The mission had to be canceled due to safety concerns, but will hopefully take place in 2022. to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in September 2021. He was scheduled to go on a one-day, all-expense-paid Honor Flight to Washington, D.C.
Gibson was twice awarded the Bronze Star presented for “a heroic and meritorious deed performed in an armed conflict.” He also earned several service and combat medals. “Me and one other guy got flown over to Da Nang to go see Bob Hope,” he said. It was one of the two times he left the jungle for a few hours. In the end, only three Marines survived.īut Gibson also remembers a good day. “We fought three days and three nights,” he said. His unit was providing critical fire support to protect Marines who were surrounded by the enemy. Thinking back on a year of near constant warfare, Gibson recalls the 1968 Tet Offensive as the worst encounter. It took “a little bit of bravery and a little bit of silliness” to survive the experience, he said. Large Chinook helicopters were constantly airlifting Gibson and his squad to “where the action was.” The fighting was intense and too often lethal. Most of the time, he was positioned behind a 155 mm howitzer, an artillery piece that could strike with accuracy up to nine miles away.
During a 12-month tour of duty, he was out of the jungle and away from fighting along the Ho Chi Minh trail for less than 24 hours. Gibson served in an artillery unit in the U.S. There were no roads there,” said the veteran who now lives in Pendleton and is a member of Shelby Energy Cooperative. But as he dodged bullets there in 19, Bobby Gibson had little time to notice the geographic similarity to his Knott County home nearly 9,000 miles - and a world - away. Vietnam’s A Shau Valley is a long, narrow strip of bottomland covered with tall elephant grass, flanked by two densely forested mountain ridges whose summits rival that of the Appalachians. News Bobby Gibson remembers his service in Vietnam Photo by Tim Webb
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