The Purple Heart was the only ribbon he rated, a highly unusual circumstance for a junior enlisted Marine in 1975. With second-and third-degree burns, Trebil floated out to sea before being scooped up by a supporting U.S. Marines on Koh Tang Island, where the ship’s crew was supposedly captive. The Cambodian Khmer Rouge shot down Trebil’s helicopter in May 1975 as it attempted to land assaulting U.S. He earned it earlier that May during the SS Mayaguez container ship rescue, only two weeks after South Vietnam’s collapse. “Sir, the lance corporal is wearing his-” Trebil had a problem after arriving in Quantico, Virginia, from Okinawa for temporary duty-but it was not clear why as he stood locked at attention. “What are you wearing?!” the indignant colonel demanded while poking the lance corporal’s chest. Sometimes regulation fails to match reality. Vietnam, Cambodia, veterans, memory, Mayaguez, the Wall, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Koh Tang, Koh Tang Mayaguez Veterans Organization, Gerald R. This article seeks to provide a heretofore unseen historical argument connecting the Mayaguez incident to the wider war and to demonstrate that Mayaguez and Koh Tang veterans are Vietnam veterans, relying on primary sources from the Ford administration, the papers of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, and interviews with veterans. The term Vietnam War has impeded a proper understanding of the wider war in the American consciousness, leading many to disassociate the Mayaguez incident from the Vietnam War, though they belong within the same historical frame. military episode amid the wider Second Indochina War. Only two weeks after the fall of Saigon in May 1975, Khmer Rouge forces seized the American merchant ship SS Mayaguez (1944) off the Cambodian coast, setting up a Marine rescue and recovery battle on the island of Koh Tang.
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