SHIP'S NAMESAKE
Col. Harvey C. "Barney" Barnum Jr.
First Lt. Harvey C. "Barney" Barnum Jr. had been in Vietnam for two weeks and was on his first major operation when his battalion was ambushed. On a 90-day temporary duty assignment to Vietnam, Barnum had been designated as the artillery forward observer for Hotel Company, which itself had been in Vietnam for five months. The company was taking part in Operation Harvest Moon, and now as rear security for the battalion, was coming down out of the Que Son mountains, headed for the finish line of Route 1, where trucks were waiting to drive them back to their base. It was December 18, 1965. The other units of the battalion had largely moved into and through the town of Ky Phu when the trap was sprung.
“It was the first time I’d ever been shot at,” recalled Barnum. “So I hit the deck. When I looked up all these young Marines are looking at me. They don’t know my name, I’ve only been with them four or five days, but I had a silver bar on my collar as a 1st lieutenant, and they were looking to me for guidance and instruction. I said to myself, ‘you’ve got a job to handle’. The first thing I did was contact the artillery and start adjusting artillery fire. So I was adjusting rounds and all of a sudden the corpsman, Doc Wes, [Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Wesley Barraud] from Chicago, goes running by me and goes ‘Skipper’s down! Skipper’s down!’. And I look out on the dike and there’s four or five bodies piled up. And he got shot two or three times getting out there. So I continued to adjust the artillery and then my scout sergeant, [Private 1st Class David L. McClain], gets up and he runs out to help the corpsman, and he gets shot two or three times (McClain and Barraud would both survive to receive the Silver Star for their actions that day). Now I’ve got the corpsman down, my scout sergeant down, the company commander’s out there and he’s down and he’s got the radio. I took my pack off and I ran out and I picked up Capt. [Paul L. Gormley Jr.] in my arms and brought him back. He died in my arms”.
In a matter of minutes, the inexperienced 1st Lt. Barnum—newly in-country, being shot at for the first time—had been thrust into a leadership role where he would have to make life and death decisions for himself and the Marines of Hotel Company. Luckily for them, while Barnum might not have been born a leader, his upbringing and Marine Corps training had certainly made him one.
Born July 21, 1940, Barnum was raised in Cheshire, Connecticut, the son of H. Curtiss Barnum and Ann Barnum. Barnum’s father managed a poultry plant as his full-time job, but also kept the books for other businesses at night and on weekends. His mother was a dental hygienist who became a homemaker after her two sons Harvey, nearly always called Barney, and Cliff were born.
An altar boy at St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, he became head altar boy; a Boy Scout, he became senior patrol leader, was inducted into the Order of the Arrow (OA) – which OA calls scouting’s National Honor Society – and later became Chief of the Order itself. At Cheshire High School, Barnum was elected president of his Freshman and Senior class. Like his father before him, Barnum became a volunteer firefighter in his community.
His interest in becoming a Marine started early in life. “… My dad was getting deferred from the draft [during World War II] because he was in the poultry business. But then in 1945 when everything was going bad, and they were going to start drafting, my dad joined the Marine Corps. Two weeks or so before he was to depart for Parris Island, they passed the age law. So for me, that was good because my dad, if he went to Parris Island, the people he went through with landed on Iwo Jima. So I probably would have ended up without a dad for the rest of my life. I asked my dad why he joined the Marine Corps and he said he wanted to be ‘the best prepared to come back to mom and you two boys’. That stuck with me”.
“And then my senior year of high school they had career day. All the recruiters came in and the Army guy got up and talked and there were catcalls and whistles, and the Air Force and the Navy recruiters got up and talked and there were catcalls and whistles and then this old Marine gunny got up slapped his hand on the desk and said, ‘You’re not good enough to be in my Marine Corps!’. And started chewing out the faculty in the back of the room for letting the boys get out of hand. I said that day, ‘here’s a guy that gets up, he knows who he is, he knows what’s got to be done, doesn’t take any BS from anybody, and you know, I think I’d like to be like that’. So he had a big impact on me joining the PLC program, which I went to St. Anselm College on, and two summers of PLC program at Quantico, and I was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant upon graduation from college”.
After his 1962 graduation, Barnum attended the Basic School at Quantico, then the Artillery Officers Orientation Course before shipping out to Okinawa, Japan, where he served as a forward observer and battalion liaison officer before transfer to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. He was serving at Marine Barracks, Naval Base Pearl Harbor, when as the unit's only bachelor, he volunteered for the 90-day detachment to Vietnam in order to allow married Marines to be with their families for the holidays.
Now, under cover of a small knoll, under enemy fire, Barnum knew he needed the PRC-25 radio lying out on the dike, “which I had never seen, because the artillery didn’t have it, but the infantry did,” to communicate with the rest of the battalion. “So I ran out. The radio operator was dead. I took the radio off the dead operator, came back with it, then I strapped it on and I checked in with battalion 2/7, told them I was the forward observer and I was taking over the company”.
For the next three hours, Barnum called in artillery fire, directed Huey helicopter gunship strikes on enemy positions, and led a counterattack against entrenched machine guns on the company's flank. But five hundred meters of open ground, every yard of it swept by enemy fire, still separated them from the rest of the battalion, and the battalion's other units were fully engaged in their own firefights.
“I’m talking to the battalion commander and he said, ‘you know, you gotta come out,’” Barnum recalled. “We can’t come get you. We were on our own fighting there. And they were in a hellacious fight in the city of Ky Phu. He said, ‘If you don’t take them out, you’re there overnight,’ and I knew there was no future in that. There wouldn’t have been enough body bags in I Corps; they would have encircled us and obliterated us. We were running low on ammunition, we had a number of casualties, the weather was closing in, so I had to break out. How do I do this? First thing I do is I have the engineers blow down some trees so I can make a landing zone so I can bring in helicopters to take out the dead and the wounded. And they accomplished that. Then I had the engineers collect all unusable equipment and put it in a pile and blow it up. That was to make us light. And then, consider we had 500 meters to cross, everyone’s been in a firefight all day, I know they’re tired. I had them put their packs in a pile and we burned them. I got a little resistance about that because of course they had personal items, probably letters and pictures of their girlfriends and all that stuff, but I said ‘Hey guys, we gotta be light, because if you get shot, the guy next to you has gotta pick you up and carry you. So I don’t want him with his pack on and your pack and that extra weight, so let’s get on with this’”.
He began moving Company H toward Ky Phu in a series of rushes by fire team. “I had a squad at a time fire and maneuver and I had the people in the village set up a base of fire, and when they were ready I said ‘OK, we’re coming out,’” Barnum said. “We did this. Fire and maneuver. You go five or ten yards and you drop down and the next one goes. There was so much fire I realized we’d never get across doing that. So I told everybody, ‘squad at a time, when I say go, you run as fast as you can. We’ve got a base of fire, we’re trying to keep the enemy down, and the only time you stop is if another Marine gets shot. And you stop and you pick him up and keep going. So we did that. I guess it took about an hour and a half for us to get everyone out. I was the last out, and the greatest thing was when I got in there was the gunny said ‘all accounted for’”.
Two days later, Barnum found out that Lt. Gen. Lewis William Walt, III Marine Amphibious Force Commander, had nominated him for the Medal of Honor. Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze presented Barnum with the medal at a ceremony at Marine Barracks Washington, D.C. a little over a year later. Barnum returned to Vietnam in 1968, this time as commander of an artillery battery, where he received more decorations, including two Bronze Stars with Combat V, a Navy Achievement Medal with Combat V, the Combat Action Ribbon, the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with Silver Star, and the Purple Heart. Barnum served 24 more years in the Marine Corps, serving in a number of command positions, and was promoted to colonel in 1984. During his last year as an active-duty Marine, he met his wife, ship’s sponsor Martha Hill, whom he married in 1992.
A distinguished civilian career followed his retirement from the Marine Corps, including serving as Principal Director, Drug Enforcement Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Reserve Affairs, and Acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Manpower and Reserve Affairs. He has earned many honors in his life, but he said having a ship named after him ranks at the top with receiving the Medal of Honor.
“When the Secretary of the Navy called me and said he was going to name a ship the Harvey C. Barnum Jr., DDG 124, I was speechless,” Barnum said, “and people who know me know I’m never speechless. It’s almost like when I was told I was getting the Medal of Honor ... It’s equal to that. … The first time that I and my wife visited Bath, Maine, and we looked up and saw my name on that ship, we both just looked at each other and we couldn’t believe it. … It’s quite an honor”
“I was so pleased that I had a ship named after me that’s a warfighter,” he continued. “The Arleigh Burke class, they carry the heavy load of the Navy. They protect the fleet, they have multiple missions, and to have my name on a warfighter makes it extra special”. Barnum and his wife have been deeply involved with the ship and its crew as it has progressed through building and trials, and working with Navy League Hampton Roads as the ship moves toward commissioning. “I just think they do a great job, I have total confidence in them,” Barnum said of Navy League Hampton Roads. “This is their 30th ship, so it’s not their first rodeo, but it’s their first rodeo with a guy that wants to ride the horse!”.
