HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: Thank you, sir - High Point soldier sacrificed his life for his men in 1970

Yahoo

24-05-2025

HIGH POINT — Tom Kelly spent his last day in High Point on Nov. 27, 1969, celebrating Thanksgiving with his family. They ate turkey and enjoyed being together, trying not to dwell on where Tom was headed. They took some family photos — Tom, his parents, a brother and a sister.
The next day, Tom left High Point, a 22-year-old soldier bound for Vietnam.
He would not return.
The story of George Thomas Kelly III — Tommy or Tom, as he insisted on being called — is a sad tale, but an inspiring one, too. This weekend, in particular — when we salute the brave men and women who gave their lives in service to this nation — is a poignant time to remember the sacrifice of one of High Point's own.
Tom was an active, popular student at High Point Central High School, where he was named to Who's Who his senior year. He graduated in 1965 and attended the University of North Carolina for two years before enlisting in the Army in 1967. He was commissioned a second lieutenant after graduating from Officer Candidate School.
Frankly, Tom was not exactly gung-ho about the Vietnam War. He could've joined the ranks of others around him — perhaps even some of you — who protested the war, but he didn't. He still believed he should go.
'Tom was not a supporter of the war, nor was he someone who was in Vietnam because he had no choice,' Frank DeLong, one of Tom's Army buddies, wrote in an online tribute. 'He was there because he felt it was his duty to be there.'
Tom's tour of duty in Vietnam didn't last long — less than half a year — but only because of the heroic sacrifice he made during the bloody Battle of Dak Seang, when his battalion came under attack from an aggressive North Vietnamese regiment.
On the afternoon of April 22, 1970, after several days of continuous combat, the battalion found itself on a hilltop, nearly encircled by the North Vietnamese. Tom, by now a first lieutenant, bravely led his men to a bomb crater that could be utilized as a chopper landing zone. He radioed for help, and a medical evacuation helicopter was immediately dispatched to the battalion's precarious location.
As quickly as men began piling onto the chopper, the enemy emerged from a tree line and began bombarding the craft with small arms fire.
'Because of the intense hostile fire, the heavily laden helicopter experienced great difficulty in taking off,' a military account of the incident reads. 'Lieutenant Kelly unhesitantly left the ship to engage the enemy in an attempt to divert their fire and to allow the helicopter to depart.'
Armed with a couple of M-16 rifles, Tom and another officer — the aforementioned Frank DeLong — tried to fend off the North Vietnamese while radioing for another chopper. Lying prone on the ground, they began taking machine-gun fire from behind.
'The rounds were kicking up dirt all around us,' DeLong wrote. 'We rolled in opposite directions, trying to get out of his target zone. I rolled across the LZ (landing zone) and into a depression caused by an uprooted tree. Then all hell broke loose with small arms fire raking the LZ, coming from uphill of our position.'
And Tom?
'I never saw Tom again,' DeLong wrote. 'I believe he was killed by the initial burst of machine gun fire.'
DeLong wrote a letter to Tom's family, telling not only of his bravery during the final minutes of his life, but of the respect and admiration his men had for him long before that fateful afternoon.
One of Tom's higher-ups wrote him up to receive the Medal of Honor — the nation's highest military decoration for valor — but he received the Distinguished Service Cross instead, the second-highest honor, awarded for extraordinary heroism in combat. The High Point Enterprise published a photo of Tom's parents, Tom Jr. and Jill, receiving the award on their son's behalf.
'His extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty, at the cost of his life, were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit and the United States Army,' the citation read.
As they accepted the award, Tom's parents must've thought about the previous Thanksgiving Day, thankful for those final moments they enjoyed together as a family.
And today, more than 55 years later, as we honor the military men and women who sacrificed their lives, we can all give thanks for a man like Tom Kelly.