Pfc. Dan Bullock was killed at An Hoa Combat Base on June 7, 1969. Six days later, reporters from the New York Times visited a Brooklyn apartment on Lee Avenue to speak with his grieving family. What the family told the reporters stunned the country. The fallen Marine was just 15 years old. He had forged his birth certificate and enlisted at 14.
The Department of Defense confirmed it. Bullock was the youngest American service member killed during the entire war.
His Fox Company comrades learned the truth when the news broke and finally understood what they had sensed all along. "That's the first we heard of it," said Steve Piscitelli, a Marine who served alongside Bullock. "I should've known he was 15, I should've guessed it."
A Boy From Goldsboro
Dan Bullock was born on Dec. 21, 1953, in Goldsboro, North Carolina. His family was African American, raised in the segregated South. His childhood ended abruptly when his mother died around 1965. Bullock and his younger sister Gloria moved north to live with their father and stepmother in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.
The streets around Lee Avenue offered few opportunities for a Black teenager in the late 1960s. But Bullock had high-reaching ambitions.
"He wanted to be a pilot at first, a policeman and then a marine," his father told the New York Times after his son's death. "I told him over and over again that he couldn't do nothing until he got some schooling. He said after he signed up that this was the quickest way to get an education."
"My brother didn't like New York," his sister Gloria said. "He wanted to get an education, to make something of himself, and saw the Marines as a way to get there."
Forged Papers and Enlistment
In September 1968, Bullock walked into the Marine Corps recruiting station at Albee Square in downtown Brooklyn. He was 14, but at 5-foot-9 and roughly 160 pounds, he looked old enough. He had altered the year on his birth certificate from 1953 to 1949.
The recruiters never questioned it. He enlisted on Sept. 18, 1968. His family found out only after he returned with the signed paperwork. His father knew the truth but stayed silent.
"He was all excited when he was in uniform, talking about getting up in rank," his stepmother Jewel recalled. "He said, 'When I get back, I'll have my stripes.'"
Bullock reported to Parris Island, South Carolina, assigned to Platoon 3039. Boot camp was 13 weeks designed to make Marines. For the teenager hiding his age, he had trouble with certain aspects of the training.
He was strong for his size. But he lacked the endurance of the older men around him. During long-distance runs, he fell behind. Other recruits had to carry him to keep him in the formation.
Franklin McArthur, a fellow recruit, took it upon himself to get the struggling young Marine through training.
"He had already kind of washed out when he got to my platoon," McArthur later said. "He had trouble keeping up."
But McArthur understood the motivation. "Dan joined the Marine Corps to help his family out," he said.
Bullock graduated on Dec. 10, 1968, 11 days before his 15th birthday. Nobody at Parris Island ever discovered the truth.
An Hoa, Vietnam
Pfc. Bullock arrived in South Vietnam on May 18, 1969. He was assigned as a rifleman in 2nd Squad, 2nd Platoon, Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division. His posting was An Hoa Combat Base in Quang Nam Province, a forward hub surrounded by some of the most contested terrain in the country.
Bullock mostly kept quiet and stayed to himself. His fellow Marines did not know his real age, but they sensed something was off.
"It's hard to describe, but they had the instinct of a combat veteran, and they picked up on something in Dan," Piscitelli told the New York Times in 2019. "He was younger, and he didn't belong."
Piscitelli, a corporal who had arrived in Vietnam alongside Bullock, felt protective. He invited Bullock to spar, hoping physical activity would build a connection.
"He wouldn't talk," Piscitelli said. "He wouldn't open up. But he was 15. He wasn't going to tell me."
The Night of June 7, 1969
Bullock had been in Vietnam for just 21 days.
On the evening of June 6, Piscitelli dislocated his thumb while sparring with Bullock. The injury kept him from handling a rifle, so he stayed behind at An Hoa while Fox Company deployed to the perimeter bunkers.
Bullock had been assigned cleaning duty that night. When another Marine was wounded, Bullock took his place on the night watch near the airstrip.
Shortly after midnight, NVA sappers breached the wire and launched a coordinated assault with rockets, mortars and small arms.
Accounts differ on what happened exactly and what killed Bullock. Piscitelli and other Fox Company accounts note that NVA sappers crawled beneath the perimeter wire and hurled a satchel charge through the firing slot of Bullock's bunker.
"We were all alert, but that doesn't mean much because the enemy sappers were excellent," Piscitelli said. "They were so quiet. They must have crawled under the wire and tossed the thing, and that was the signal for them to attack."
The explosion killed Bullock and the three other Marines inside the bunker including PFC Donald W. Bunn, LCpl Larry J. Eglinsdoerfer and PFC Jason D. Hunnicutt. A fifth Fox Company Marine, PFC Steven Montgomery, was killed by small arms fire on the perimeter during the assault. Several others were wounded.
His company commander, Capt. Robert Kingrey, detailed the fight in a letter home. "Dan immediately realized that the attack was stronger than usual and that the ammunition supply was becoming depleted," Kingrey wrote. "He rushed to get more ammunition for his unit. He constantly exposed himself to enemy fire in order to keep the company supplied with the ammunition needed to hold off the attack."
Kingrey's letter mentioned that Bullock was killed by small arms fire while running ammunition. The captain likely worded the letter that way to downplay the tragedy of the incident for the grieving family.
Piscitelli heard the firefight as it happened and listened to radio traffic through the night. At dawn, he counted the survivors.
"Forty-five went out, only 20 returned," he said.
Kingrey closed his letter with, "Dan was one of the finest Marines I have ever known."
Dan Bullock’s Legacy
Bullock's remains were returned to Goldsboro and buried at Elmwood Cemetery with full military honors. But no headstone marked the grave. It stayed that way for 31 years.
In 2000, television host Sally Jessy Raphael learned about the unmarked plot and purchased a headstone. NYPD officers, state troopers from four states and two veteran motorcycle groups escorted a caravan 600 miles from Brooklyn to Goldsboro for the ceremony.
"I am so happy and thrilled," Bullock's older sister Porter said at the ceremony. "I would have never thought something like this would happen after 31 years."
In 2003, the New York City Council renamed a stretch of Lee Avenue in Brooklyn as "PFC Dan Bullock Way." In 2017, North Carolina dedicated a highway historical marker near his childhood home in Goldsboro. His name is inscribed on Panel 23W, Line 96 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.
McArthur, the boot camp buddy who carried Bullock through those Parris Island runs, spent years keeping the teenager's memory alive through the PFC Dan Bullock Foundation. But the effort weighed on him. Another Marine once asked a question haunted him.
"The Marine said, 'Did you ever think that if you didn't help him, he might have lived?'" McArthur recalled. "I lost my mind."
"He's the youngest kid killed, and hardly anybody knows his name," McArthur said. "Everybody should know who he was."
Piscitelli, wounded three times in Vietnam, became a sculptor in Florida. He carved figures of men in combat, then switched to ballet dancers. "It keeps me from thinking about the war," he said.
Dan Bullock served 21 days in Vietnam. At only 15, he became the youngest American servicemember killed in action during the war.
