In memory of Howard Landon "Dutch" McAllister

In two voluntary tours in Vietnam I served as CO of Company A, 2d Battalion, 18th Infantry, and later as Executive Officer, and Operations Officer (S-3), 2d Battalion, 27th Infantry. The 18th Infantry (Vanguard) was a great outfit, and no one knows better than I that the Big Red One has always been a great fighting division. But if anyone remembers me as a soldier, I want to be remembered as a Wolfhound. For it was in that dangerous, unpredictable environment along the Cambodian border, fighting a war our country's leaders had already decided to lose, I was privileged to serve with men who matched Stephen Vincent Benét's view of the soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia in the American civil war.

...Strange army of ragged individualists, the hunters, the riders, the walkers, the savage pastorals, the unmachined, the men come out of the ground...

The lazy scorners, the rebels against the wheels, the rebels against the steel combustion chamber...

...You had your cowards; your bullies, your fakers, your sneaks, your savages. You got tired of marching. You cursed the cold and the rain, you cursed the war and the food--and went on until the end. And yet there was something in you that matched your fable. What was it? What do your dim, faint voices say?

I say – in the words of my friend and personal hero, Major Charles "Butch" Darrell, who was Executive Officer and Operations Officer before me in the Second Wolfhounds:

The regimental insignia was the head of a wolfhound above the motto Nec Aspera Terrent... The insignia looks like a fraternity pin and we often said, "That's as it should be. We are a fraternity."

Please tell me about your part in our history. I will do my best to record it honestly and provide a link for us with our descendants – for all time.

Howard Landon "Dutch" McAllister