Ghosts of the Battlefield

Ghosts of the Battlefield We are a small, privately owned museum in Virginia Beach, VA. Our mission is to preserve and present the history and heritage of the United States Military.

Ghosts of the Battlefield is charitable 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Ben Snowden made it out of Cambodia.Barely.On June 15, 1967, Snowden was being extracted from a compromised MACV-SOG Dan...
09/01/2026

Ben Snowden made it out of Cambodia.

Barely.

On June 15, 1967, Snowden was being extracted from a compromised MACV-SOG Daniel Boone mission when an enemy machine gun opened up on the South Vietnamese H-34 Kingbee carrying the team.

The helicopter took 68 hits.

Somehow, it kept flying.

It staggered back to the SOG launch site at Dak To, where the damaged engine finally quit and the aircraft crashed into a ditch.

Snowden had been hit nine times.

He did not survive.

He became the first SOG man lost during Operation Daniel Boone, and afterward the reconnaissance company office at Kontum was named Snowden Hall in his memory.

Sometimes making it back was not the same thing as making it home.

Staff Sergeant Gerald Cohen was born on September 1, 1945, in Levittown, New York. He enlisted in the United States Army...
09/01/2026

Staff Sergeant Gerald Cohen was born on September 1, 1945, in Levittown, New York. He enlisted in the United States Army and began his tour in Vietnam on May 31, 1967, serving as a light weapons infantryman with Company C, 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.

By the spring of 1968, Cohen and the men of the 327th were operating in Thua Thien Province during one of the most difficult periods of the war. On April 21, 1968, while at Fire Support Base Veghel, Staff Sergeant Cohen was killed by hostile small-arms fire. He was 22 years old.

For the military record, his life can be reduced to dates, a unit, a service number, and a line recording the circumstances of his death. But Gerald Cohen was more than an entry on a casualty list. He was a young man from Levittown who volunteered to serve, became a Staff Sergeant in one of the Army’s most storied airborne divisions, and never returned home.

Today, on what would have been his 81st birthday, we remember Staff Sergeant Gerald Cohen.

Say his name to remember.

Staff Sergeant Gerald Cohen
C Company, 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry
101st Airborne Division
September 1, 1945 – April 21, 1968

Carl Joseph Mangold was flying helicopters in Vietnam at a time when Army aviation was still writing the rules as it wen...
09/01/2026

Carl Joseph Mangold was flying helicopters in Vietnam at a time when Army aviation was still writing the rules as it went.

A First Lieutenant with the 197th Aviation Company, Mangold was flying in Binh Duong Province on September 1, 1965, during operations connected to a convoy es**rt near Ben Cat.

His aircraft was brought down by hostile action.

Mangold was 25 years old.

He came from Castroville, Texas, and served as a rotary-wing aviator with the 145th Aviation Battalion, part of the rapidly expanding helicopter force that was changing the way the Army fought in Vietnam.

In 1965, that kind of flying was still new, dangerous, and often brutally unforgiving.

Carl Mangold was one of the men learning those lessons in real time.

James Rogers King was 20 years old and serving in the U.S. Army as a logistics specialist when his tour in Vietnam came ...
09/01/2026

James Rogers King was 20 years old and serving in the U.S. Army as a logistics specialist when his tour in Vietnam came to an end on September 1, 1970.

James was from Hamtramck, Michigan, and was serving in Bien Hoa Province when he was involved in a vehicle accident. His death was recorded as non-hostile.

There is something especially sobering about that. Not every loss in Vietnam came during a firefight or an ambush. Sometimes the danger was simply part of being there, moving men, equipment, and supplies through a war zone where even an ordinary day could turn suddenly.

Photo courtesy of his sister, Elaine Abarelli.

We Found Her: Genevieve Bowen Returns to the WallSometimes preservation begins with an artifact. Other times, it begins ...
09/01/2026

We Found Her: Genevieve Bowen Returns to the Wall

Sometimes preservation begins with an artifact. Other times, it begins with a face looking out from an old painting and a name waiting to be recovered.

While researching this portrait from our newly acquired Women Marines collection, we identified the woman as Genevieve Bowen of the United States Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. Genevieve enlisted in 1944, trained at Camp Lejeune, and served at Parris Island, where she helped process approximately 1,500 Marines returning from the Pacific and carried administrative responsibilities far beyond her rank of private first class.

Then the story took another turn. We discovered that the surviving painting once had a companion piece, but that second portrait is now missing.

We could not recover the original painting, but enough information survived for us to bring it back in another form. Using the surviving imagery, the original portrait, and the details of Genevieve’s uniform as our guides, we created a digital reconstruction of the missing companion. It is not the lost original, and we would never represent it as such, but online the two pieces can finally be seen together again.

That feels particularly fitting because Genevieve became an accomplished painter, sculptor, ceramicist, and metal artist after leaving the Marine Corps. She spent more than seven decades creating art, and now art has helped return her own face to history.

Tomorrow, Genevieve Bowen—her portrait, her name, and her story—will take her place on the wall of our Women’s Gallery. A missing painting may never physically return, but the woman it represented will no longer be missing.

We found her, and now others will know her name.

Thank you to the Woman’s Marine Association for the donation and to Jeannine Franz for helping us find her.

He was assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Battery (HHB), 8th Battalion, 6th Artillery, 1st Infantry Division. Sin...
08/31/2026

He was assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Battery (HHB), 8th Battalion, 6th Artillery, 1st Infantry Division. Since his MOS was Field Artillery Operations and Intelligence Assistant, he was not simply an artilleryman working a gun crew. He was part of the battalion headquarters element supporting the coordination, intelligence, and operation of the battalion’s fires. Tiny distinction, rather important when we’re telling his actual story.

I’d phrase the post like this:

Howard Williams served with the artillery, but he wasn’t standing behind a howitzer pulling a lanyard.

He was a Field Artillery Operations and Intelligence Assistant assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, 8th Battalion, 6th Artillery, 1st Infantry Division. His job was part of the machinery behind the guns, helping the battalion coordinate and direct its fire.

On April 17, 1968, the artillery war came back the other direction.

Enemy artillery, rocket or mortar fire struck the American position in Binh Duong Province.

Howard was killed.

He was 24 years old, a Staff Sergeant from Corpus Christi, Texas, and had been in Vietnam less than three months.

Sometimes the men who helped put American firepower onto the enemy became targets themselves.

That day, Howard C. Williams Jr. was one of them.

Wilford Lee Blumer had been 19 for a little over three months in Vietnam.He came from East St. Louis, Illinois, joined t...
08/31/2026

Wilford Lee Blumer had been 19 for a little over three months in Vietnam.

He came from East St. Louis, Illinois, joined the Marines, and arrived in Vietnam on March 26, 1968. Five months later, he was serving as a rifleman with G Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines in Quang Nam Province.

On August 31, an explosive device ended his life.

Nineteen years old. Five months in country. One more young Marine whose entire future disappeared in a place most Americans back home could barely find on a map.

His name was Wilford Lee Blumer.

Remember the name, not just the date.

Douglas Gossage had a choice.His OH-6A was down. His pilot and observer were outside the wreck. North Vietnamese soldier...
08/30/2026

Douglas Gossage had a choice.

His OH-6A was down. His pilot and observer were outside the wreck. North Vietnamese soldiers were closing in.

Gossage stayed with the gun.

On September 26, 1968, the three-man crew had gone into a fight in Quang Tri Province where an ARVN Ranger company was facing a much larger North Vietnamese force. Their little OH-6 went after an enemy 12.7mm machine-gun position and was shot down.

SSG John States was killed after leaving the wreckage. WO1 John Wallace ran toward friendly lines but was shot before reaching them.

And inside the shattered helicopter, SP4 Douglas Gossage kept firing his M60.

The Rangers later remembered hearing that gun hammering away as the enemy closed around him.

It kept firing.

And firing.

Until an RPG slammed into the wreck.

Then it stopped.

When Americans later recovered the site, twelve enemy dead were reportedly found in and around what remained of the OH-6.

Sometimes you don’t need to dress a story up.

Douglas Gossage stayed with his gun.

Does anyone know who this beautiful Marine is? This portrait donated at Ghosts of the Battlefield yesterday with no name...
08/30/2026

Does anyone know who this beautiful Marine is? This portrait donated at Ghosts of the Battlefield yesterday with no name except 1943. It is an oil on canvas original. It’s a long shot but would love to give her her name back.

It’s on their faces in these photos. William Francis Kelley did not wait for someone else to break the ambush.He ran str...
08/30/2026

It’s on their faces in these photos. William Francis Kelley did not wait for someone else to break the ambush.

He ran straight at it.

On May 31, 1969, near Tap An Nam, his unit was pinned by North Vietnamese fire coming from a hedgerow. Kelley crossed open rice paddies, hit the enemy position with gr***des and rifle fire, then kept going.

He rearmed, crawled within feet of another trenchline, dropped a gr***de into it, rose through the blast and fired into the survivors. Then he spotted another enemy position roughly 60 meters away.

So he charged that one too.

Firing as he ran, Kelley destroyed the position and helped open the way for his unit to continue the attack.

He was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

There are acts of courage that sound almost fictional when you read them years later.

This was not fiction.

This was Staff Sergeant William Francis Kelley.

Address

1329 Harpers Road Suite 103
Virginia Beach, VA
23454

Opening Hours

Monday 11am - 5pm
Tuesday 11am - 5pm
Wednesday 11am - 5pm
Thursday 11am - 5pm
Friday 11am - 5pm
Saturday 11am - 5pm

Telephone

+17573018718

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