Remember...
Dana Lee Rager
1950-1969
"What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many avoided it, but how many could not and did not."
John Gregory Dunne
|
Remember...Dana Lee Rager
|
Dana Lee Rager was born to Elden Lazelle Rager and Lewis Rager on August 14, 1950, in Kingwood, West Virginia. Dana Rager was born the fifth of seven children. All included, Dana was one of six sons--Lewis, Terry, Ronald, Gary, and Richard--and one daughter, Beverly. Growing up, Dana Rager enjoyed hunting and fishing and was closest with was his brother Ronald, who also served in the military. Their early lives were especially difficult because their father, a World War II veteran, died in 1958 in a mining accident. (Dorothy Bonafield Snyder, "Dana Lee Rager," Not To Be Forgotten: Prestonians Who Died in Vietnam 1965-1970, 2001).
Dana Rager completed schooling to the eighth-grade level and then stopped going to school. He worked on a neighboring farm. Writing in the "Comments" section of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund's "Wall of Faces," Dorothy Snyder notes that Dana Rager convinced his mother to allow him to join the Marines before his 18th birthday. The recruiter is said to have promised that Dana would not enter a war zone until after he became 18 years old.
By the time Dana Rager was 18 years old and joined Company E of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines Regiment, 1st Marines Division in 1968, the unit had been in Vietnam since 1966. The 5th had already engaged the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in several operations, including Hastings, Colorado, and Prairie and, in 1968, the Tet Offensive, which began with a series of coordinated attacks carried out by the North Vietnamese against more than 100 cities and outposts in South Vietnam. The attacks began on January 31, 1968. ("Tet Offensive," History.com, 29 October 2009, last updated 3 April 2020, accessed 17 September 2021, https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/tet-offensive.)
Dana Rager joined this storied regiment later in the fall of 1968. Three months after his arrival in Vietnam, he died of malaria on January 7, 1969.
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs,
Throughout the war, disease accounted for 70.6% of all admissions with the remaining approximately equally divided between battle casualties (15.6%) and nonbattle injury (13.8%). The good survival rates seen were attributed to rapid evacuation, the ready availability of whole blood and well-established semi-permanent hospitals. Tropical diseases were frequent. Malaria was the most important. Over 40,000 cases of Malaria were reported in Army troops alone between 1965 and 70 with 78 deaths. However, this was less than had been seen in earlier wars because of the effectiveness of weekly chloroquin-premaquin prophylaxis against vivax malaria. (Prophylaxis was much less effective against falciparum but the institution of dapsone prophylaxis cut those cases in half.) ("Military Health History Packet Card for Health Profession Trainees & Clinicians," Office of Academic Affiliations, last updated 7 June 2019, accessed 21 September 2021, https://www.va.gov/oaa/pocketcard/vietnam.asp.)
Among U.S. Navy and Marine forces, according to authors Christine Beadle and Stephen L. Hoffman,
During the Vietnam War, there were 24,606 cases of malaria, an estimated 391,965 sick-days because of malaria, and 46 deaths due to malaria. With the worldwide resurgence of malaria, the spread of drug-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum, the emergence of chloroquine-resistant P. vivax, and the increasing resistance of Anopheles mosquitoes to insecticides, malaria continues to be an enormous threat to U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel deployed to the tropics and subtropics. ("History of Malaria in the U.S. Naval Forces at War: World War I through the Vietnam Conflict," Clinical Infectious Diseases 16:2, 1 February 1993, accessed 20 September 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/clind/16.2.320.)
| Dana Rager's body was sent home to West Virginia, and he was interred in Maplewood Cemetery in Kingwood. |  Military marker for Pfc. Dana Lee Rager in Maplewood Cemetery. Courtesy Cynthia Mullens |
Article prepared by Cynthia Mullens
September 2021
West Virginia Archives and History welcomes any additional information that can be provided about these veterans, including photographs, family names, letters and other relevant personal history.