From West Point to Pueblo
Drew Dennis Dix was born at West Point—literally in the Army’s front yard—and raised in Pueblo, Colorado, a blue-collar town known for turning out first-rate warfighters. He graduated from Centennial High and wanted a life with a ruck, a rifle, and a purpose. At 18, he enlisted in 1962, aiming straight for Special Forces. The Army told him to grow up first, so he cut his teeth with the 82nd Airborne and jumped where he was told, including the Dominican Republic during Operation Power Pack in 1965. When he hit 21, he finally got the long tab.
Why Special Forces?
Dix wasn’t built for the assembly line. He wanted small teams, big stakes, and the kind of mission where your name matters. Special Forces offered exactly that: indigenous partners, language skills, autonomy, and the chance to solve ugly problems with a dozen men and a plan. By 1968, he was a staff sergeant advising local forces around Chau Phu, the provincial capital near the Cambodian border. He’d already earned a reputation for pushing into places other folks called “too hot.”
Tet, Chau Phu: Two Days of Controlled Chaos
January 31, 1968—the opening punches of the Tet Offensive—turned Chau Phu into a knife fight in a phone booth. Two Viet Cong battalions crashed the city, defenses splintered, and the streets went loud. Dix didn’t wait for perfect orders. He scraped up a patrol of Vietnamese fighters and moved to a house where a nurse was trapped under heavy fire, pulled her out, and shuttled her to safety. Then he went back—again and again. He led a rescue of eight civilian employees under mortar and small-arms fire, assaulted a building under machine-gun fire to free two Filipinos, and turned the next day into a rolling street fight—clearing a hotel, a theater, and adjacent buildings with a 20-man ad-hoc force. By the end, he’d killed or helped kill dozens of enemy fighters, captured twenty (including a senior VC official), grabbed fifteen weapons, and rescued fourteen U.S. and allied civilians—plus the deputy province chief’s family. That’s more than courage; it’s strong leadership on offense.
The Medal—and What It Meant
For those 48 hours of hell, Dix was awarded the Medal of Honor, presented at the White House on January 16, 1969, by President Lyndon B. Johnson—one of LBJ’s final acts in office. He became the first enlisted Special Forces soldier to receive the Medal of Honor, a point of pride for the Regiment and for Pueblo, which styles itself the “Home of Heroes.”
The medal didn’t end his service; it gave him a wider field. Dix accepted a direct commission and stayed in uniform, eventually retiring as a major after twenty years. The rank on his collar changed, but his lane didn’t: he believed in small teams, hard missions, and standards that don’t bend.
Life After the Uniform
Retirement didn’t mean idle hands. Dix worked as a security consultant, ran an air service in Alaska’s interior, and took on homeland security roles when the country needed adults in the room. In 2002, he was Alaska’s deputy commissioner for homeland security and chaired the state’s Task Force on Homeland Security—mission sets that married his real-world problem-solving to protection of critical infrastructure. He also wrote The Rescue of River City (2000), a clear-eyed account of those two days in Chau Phu and the lessons they branded into him.
Giving Back: The Center for American Values
Dix didn’t just tell war stories; he built a place to teach the next generation what duty looks like. In 2010, he co-founded the Center for American Values on Pueblo’s Riverwalk, a nonprofit showcasing a “Portraits of Valor” gallery and educational programs anchored on honor, integrity, and patriotism. He’s been its driving force and public face—proof that the Medal is a responsibility, not a trophy.
Legacy
Drew Dix’s legacy breaks into three clean lines:
- On the street in Vietnam: When the city burned, he ran toward the heat, improvising a defense with local partners and turning disorder into momentum. The numbers—rescued civilians, prisoners taken, enemy neutralized—tell the story, but the real impact was how his aggression rallied the defenders and reclaimed the initiative.
- In the Regiment: As the first enlisted SF soldier to receive the Medal of Honor, he set a standard that Special Forces NCOs still point to: find the mission, build the team you have, and attack.
- Back home: From Alaska’s homeland security portfolio to a values-driven nonprofit in Pueblo, he treated citizenship like another deployment—different tools, same intensity.
Dix started life next to the Army’s front gate, but he earned every inch of his reputation in a maze of alleys half a world away, with a radio, a borrowed squad, and zero patience for victims.
His example is simple enough to teach to a kid and hard enough to challenge a colonel: when the situation is broken and people are in danger, you move first and make good things happen.