Sent to newspapers 9/25/2026
Honoring a legacy
I’m traveling for a funeral this week that means a great deal. Lt. Col. Dick Merritt, USMC (Ret.), will be laid to rest Sept. 26 in his chosen hometown of Aspen, Colo., surrounded by family, friends, and first responders, with full military honors.
For Dick, like many Veterans, the concept of home is vitally important. The American military has been grounded in strong values for generations, proactively promulgated worldwide since the end of the Second World War.
But for service members like me, those values start at home with the lessons we learn as Americans. Dick Merritt left an indelible stamp on my family, the Marine Corps, and the Navy, long before he came to Aspen.
Six decades ago, America was embroiled in the Vietnam War. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was obsessed with statistics, and the American commander in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, decided to comply with physical body counts.
A few Marine artillery officers decided this was unacceptable. They knew that after executing fire missions, sending live Marines to count dead NVA was the surest way to get them killed. So they didn’t. They sent simulated battle damage reports instead.
Dick Merritt was one. My father was another. Dick deployed from 1966-1967, commanding a mortar battery to protect the infantry. He provided artillery cover during Operation Hastings in 1966, the pivotal moment when Vietnam transitioned from a counterinsurgency to a full-scale conventional war.
During Operation Hastings, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) demonstrated its willingness to wipe out entire Marine battalions. The Marines held the line, but the war outgrew Westmoreland’s “war of attrition”; the Americans now faced a modern army.
My father, John Hamilton, was the Marine artillery commander at Khe Sanh (and the last Marine on the last helicopter leaving the fire base in July, 1968). My brother and two sisters were in grade school. They watched the news each night. It was scary.
Dick Merritt showed my family who he was and helped them. He brought light moments to our house, acting as an uncle we didn’t have at Camp Pendleton. He was a tremendous support to our mother, who was on her own for 13 months.
When my father returned home in 1969, and my parents found themselves expecting their fourth child, my siblings insisted, boy or girl, that the baby be named “Merritt.” I was christened Jennifer Merritt Hamilton in 1970. I’ve never been called anything but Merritt (and it is a major pain in the military to go by your middle name, let me tell you.)
The story doesn’t end there, as Aspen residents know. But the impact of Dick Merritt’s and John Hamilton’s actions expand much further. Their refusal to send live Marines to count dead NVA ensured hundreds of Marines came home. And their actions were studied by military scholars.
Naval Academy Professor Karel Montor cited their defiance of Westmoreland’s order in his ethics classes in the 1980s and refers to their actions in his 1987 textbook Naval Leadership: Voices of Experience. Thousands of Marine and Naval officers have been taught that it is okay to say no for the greater good.
Those officers have gone on to become the four-star leaders of the current era, even leading the Naval Academy in recent years. The Sailors and Marines those officers have inspired run into the hundreds of thousands. And no, no one is sending out live troops to count enemy dead anymore.
Often we think of transformational military leadership coming from someone with generations of military service who went to a service academy. But an NROTC captain from the University of Washington and an NROTC major from the University of Kansas have helped the men and women serving in the North Arabian Sea today understand what is acceptable and what is not in an ever-more-complex battle environment.
I’m incredibly proud to bear their names. And I am honored to pay my final respects to Dick Merritt during a fall weekend in Aspen.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a corporate executive and former Navy officer. Her father, Lt. Col. John A. Hamilton, Sr., USMC (Ret.), died in 2017 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, along with her mother, State Rep. Dianne Miller Hamilton, who died in 2021. She appeared regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican for 36 years, she became an independent upon reading the 2024 Republican platform. She lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run one head of dog, and one of cat. She can be reached at merritt@merrittocracy.news.