A 28-year-old career soldier, Dixon had been in the Army eight years when he arrived in Vietnam in early May 1967. After a couple of months in a relatively safe location he and six other members of the 137th Engineer Company were sent to set up a rock-crushing machine in Duc Pho.
Dixon had a wife and two sons back home in Trenton, New Jersey. As recounted in a Trenton newspaper article published on Memorial Day 2007, Dixon was extremely homesick and bored in the first days of his new assignment. To escape the boredom he asked if he could go along on a mine sweeping mission.
His buddies said they thought Cecil was crazy for volunteering, not because they felt the mission was dangerous, but because it involved walking four miles up a dirt road. The platoon leader of the operation, First Lieutenant Jim Shamblen, recalls that the fatal explosion cleanly severed Dixon’s right hand and left a small wound in his chest. Shrapnel hit his heart, and he was dead in a matter of minutes
Dixon’s wife, Emily, said in the news article that Cecil didn’t say much about the war in his letters home, he just told her how much he missed his family. Emily passed away at age 72 in 2011.
One of his comrades, Victor DiMartini, said “Everybody liked Cecil, he was a nice guy.” Another said Dixon was the first death in their unit and “our company took it very hard.”
Cecil F. Dixon is buried at the Beverly National Cemetery in Trenton, New Jersey.
