1st Lt. Michael André Roger de Magnin

133344401
Advisory Team 90
Military Assistance Command , Vietnam , (MACV)

The U.S. Military Assistance and Advisory Group, Indochina (MAAG-Indochina) was created in September 1950 and acted as advisors to the French until their defeat at Dien Bien Phu . In 1962, the command’s name was changed to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) and moved the U.S. from advisory roles to combat roles. MACV existed for the remainder of the war in Vietnam , with headquarters in Saigon. Its mission was to assist the Vietnamese Armed Forces to maintain internal security and to resist external aggression. One such advisor was Michael de Magnin.

De Magnin was born April 8, 1945 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil but moved with his parents and sister to Larchmont, NY when he was three years old. He attended Bucknell University where he was a member of Sigma Chi fraternity and graduated with a degree in business administration. While at Bucknell, he met his wife, the former Peggy Kamuf of Ridgewood . They later lived with her parents at 440 Knollwood Road in Ridgewood . He was 6’1” tall and weighed 165 lbs. and had brown hair and brown eyes.

He first worked at the Continental Insurance Company and then for Columbus Mutual Insurance of Ohio but left to join the service September 6, 1967 . He did his officers training at Fort Benning, becoming an advisor in Vietnam April 9, 1969, working directly with the Vietnamese people. This allowed him to participated in the Committee of Responsibility, a committee formed in 1966 in reply to the horrors the war was inflicting on the Vietnamese citizens. Up to 60% of the war’s victims were children under the age of 16. The Committee’s goal was to bring these children back to the USA for medical attention.

In the late afternoon of November 1, 1969 , an Army command and control helicopter (UH1H) in which he was a passenger took ground fire, crashed and burned north of Mo Cong, Tay Ninh Province on the Cambodian border of Vietnam, 65 miles northwest of Saigon. Everybody aboard perished. Lt. de Magnin’s body was brought home and buried in the Sycamore Section, Row 8, Grave 49 in Valleau Cemetery. He is also listed on the memorial plaques in Larchmont. At death he was 24 years old.

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Written by Chris Stout of Ridgewood, New Jersey, who explained "I am simply a self-appointed amateur local historian who decided in 1998 that the names on our memorial plaques represented nothing more than a list of anonymous names so I decided to find out who they were. Since then, I have written about 160 bios of service casualties from this area. The bios have been published weekly (almost) since June 2001 in the Ridgewood News and were popular enough that the series is on its second round."