Poos: CC Bob Poos, AP correspondent dies after a lengthy illness
The memorial service is scheduled for Sunday January the 11th, 2009, from 2:00pm – 4:00pm at the Collingwood Museum and Library in Alexandria, VA. Directions can be obtained from their website: www.collingwoodlibrary.com. If you have any questions, or need further information about the location, their phone number is: 703-765-1652.
We thank you all for your calls, and condolences, and years of friendship. If you have any questions or would like to contact myself, Lisa Green, his daughter, or Laurie Poos, his daughter, or his wife, Bobbie Keating, all of our information is as follows:
Lisa Green, jgreen121@cox.net ; Laurie Poos, laurie.poos@suntrust.com; Roberta Keating, bob.poos@verizon.net
One-time AP Saigon staffer [and CC] Bob Poos has died… Due to a byline strrike at AP this obit may not show up as readily on the Internet. Bob was not very active in recent years due to illneses, but he was another guy who never forgot his AP ties. He told the story of An Thi on pp. 56-59 of “Lost Over Laos.” Roberta (Bobbie) Poos’ is reachable via CCHQ. All who knew Bob can appreciate his recording on the answering machine: “Bobbie is busy doing good works, and Bob is cleaning his guns, which he uses to discourage intruders and knee-jerk liberals.” — Richard Pyle, Associated Press Writer
Bob Poos in Vietnam
By RICHARD PYLE
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Robert Poos, who covered the Vietnam War as a reporter for the Associated Press and later served as managing editor for the outspokenly pro-military magazine Soldier of Fortune, has died at age 78.Poos died on Monday at a hospice in Arlington, Va., where he had been under care for nearly two years for respiratory ailments, his wife, Bobbie Poos, said. He recently had suffered a broken hip and a broken elbow in falls.
Born in Hillsboro, Ill., on July 12, 1930, Poos was the son of Omer Poos, a U.S. District Court Judge in Springfield, Ill. In early years, he knocked about as a coal miner, merchant seaman and deckhand on a Mississippi river boat before joining the Marines at the outset of the Korean War in 1950.
In 1951 he was among the “Frozen Chosin” Marines who staged a fighting winter retreat from the Chosin Reservoir, under attack by Chinese Communist forces who had entered the war on the side of North Korea.
Poos joined the AP as a newsman in St. Louis, Mo., in 1957 after journalism studies at Southern Illinois University and working as a reporter-photographer for the Southern Illinoisan newspaper in Carbondale, Ill.
In 1965, he was assigned to the AP’s Saigon bureau and quickly became noted for aggressive and daring combat reporting. During the January 1966 battle of An Thi, where U.S. cavalry troops were surrounded by communist forces, Poos and AP photographer Henri Huet helped recover and stand guard over wounded GIs.
Bob Poos and Bobbi taken at a Lucas Chapter meeting last Fall
“We figured we could be overrun and wiped out in the next 24 hours,” Poos recalled years afterward.
Two months later, Poos himself was wounded in the chest when gunmen attacked a Buddhist pagoda in Danang where he and other journalists were covering a standoff by anti-government monks. In later years he suffered from chronic lung ailments, his wife said.
“In Vietnam Bob Poos was always good company and an able member of the Saigon bureau,” said former AP and CNN correspondent Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his own AP reporting in Indochina.
Author-journalist Joseph Galloway, who competed with Poos as a UPI reporter in Vietnam, called him “a great friend in a foxhole or a watering hole, and a damned fine shoeleather reporter of the old school.”
In late 1966, Poos was named chief of AP’s bureau in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and later was a news editor in Tokyo before returning to the U.S., where he spent two years in AP’s Washington D.C. bureau. After leaving AP in 1970 he was a spokesman for the American Railroad Association.
Later, as managing editor of Soldier of Fortune in the 1980s, he wrote about military topics for the Boulder, Colo.-based magazine, and while covering a story in Central America became involved in a controversy over carrying a sidearm.
On assignment in Afghanistan, Poos smuggled out Soviet AK-74 ammunition, the first of that type that the Pentagon had ever seen, according to SOF editor and publisher Robert K. Brown.
As the magazine’s “first professional” journalist, Brown said, Poos brought expertise and real experience to its readers. “He had seen the elephant in ‘Nam as a combat reporter, and was recognized by his peers as one of the few who actually filed copy from where bullets were flying and the blood was dripping.”
Poos is survived by his wife, Bobbie, and two daughters by a previous marriage, Lisa Green, of Virginia Beach, and Laura Poos, of Hampton, Va. Plans for a memorial were pending.