The first American combat adviser killed in combat

SFC Greg Fronius received a posthumous Silver Star for his courageous actions during an FMLN attack on the 4th Brigade base at El Paraiso. Severely wounded, guerrilla sappers placed an explosive charge beneath his body and then detonated it. Jennifer Casolo visited 4th BDE prior to the attack and some attribute Fronius’ death to her intelligence gathering effort on behalf of the guerrillas.

By Greg Walker

Relatives of SSG Gregory A. Fronius, a 28-year-old Green Beret sergeant, were told he was slain during a guerrilla attack on the Salvadoran brigade’s headquarters at El Paraiso. They were informed Fronius had died in his barracks while asleep when a mortar shell struck. In fact, Fronius had bolted from the barracks to rally Salvadoran soldiers for a counterattack. Fronius, fighting alone from an elevated position, bought time for Salvadoran officers to secure the command bunker when several guerrilla sappers (trained by the North Vietnamese in Nicaragua) shot him multiple times. Fronius, slipping down a stairwell into the courtyard below, was mortally wounded, as his autopsy report was obtained years later in a FOIA request of the Army showed. Upon reaching his body the guerrillas realized he was still breathing. Enraged to find an American adviser had thwarted their plans to attack the bunker, they placed a shape charge beneath his body and detonated it.

Upon returning from San Salvador, his team leader, Major Gus Taylor, helped collect the young Green Beret’s remains. “We recovered about 17 pounds of Greg,” he told this author over the course of several interviews. The rest was scattered…we had to pick pieces of him out of the overhead trees.”

Taylor and another member of his mobile training team would set out with selected Salvadoran snipers from the base after he had met with the then U.S. MILGRP commander. For 30 days the men hunted down and shot any guerrilla or guerrillas they encountered. Taylor, deeply affected by the loss of Fronius, would later provide crucial photographs and information to the Veterans of Special Operations – El Salvador while they were being interviewed by CBS’s Ed Bradley in 1995. Greg’s brother, Stephen, was also interviewed. He also met privately with Taylor.

In June 1998, at the largest awards and decorations ceremony held by the 7th Special Forces Group (A) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, SFC Fronius’ 12-year-old son stepped forward to receive his father’s posthumous — and initially denied by the Army — Silver Star. He was the first American combat adviser to be killed in combat in El Salvador.

Read Gus Taylor’s account of Gus Fronius’ death on page 10.