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Joseph Bowman (10 November 1940 – 19 February 1968) was a Chief Petty Officer in the US Navy and a CIA and MACV-SOG special agent during the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Bowman took part in numerous special forces missions, ranging from the Bay of Pigs invasion to Operation Flashpoint and several actions in the Vietnam War, during which he was captured and killed by the Viet Cong in Laos.

Biography

Bowman Cuba

Bowman in Cuba, 1961

Joseph Bowman was born in Atlanta, Georgia on 10 November 1940, the son of a World War II veteran. Bowman decided to join the US Navy at the age of seventeen in 1957, and he received Underwater Demolition Team training. He would later be recruited into the CIA and assigned to Alex Mason and Frank Woods' team for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, during which they took part in a failed assassination attempt on Fidel Castro at a Cuban plantation.

Bowman also took part in Operation Flashpoint in 1963, derailing the Soviet space program by assisting Mason and Woods in destroying a Soviet Soyuz rocket at the Baikonur cosmodrome. Before going back to his second tour in Vietnam, Bowman met a girl named Angela and the two of them had a son named William, knowing that he would not be able to see his child grow up, Bowman spends this time with his family with the little time that he has before going back into the action.

Bowman, Mason, and Woods would once again meet up in Vietnam after the Battle of Khe Sanh in 1968, and they had the objective of gathering intelligence on the covert Soviet military presence in Laos. During an incursion into Laos at Khammouane, the Americas were captured by the Viet Cong and were handed over to the Spetsnaz at a prison in Sekong, Laos. When Bowman refused to play Russian roulette with Alex Mason, a Spetsnaz GRU advisor named Dimitri Varshavsky cracked his skull open with a pipe, savagely beating him to death.

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