While serving at West Point, his father died, and the younger Patton dropped the Roman numeral from his name.A year after he returned from Germany, he married Joanne Holbrook in 1952[2] Patton served in the Korean War from February 1953, commanding "A" Company of the 140th Tank Battalion, 40th Infantry Division.During this final tour, he was initially assigned as Chief of Operations and Plans at Headquarters, United States Army Vietnam.During his three tours in Vietnam, Patton, who frequently used helicopters as a mobile command post, was shot down three times and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and a second Silver Star.[citation needed] Patton's military awards include: In the years after his retirement in 1980, Patton turned an estate owned by his father located north of Boston into the Green Meadows Farm,[8] where he named the fields after soldiers who died under his command in Vietnam.In the 1990s, Patton worked alongside author Brian Sobel to write The Fighting Pattons, a book that serves as an official family biography of his father as well as a comparison between the military of his father's generation and that of his own, a time which covered five conflicts and almost 70 years of combined service.His great-grandfather, the first George Smith Patton, was a colonel in the Confederate army during the American Civil War.