The Icons for Them All, by Peter Trenouth

            The bright, mild January 1990 day in Abington, Massachusetts, was far from the Laotian jungle of November 30, 1968, when the helicopter carrying a three-man crew plus Staff Sergeant Richard Fitts and five of his fellow Green Berets was shot out of the sky and crashed, a fireball killing all on board. Twenty-one years later amidst different geopolitics, an American-Laotian search team found his remains—a few teeth and about a hundred bone fragments, some his, some not. It was enough.

            Cars lined the roadway swirled among grass and gravestones. People edged toward Richard’s open grave. I kept a distance, not wanting a privileged space and stopped about twenty feet from the hearse. The Army honor guard stood perfect in uniform, their faces frozen in solemnity. Three riflemen would fire the salute. Six pallbearers carried the flag draped casket. Three drummers beat the dirge-paced tempo. The gathering crowd blocked my view of the seated family, one of whom I had met a few years earlier, Richard Fitts Junior. Never before or since had an introduction stopped me cold. He had to have been a baby when his father disappeared.

            It was after the last performance of a high school play I had directed. A girl in the cast wanted me to meet her out-of-town boyfriend. The last time I saw young Richard’s father was June 1961. Most kids finishing ninth grade at Abington Junior High went to the high school. Richard chose a regional vocational high school two towns away. From then on we travelled in different companies. I never saw him again. He had brown hair and a gentle boy’s face that I first saw in the seventh grade.  Abington Junior High was new to me, a December new kid. The homeroom teacher knew what she was doing when she asked Richard to show me my locker and how to work the combination. Any other boy might sense an easy target and become bossy and aloof, but not Richard, a naturally reassuring presence at age 13. Richard Junior’s face, older but barely different from that kind boy’s, fixed my certainty before his girlfriend spoke his name.

            Soon other happy kids surrounded us. I spoke joyous chatter and never mentioned what was most on my mind to young Richard. Saying I knew his father would only remind him that strangers held memories he would never have. My attention to helping the custodian close the building delayed what would later enter my mind and stay off and on ever since. In 1985 Staff Sergeant Richard Fitts was still MIA, presumed dead, and I owed him and all the others whose names lined the memorial wall in Washington. They paid for my college education. I wouldn’t be a teacher if it weren’t for him and the 58,219 other service members who died in the Southeast Asia War; the 304,000 wounded; and the countless others among the 2.6 million who came home broken in ways unseen until something terrible happened. In their silence these service members pushed Congress to pass the Vietnam War Era G.I. Bill in 1966 when the ever-mounting casualties were half their current numbers.

            The G.I. Bill promised money, the ticket to college my family didn’t have.  The means to get it lay beyond my then lazy self-direction. It changed everything. In 1966 I had one more year before my three years of active duty ended with the Navy Reserve which I had joined while still in high school, all that time spent in one place: South Weymouth Naval Air Station, a fifteen minute drive from my Abington home. Despite the faraway war, I served in a peacetime Navy. After the first year filled with menial duties set for the lowest ranks, my permanent duty spot became the firehouse—the crash crew—where the petty officers and a chief petty officer built on the good work my previous Navy bosses started to make me grow up.  Altogether those years between 18 and 21 bestowed six years of essential maturity. The oldest among these Navy lifers then put it this way: “Earn trust, keep it, and look like someone who deserves it.”

            Each insisted I do all assigned tasks well. Preparedness was essential. Be at the right place at the right time ready to go. Watch out for each other. Respect authority but don’t be overwhelmed by it. If you show up for morning muster with a hangover, that’s your problem; don’t make it anyone else’s.  Never break a promise.  These men liked guys who were funny, as most of them were, but not jerks. They lived this stuff and never bragged about it. With my gradual comprehension, these standards seeded and grew. I’m forever grateful for my mentors’ tutelage and friendship.

            Yet we weren’t the same.  Most guys at South Weymouth older than twenty-five called rock stars’ long hair “girly.” They said worse about the anti-war protesters, a population they condemned, charging they made noise because they had nothing else to do and didn’t know a damn thing about duty. I didn’t mind when they kidded me about my hair, which barely stayed inside Navy regulations. We all took jokes from each other. A few pretended not to hear the ethnic, racial, and sexist jokes so universal among white men back then, as we all were, a culture still with us. I had heard the same in my suburban high school. You laughed along to get along. By the second year of active duty, I stopped laughing. Too much had happened in Mississippi and Alabama.

            Shortly after my assignment to the crash crew, the fire chief asked me to take his red pickup and deliver some papers to the supply department. Crash crews never walked anywhere while on duty. Along the way my eye caught a Marine Corps staff car parked near the chow hall and recognized the passenger in civilian clothes, a thin man about forty-five. He was the father of a dead Marine who graduated Abington High School with me in 1964.

            The newspaper death notice read: “Hamlin, Ralph G. PFC, USMC, in service to his country, South Vietnam, November 29, 1965.”

             Word around town said he died when he stepped on a booby trap during his first patrol. He was 20-years old. Ralph’s funeral and burial came and went without my knowing about them. Seeing Mr. Hamlin, I figured the Marine honor guard must have come from South Weymouth and he came on base to thank them. I parked the chief’s pickup behind the sedan and noticed the passenger window open. The errand for the chief could wait.

            Ralph had played tackle on the football team. He looked like a lineman, maybe the strongest boy in our class. Some kids said he bragged too much. A teammate put it differently.

            “You got to understand Ralph plays well, but it’s because he’s scared.  He told me that whenever he screws up, he gets chewed out twice. First the coach yells at him, and then his old man gives him worse shit when he gets home. That’s why he brags. It’s like he needs people to know he’s not a screw up.”

            This was the first time I ever paid condolences to someone outside my family. The right words came; the praise for the dead and sympathy for the bereaved. I remember saying, “Ralph was a great guy.” Mr. Hamlin vaguely recalled my name. A sad, polite grin tracked his face. His barely audible voice thanked me.

            It wasn’t that moment exactly. A lot happened before my speaking to Mr. Hamlin and a lot more after. Most twenty-year-olds think in absolutes. I rarely did. For me, experiences unrolled in ambiguity, even before I knew the meaning of the word.  Call it an artist’s sensibility or an attention deficit disorder that never sees only one central point in anything. The military wants absolutists, and it had them in the career guys at South Weymouth and every other station or ship.  It didn’t need me. Then came the G.I. Bill.

             Five months before my discharge in June 1967, notice came that I passed the exam for Aviation Boatswain’s Mate Third Class. The next day I was accepted to Suffolk University.

            April 10, 1968, Suffolk was closed. Every college in Boston and Cambridge was closed. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. We students had no place to go. Someone said, “Let’s go to the Common.” A lot of people must have said the same. The Boston Common bordered the opposite side of Beacon Hill from Suffolk. By noontime thousands had gathered—all kinds of people, angry and terribly sad—shouldered together on the beige-green grass while the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House glistened in the sun. A public address system appeared, and speakers spoke words I knew were true: Too much was wrong with America. We had to finish Dr. King’s work. End poverty. End this senseless, horrible war.

            A massive public mourning became a protest, my first of many, and my hair hung over my ears and draped the back of my collar.

            During Richard Fitts’s funeral the minister said, “Today a twenty-three-year-old man buries his twenty-one-year-old father.” I pictured Mr. Hamlin slouched in the Marine sedan—the two men so different and so much the same. At the cemetery I could just see the six pallbearers’ hats as they huddled to fold the flag into a tight triangle of white stars on blue. The drums had gone silent. The riflemen fired three volleys. A bugler played taps. 

            There’s profound honor and beauty in the formality of military grief, despite the policies that cause it. Our best traditions sustain us. They remind us who we are, especially when we misgauge, as we always do, how much sustaining we need.

            The Navy closed South Weymouth Naval Air Station in 1997. The summer of 2005 I went to Washington and walked the long Vietnam memorial, my generation’s most poignant place with its two walls each 246 feet and 9 inches in length angled together, and found the panels and lines for Richard and Ralph. I touched their names, my icons for them all.