We were in Doc Fiddler’s one cold night in November 1967. It was a favorite bar in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, at 275 Sherman Avenue, above Isham Street. George Lynch was the bartender. We called him the Colonel. It was an honorary title, since he had made only private first class in the army. But he was a great military historian and patriot.
One day the Colonel commandeered the empty lot on the corner and erected a gigantic flagpole—something you might find in Central Park or in front of a government building. It’s still there. Every morning, he would ceremoniously raise the flag; every sunset, he would lower it. Each Memorial Day and Fourth of July, the Colonel would organize a parade up Sherman Avenue. He tapped his connections to make it huge. He got Bill Lenahan, who was the commanding officer of the US Marine Corps Reserve at Fort Schuyler, the nineteenth-century fort in Throggs Neck that’s now home to the State University of New York’s Maritime College and Museum, to literally send in the marines to march. The Colonel’s efforts took on an even greater urgency now that we were at war in Vietnam and with so many of our neighborhood boys serving there.
The Colonel got Finbar Devine, a towering man who lived up the street and who headed the New York City Police Department (NYPD) Pipes and Drums of the Emerald Society, to lead the flying wedge of kilted bagpipers and drummers while wearing his plumed fur Hussar’s hat and thrusting his mace heavenward. Father Kevin Devine, Finbar’s brother and the Good Shepherd Parish priest, got all the priests and the nuns and the kids from the Catholic school to march, too. Another Devine brother was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Colonel convinced him to organize a contingent of FBI agents to come out from under cover and march. The Colonel was beautifully crazy.
He treated the boys who came back from the war like kings. At Doc Fiddler’s, they didn’t pay for a drink. Around the corner from the bar, in what we called the Barracks, he lived in a room with two army surplus bunk beds—one for himself and one for any GI who’d come home and needed a place to stay.
Behind the bar, the Colonel ruled. He listened and laughed and could tell a story like your Irish grandfather, doing every accent and voice, no word astray, with a finish that would cure your asthma laughing. But he was tough, and those who engaged in tomfoolery on his watch were soon jettisoned.
The Colonel had become unhappy lately with what he was seeing on news reports about the war. Antiwar protesters were turning anti-soldier. Not just anti–President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who escalated the conflict he’d inherited from President John F. Kennedy by increasing the troops from JFK’s 16,000 to half a million. Nor were they strictly focused on General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, who was asking for even more troops to be deployed. Protesters were now training their sights on teenagers who’d been drafted, and on veterans who’d come home from a hell they couldn’t express. We were told that when the neighborhood boys had gone down to the draft board on Whitehall Street—many so inexperienced that their fathers or older brothers accompanied them—they’d been met by picketers carrying signs that read, “GIs Are Murderers.”
As these news scenes played out on the TV above the bar, the Colonel didn’t hide his disgust.
“You know how demoralized they must be while they’re over there doing their duty?” he would growl. “We’ve got to do something for them!”
“Yeah!” shouted the assembled.
“We’ve got to show them we support them!”
“That’s right!!” came the shouts, even louder.
“Somebody ought to go over to ’Nam, track down our boys from the neighborhood, and bring them each a beer!”
“Yeah!!—Wait. What?”
“You heard me! Bring them excellent beer, bring them messages from back home. Bring them . . . encouragement. Tell them we’re with them every step of the way!”
The Colonel folded his arms on the bar and looked me dead serious in the eyes. “Chickie,” he said, “I want to borrow your seaman’s card.”
It sounded more like an order than a request.
I was a US merchant mariner, a civilian seaman working on tankers and other commercial ships. I had joined after serving in the US Marine Corps for four years into the early 1960s.
I had a seaman’s card—it’s called a “Z” card—which is like a military ID. It has your picture and years of service on it. Mine noted that I could handle ammo, because I had military clearance. It’s issued by the US Coast Guard and used in lieu of a passport.
“What do you want my seaman’s card for?” I asked.
“I’m gonna get on one of those ships that goes to Vietnam,” he answered, “and I’m gonna bring all the guys over there from the neighborhood a drink.”
During the war, civilians couldn’t fly from the States to Vietnam without military orders—not that anybody wanted to take spring break in beautiful downtown Da Nang.
But there was no way the Colonel could “borrow” my seaman’s card to sail off to the war zone. He wouldn’t know what to do on a merchant ship. Besides, he didn’t look anything like me. I had red hair, I was ten years younger—forget it, there was no way. Besides, the idea was insane. Wasn’t it?
I looked in the Colonel’s eyes to see if he could possibly be serious. Oh, he was.
As of late 1967, Inwood had already buried twenty-eight brothers, cousins, and friends who had been killed in Vietnam. People from the whole neighborhood would turn up for the funeral, whether they knew the boy or not. At least half of the soldiers had been drafted or signed up right after leaving high school at the age of eighteen or even seventeen. At seventeen, their parents had to sign a permission slip, like for a field trip in school—a nine-thousand-mile field trip from which they might never return. Of the young men who did go to college, many were drafted soon after graduation and could be drafted until the age of twenty-six.
In Inwood, you didn’t have guys with a doctor friend of the family composing notes about nervous maladies or heel spurs. No guys playing the endless college-deferment game like future vice president Dick Cheney, with his four college deferments and another for good luck. For us, crossing the border and becoming Canadian wasn’t an option, either.
The Colonel and I had been good friends with Mike Morrow. He had been killed in June at the age of twenty-two by a mortar in the battle of Xom Bo II. His company and three others from the First Infantry Division were ambushed and outnumbered at Landing Zone X-Ray by up to 2,000 Vietcong (VC) soldiers. The bloody score, as reported by the United States government: “they” lost 222; we lost 39, just as the Summer of Love was getting started back home. We also lost Johnny Knopf at twenty-three, killed on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1966, when his mother was in church praying for him.
Then there was Tommy Minogue, who signed up at nineteen and one month; after turning twenty in March 1967, he had died a hero. His death was particularly hard to take. As courageous as Tommy was, he was a sweet kid. He was big, but he would never think of bullying anyone. He never wanted anybody to feel left out, and he found a way to include kids no one else would want to play with in the team sports in Inwood Park or in street games. We were friends with his older brother, Jack, and his three other brothers, so he was a little brother to us. Back then, when parents would have four or six or even ten kids, the older brothers would let the young ones tag along, and we’d look after all of them.
This was the kind of kid Tommy was: one summer, his father, John “One Punch” Minogue, asked his friend Danny Lynch down at the Miramar Pool if he had a job for Tommy, to keep him out of trouble for the ten long, hot weeks away from school. Lynch said he was sorry, but they’d filled all the jobs. Mr. Minogue looked dejected as he walked away.
Lynch called out, “Wait! Maybe Tommy could come and help out, and then he could at least swim for free.”
Mr. Minogue went for it, and so did Tommy: He worked like a beaver every day. Lifeguard Andy Rosenzweig tells the story of how one day, the owner of Miramar Pool showed up as Tommy was sweeping and stacking towels and carrying deck chairs. He asked, “Wow, what are we paying that kid?” and Lynch replied, “Nothing.”
“Well, start paying him today,” the boss commanded. Even bosses saw Tommy’s integrity.
Later, Tommy joined the Second Battalion of the Thirty-Fifth Army Infantry and became a platoon medic. He was soon sent to Kon Tum Province, in the Central Highlands, on Vietnam’s border with Laos. A few days after Saint Patrick’s Day, his unit of 100 soldiers was surrounded by a thousand North Vietnamese army regulars who had swarmed over the border. The platoon, outnumbered ten to one, was overrun within minutes, leaving company commander Captain Ronald Rykowski badly wounded. Tommy ran a hundred feet through a hail of bullets and threw his body over his captain, taking several bullets. Ignoring his own wounds, he treated the commanding officer, ultimately saving his life and that of the company radio operator next to him. Tommy then grabbed a machine gun from a fallen brother and fought back against the NVA soldiers, along with the remaining members of his company, continuing to shield the wounded Captain Rykowski. At the captain’s orders, the radio operator called in air support, but by the time it came, twenty-two men had been killed and forty-seven badly wounded. Tommy didn’t make it.
Three of his brothers, Jack, Donald, and Kevin, organized the Thomas F. Minogue Chapter of the Narrowbacks Social and Protective Club, and dozens of us meet regularly to remember him. I still don’t know why Tommy Minogue hasn’t been awarded the Medal of Honor, given by the president on behalf of Congress for extraordinary acts of valor.
These were the kinds of kids we were losing. They were so young—eighteen and nineteen, early twenties. The marines, which I’d joined at seventeen, considered me old at twenty-six; they’d cited my age as the reason for rejecting me when I’d tried to re-up in 1967.
People didn’t support the troops then as much as they do now. The country seemed ungrateful for what they were doing, because it was an unpopular war, and Americans were watching its brutality on the television news every night. But our young soldiers were doing what they felt was their duty. I’m not saying every guy was gung-ho about going to fight the Vietnamese. But in our community, at that time, if you were called by your country to fight what our leaders said was the spread of Communism, you went. You wouldn’t think of doing anything else but your duty. In Inwood, we grew up singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the end of Mass every Sunday; you’d receive Holy Communion and sing the “Agnus Dei” Latin hymn, and that would flow right into the national anthem like a medley. Your feelings of patriotism were connected to your religious beliefs. They were cut from the same sacred cloth.
The guys who didn’t want to serve, they moved out of the neighborhood. If I truly believed how they believed, I would have left, too. I wouldn’t want to make enemies of the people I grew up with because we disagreed about President Johnson, General Westmoreland, or Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The fight was with them, not the people on my block. You didn’t have protests in Inwood.
I would see the protesters in Central Park, and if I became one of the guys yelling back at them, what would that accomplish? Nothing. But I wanted to do something. Having served in the marines overseas myself, I figured that when our buddies over there heard about the discord from new recruits or in letters from back home, it would probably make them feel pretty damn bad.
To us, the people marching here with the red-and-yellow North Vietnamese flag while our guys were over there dying were traitors. No matter how we felt about the war, that was just wrong. What we didn’t know yet was that our own brothers and sisters were among the protesters, and that Vietnam veterans would soon join them. But rather than go down and fight the antiwar demonstrators, the Colonel wanted to launch his own counteroffensive and go directly to Vietnam to supply positive reinforcement to our boys.
“We gotta support them!” he yelled again.
I felt the same way as he did, but actually going there seemed a little extreme. I couldn’t give the Colonel my seaman’s card. And I had been “on the beach”—slang for not working on a ship—for a while now. I was doing nothing, simply hanging out and drinking beer with my buddies, while our friends were over there dying or wounded or in harm’s way.
I thought, I have the right ID papers to slip into Vietnam as a civilian. I have the time. Maybe I can do this. No: I have to do this. Some authority figures will probably stop me, but I have to try. I have to.
“Yeah, George, okay,” I said. “You get me a list of the guys and what units they’re with, and the next time I’m over there, I’ll bring them all a beer.”
It was sort of a flippant thing to say, but that’s how it all started.