In Honor Of The Fallen Vietnam War Brothers Of North Adamsville Now Eternally Etched In Stone At Town Hall And Down In Washington

By Frank Jackman  

I am probably the surprise choice to take up this assignment honoring a couple of my Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys, Rick Rizzo and Donald White, from the early 1960s who grow up in the desperately poor Acre section of North Adamsville and laid down their young heads in some now forgotten battlefield of Vietnam.  You see this is the 50^th anniversary of my own struggle as a military resister to the war and the only one from our crowd who then joined the internal Army resistance. I have, and others too, have gone through the particulars of my experience elsewhere so that need not detain us here. Besides this is about Rick and Donald (nobody ever called him anything but Donald so I will stick with that).     

Rich was a gung-ho guy, a tough little bastard who imbibed all the anti-communist red scare stuff that we were being force-fed but he was a true believer, a guy who really did want to eliminate every enemy of America. There were a few other guys who hung around Tonio’s like Rick but most of us just wanted to get laid and have some booze, stuff like that. So he signed on the dotted line right after high school I think with the idea of making the military a career (a choice of many not going to college guys looking to grab a skill while serving their country). When Rick came home from basic or maybe it was AIT he was all spit and polish and frankly we looked up to him whether we ourselves would enlist or not. Then sometime in late 1965 he got orders for Vietnam and we had a big party for him, as it turned out the last time we would see him. In August of 1966 somewhere in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam during a major confrontation Rick got blown away. The news when it came to us was a shock and each one of the corner boys probably to this day has a little sorrow in his heart for Rick’s too young fate.

Donald White was slightly different. He had gone to college for a year but just couldn’t cut it, was not his thing. That subjected him to the getting very familiar notice to report for induction from his “friends and neighbors” at the local draft board. Instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop he decided to enlist and grab a clerk’s job as his MOS. Two unfortunate things befell him. One the war in Vietnam was raging out of control with call-ups of addition manpower every few months and so despite his clerical training he was assigned to an infantry unit in-country. Two, there were really no battle-lines in that war like in Europe in World War II and so even lowly clerks had to act as infantrymen or get blown away. Got into firefights when unit positions were under attack. One night when “Charlie” came over the top Donald fell down, laid his golden blonde hair down in some muddy field.           

All of us guys still standing, still around agree that there was a very big difference between what got Rick and Donald to the war before 1968 and what TET and the endless calls for escalation, more bodies as did to the morale of the American forces and the possibilities of winning. Most of us who did our military service did so in the post-1968 and that reflected the chance in spirit even among those who had not the slightest desire to resist (by the way not one of our Tonio’s guys was a draft resister and like I said then I was the only military resister)

All this to say whatever our personal attitudes then or now we had no wish for the death of any individual soldier. Certainly not Rick and Donald. So maybe that is why I am the guy selected to give this late eulogy for our Tonio’s fallen.