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

By Frank Jackman  

You know I don’t think I really have given the reader the hard edge of how the deaths of our corner boy comrades Rick Rizzo and Donald White who laid down their heads in muddy fields of faraway Vietnam back in the 1960s and are now forever remembered at Town Hall and in black granite in Washington affected all of us when we heard the news. By then, by 1966 and 1967 when they passed, the corner boy crowd from the North Adamsville High Class of 1964, their and our class mostly had passed through seven winds, were scattered to and fro although mostly still Acre connected by parents and siblings. Some still in town like Bart Webber or nearby colleges like Pete Markin, forever known as the Scribe. So the hard solidarity we had accumulated, most of us, the core, from those junior high school days at Atlantic (now renamed North Adamsville Middle School since a couple of schools were combined) at start-out Doc’s Drugstore corner holding the bricks up and racketed up in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in high school might had dissipated some but it was hard to shake off that a couple of our number had passed so young in the days when we all, including Rick and Donald, thought we would live forever. Writing over fifty years later has some of that same dissipated quality, that time has done its job to make us forget enough to keep back most of the tears.

But that is just plain wrong, wrong enough to need some additional thought and words to speak of the deaths of guys who we thought then, 1966, 1967 then were doing the right thing even if later we mostly changed our minds when we in our turns had to do military service. Maybe not so much on Rich who really was a mad man to beat commie ass, to wipe away whole countries if necessary so we in the Acre could have some, well, whatever we had, peace I guess. Donald (nobody ever called him anything but Donald from as far back as I remember) who really did get a snow job from the Army recruiter who promised the world and brought only the death that Donald’s mother never got over, drew her to an early grave. There I said it, said stuff that should have been mentioned in the previous tributes, the stuff about broken-hearted mothers, and broken-hearted corner boys. Maybe for the first time I will admit, despite my long years as an anti-war activist and peace crusader, that I privately went to Adamsville Beach one night after hearing the news and wept copious tears over poor Donald’s demise. Hopefully that will give the reader a much better sense of how we took our fallen comrades’ deaths.           

When I wrote the first couple of tributes I mentioned that I was probably the surprise choice to take up an  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 battlefields of Vietnam.  A key reason for that judgment when the other guys asked me to put a little tribute together that this year is the 50^th anniversary of my struggle as a military resister to that same war. A very, very different storyline from Rick and Donald’s. I was the only one from our crowd who at that time joined the internal Army resistance. I had refused orders to Vietnam, did stockade time and that was that. I have, and others have too, gone through the particulars of my experience elsewhere so that need not detain us here. Besides this is about Rick and Donald. Now the choice seems right, seems righter than rain. So let’s run with the thoughts about these brethren a little bit.

    

Rick 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. In the early 1960s during what was still the deep Cold War even if there had been some abatement in the national red scare epidemic I had been almost as firm in my beliefs about the “commie menace” as the next guy although maybe not as much as Rick. When Rick blasted us about the latest atrocities by the Communists somewhere we all went ho-hum, even the Scribe who was the most political of all of us. There were a few other guys, maybe Frankie Riley whose parents were rabid Irish Catholics and serious archenemies of the commies, who hung around Tonio’s like Rick but most of us just wanted to get laid and have some booze, stuff like that. Regular high school guy stuff then, and almost mandatory for life among the corner boys.

Rick signed on the dotted line right after high school in 1964 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. In those days in the Acre, the serious working- class section of North Adamsville and home to all the corner boys, not many of the guys expected to, wanted to, or were smart enough to seek the college path. Life was -graduate high school, get a job where you might pick up a skill, get married, have kids, and after a billion years retire and nobody would have been surprised if some young man decided to go into the military rather than be drafted to have some choice in learning a skill. That was Rick to a tee.    

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. (With maybe a couple of exceptions for guys with some kind of medical problems or sole support of the family every guy in the roving Tonio’s corner boy crowd served in the military.) 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 whatever our subsequent views on that Vietnam War, or wars in general, 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. Donald never was much of a student, could not bear to listen when the Scribe would start reading stuff out loud, something by a freaking faggot(then) named Allan Ginsberg whom he was all hot and bothered over after reading the explosive poem Howl.  (Some recruiter from North Adamsville Junior College came through the school senior year and grabbed a bunch of kids including Donald who were not qualified to get into a four- year college to enroll in their two-year program with the idea of eventually going to some other school). That drop-out 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 Donald decided to enlist and grab a clerk’s job, maybe as typist, 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 when he got orders in 1967. Two, there were really no battle-lines in that damn war like in Europe in World War II and so even lowly clerks had to act as infantrymen, build perimeters, lay mines, dig foxholes and do sentry duty, or get blown away. He, from what one of his Army buddies told us later, was in the thick of the 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, pro-war, anti-war, Vietnam vets or “era” (like me) still around agree that there was a very big difference between what got Rick and Donald to join the war effort without qualms before 1968 and what TET and the endless calls for escalation, more bodies chewed up did to the morale of the American forces and the possibilities of winning. The no longer 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 before 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 was the guy selected to give this late eulogy for our Tonio’s fallen. Now included with tears for my fallen corner boy brethren.