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The first night that we were settled into our new home, I decided to take a walk “downtown” and check out the village's business district. Newport in the sixties was kind of like a Norman Rockwell painting. There was the “main corner” with a gas station, the town pharmacy, a furniture store, and the combination bowling alley, diner, and bar occupying the four corners. Main Street was lined with stately Elms, a large Catholic church and the white clapboards and tall steeples of the Methodist and Baptist churches. At the foot of our street was an Octagon shaped, limestone house, with a small workshop attached to the back of it. That house was where Linus Yale had invented the Yale lock, which is still in use today.

The village was bisected by the West Canada Creek. I decided to walk down bridge street, appropriately named because it led to the BRIDGE, and take a look at the creek and the dam. It was a keystone bridge, made entirely of locally quarried limestone, and when you stood on the bridge, you could feel the mist rising from the water as it spilled over the dam from the mill pond. Above the bridge stood the village's only surviving industry, a Borden's Instant Coffee plant. As I stood there, bored and forlorn, little did I know that the spillway below that dam was the home to some of the biggest trout I had ever seen. Little did I realize that trout fishing at the foot of that spillway would become one of the greatest activities that I would ever enjoy.

Bridge Street had once been home to a shoe factory, that occupied a large wooden frame building, and what had been the original feed store, that occupied a two story limestone building. As I walked by the old feed store building, my eyes met with those of an elderly man with a pork pie hat, sitting on a stool in front of an antique cash register. He knodded a barely detectable greeting, while chomping on the butt of a cigar. His face was friendly, and you could tell by the way his face was drawn and his brow was wrinkled that life had not always been kind to him. Looking past the old man, I could see two regulation sized pool tables and a few boys standing around leaning on cue sticks or leaning over the tables lining up their next shot.

I opened the door and with hesitation, I walked inside. I asked the old timer how much it cost to play. He told me that it was 1 cent a minute for the table, and that I should put my name on the chalk board waiting list. Whoever lost the game had to pay for the table rental and everyone took turns challenging the winner of the previous game. He said “where are you from youngster? You ain't from around here are ya?” I told him “ I am now!” I told him my name and he told me that his was Moses Everett, but everyone called him Mose. Mose had once owned a larger pool hall in another town, but had done some time in prison for some unknown charge, and had retired to Newport after he got out. He and his wife and daughter were quiet and stayed to themselves.

I put my name on the chalkboard, bought a 15 cent 7 ounce coke, and leaned up against a counter to watch and wait for my turn to play. There was a handsome kid about my age leaning on a cue, smoking a cigarette standing next to me. He had jet black naturally wavy hair, a mischievous grin, and he was quite friendly and outgoing. He introduced himself, and stuck out his hand to shake. It was a strong arm, more like that of a man than a teenager. His forearm stuck out of a flannel shirt, rolled up to his elbow, and his handshake about crushed my fingers. His name was Gary Hartman, and he was to become my first, and one of my best friends in my new hometown.

West Canada Valley Central School didn't travel all over the villages picking up the kids. We all had to walk to the center of town and the main corner to catch the bus. The first morning I was to attend school, I arrived on the corner to see Gary standing in front of the furniture store smoking a Marlboro with a couple of other boys. He immediately motioned for me to come over, and he introduced me to several other boys, and when we arrived at school, he took me to the office and introduced me to the principal and the secretary. That would not be the last time that Gary and I stood together in the principal's office. We were not the school's most stellar of scholars, and we did manage to get caught smoking on school grounds, skipping school, or leaving school during the lunch hour with in a friend's car which was forbidden.

Gary was a year behind me in school, and I made many friends in my own class, but Gary and I would always be friends and outside of school we always found time to bum around and to shoot pool, or to cruise the roads of the area in our friend Mickey's 55 chevy.
I found that rural life was not as bad as I had anticipated. I had worked on farms in Schuyler and Deerfield and loved animals and the farm lifestyle. I took agriculture in school, and was the only “city kid” to have ever won the tractor driving contest, competing with boys born and raised on farms. I loved to sing, and soon was asked to join the chorus, and with my DA haircut and sideburns, I was asked to play Conrad Birdie in “Bye Bye Birdie”.

It was my ticket to popularity and acceptance. It was during those auditions and rehearsals that I met the principal's daughter, Sue. We went steady for the duration of our junior and senior years of high school. Sadly, Sue passed away a couple of years ago after a 6 year battle with breast cancer.

Although I had begun to run with a different crowd, I always remained close friends with Gary Hartman, and we still frequently played pool or ran around in Mickey's car together. We still spent several hours a week together, rode together on the school bus, and hung at the bowling alley and diner on the corner in downtown Newport.

Life was great in Newport NY. It was wonderful place to live and to grow up. Gary had lived there all his life, as had most of my other friends there. Many of my friends and classmates were farm kids, and lived a wonderful and wholesome life on area dairy farms. Many of us town kids worked on those farms after school and in summer. Others worked summers in the tannery in Middleville NY or for area merchants. Gary and I once worked with a friend digging graves for the local funeral director for $30 per grave, which was big money in those days.

After graduation I went on to a two year college. Gary graduated the following year and joined the Marines. It was not long before my lack of “scholastic ambition” brought about the decision to quit college and join the Navy. I had a childhood acquaintance that was on his second hitch in the Navy and thought it was a great way of life, so I chose the Navy as opposed to the Army.

Not long before leaving for basic training, I spent time with Gary while he was home on a leave prior to his deployment to Vietnam. We drank lots of beer, raised lots of hell, and had a great time.
He was a very proud young Marine and almost “eager” to put his training into play and to battle Communism and to defend the freedom of South Vietnamese citizens. There were those who were drafted, and were not happy to be serving in the military, and then there were those of us who enlisted and were eager to fight for the freedoms we enjoyed, just as our fathers and grandfathers had fought for those freedoms in the wars of their own time.

Gary had extended his tour in return for being able to come home on leave for Christmas in 1966. He would have been out of the country of Vietnam had he not extended, but it was shortly after his extension went into effect, that he was killed on April 21, 1967. He was killed by hostile fire while on patrol in Quang Nam, Vietnam.
Gary and I had corresponded by mail occasionally and were looking forward to the end of our enlistments, and to going home to Newport to start our adult lives and futures. I didn't hear from him for quite a while, and then one day the horrible news arrived in a letter from my mother. Gary had been killed. I broke down and sobbed by heart out. I had known others that had died in Vietnam, and I knew a couple of those that were wounded and sent home disabled, but this was my high school friend. My carefree buddy and pool partner. He had arrived back in Newport at our small town funeral home in an aluminum box, to be honored with full military honors, with marines flanking his closed casket during calling hours, according to my parents.

I was unable to get leave to come home for the funeral. Gary's death had the most grievous impact on my young life of any death before or since. It was so sudden, so unexpected, so violent and so unfair. It was different than the death of relatives from natural causes and old age.

When the “war” was over, and we were all back home, I never got over the sad realization that we had left proud and eager to fight the good fight in the name of Democracy, and we had come home unappreciated, looked down on my many, and with way too many memories of brave young men that made the ultimate sacrifice.
I played pool in that old pool hall on Bridge Street, and I drank in all the bars up and down the West Canada Valley and other places. It wasn't the same as when we hung out and drank 35 cent drafts without a care in the world. It simply was unfair that Gary was not there to tip a bottle or two of beer and play a game or two of nine ball. It was a such a waste that so many young American lives had been sacrificed in vain, in a country that ended up in the hands of the communists anyway.

58,260 American men and women gave their lives in that hot and steamy jungle. 58,260 men and women made the supreme sacrifice in the name of corruption and politics.
 
On March 26, 1982 the ground was broken for the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall in Washington DC. In November of 1984 the wall became the property of the people of the United States, to be maintained by the National Parks Service (information and facts concerning the building of the wall have been taken from the website I have visited Washington DC many times over the years. I have even stood on the knoll overlooking the wall and shed tears for my friend Gary as well as for all the other former comrades and fallen veterans listed on the granite panels.

I have tried on two different occasions to visit the wall, and to touch Gary's name on the wall. There is a haunting desire to simply touch his name and to kneel before the wall, to pray, and reminisce about the fun loving kid from Newport NY that died on that April day in 1967. That young man that died in a jungle many thousand miles from those peaceful hills surrounding the West Canada Creek.

I have twice gone forward with every intention of simply walking to panel 18A to pray and fulfill that desire to touch his name. Both times I have walked toward the wall, and as soon as I began to descend into the area in front of the wall, overwhelming grief inexplicably came over me, and I have broken down and sobbed. Both times I have turned around and left. I was able to get a rubbing of his name off the wall when my younger brother visited the wall many years ago. It rests in a photo album, along with a couple of pictures of Gary, taken before we enlisted and left Newport.

I will always carry the memories that Gary and I created together. I will always remember his smile and his curly black hair, and his strong personality. He wasn't afraid of anything, and he paid the price for that lack of fear by defending freedom as a proud US Marine, and by dying in a jungle far away in a war that forever goes down in history as a failure and a waste of lives.
 
Every Memorial Day I still picture his mom, the only Gold Star mother of a Vietnam Veteran, riding I an open car with the mother of a WWII veteran, during he little Memorial Day parade in downtown Newport NY. I always am brought to the verge of tears thinking of the lives wasted, of my generation, while proudly fighting the threat of Communism on foreign soil. The cold war is over now, but in those days Communism was a serious threat and nuclear war was our biggest fear as children growing up in the 50's and 60's.

Somehow I try to justify our fight as a stumbling block that stifled the forward march of Communism. Somehow I always try to justify the loss of all those young lives as a price paid in the name of freedom, although the particular war in which they were lost was a sad failure and unmitigated disaster militarily. One has a hard time wrapping their mind around the idea that their best friend as well as thousands of other fellow veterans died in vain, in a country far away. It is hard to think that those lives served no purpose at all and were sacrificed in futility. Anyone that can simply call it a “political war” or a “conflict” rather than a war, damn sure never served there during that time. It WAS a war. It was no different than any of the other wars that our military has fought over the years. It was a hot, steamy, stinking, bug infested, fungus breeding, hell hole, and the tactics and booby traps used against our fighting men were horrific. The tortures and the humiliation as well as the abuses and neglect that our troops suffered in POW camps are as real as they were in Japan or Korea, or in the hands of Nazi's in WWII.

Believe me when I say it WAS a war, and that war is memorialized by a black granite wall in our nation's capital. The names of those killed or missing are engraved on 144 panels divided into the east wall and west wall.

Gary Hartman's name is listed on line 59 of panel 18E. Someday before I die, I WILL find my way to the wall again, and WILL touch his name on that wall.

In memoriam:
Gary Richard Hartman
Corporal E-4 US Marine Corps.
Length of service: 1 year

casualty date: April 21, 1967
Quang Nam, South Vietnam as a result of hostile fire.
 
His name is located on PANEL 18E, LINE 59 on the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall.

Rest in peace my friend.