SPEAK OUT!

BY Michael Gorin

In this 50th anniversary year of the end of the war in Vietnam, it feels especially important to reflect not only on the service of those who went, but on the lives they lived before they wore a uniform.

I grew up in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in Queens, New York. From there, five young men I knew left to serve in the Vietnam War. They were part of the fabric of our community—athletic, patriotic, and proud. They were our own. Queens lost 371 sons in that war. Nine of them were from Jackson Heights. I knew five.

I didn’t serve in Vietnam, so I can’t pretend to know the hell they endured. But I can remember who they were before they left — by evoking the places they went, the things they did, and the people they were. Not with parades or platitudes, but with real remembrance.

There are “Jackson Heights” throughout the USA, places with different names but the same kinds of kids who grew up there, went to war, and, for some, never came home. This isn’t just a walk down memory lane for my hometown. It’s one for every hometown that sent young people off to Vietnam.

Jackson Heights, like so many neighborhoods, has changed a lot since I left in 1974. The pizzerias, card shops, and soda fountains where we spent our days are mostly gone now, lost to time. But I still remember the places we gathered, and the people who filled them.

Patrick Nouhaller

We played ball at 76th Street Park – now the Louis C. Moser Park. Sal Bertuna, Dennis Magnotta, John Ross, and Michael LaBianca used to hang out there. They were a couple of years older, but we’d talk or play together every now and then. Maybe it was during one of those long afternoons at the park that they first began to think seriously about joining the military.

The fifth was Glenn Lucas. He lived near the baseball field at 30th Avenue and 79th Street. He was a standout athlete — football was his game. Unlike the others, he didn’t know the Jackson Heights crew. He was older and deployed to Vietnam before they even graduated high school.

Lucas was drafted. The story goes that at the Whitehall Street induction center in Manhattan, when the Marines called for volunteers, he stepped forward. More likely, he was one of many draftees randomly selected when the Corps came up short on enlistees, a common occurrence at the time.

I know that Glenn Lucas was killed on January 31, 1968. I know that Michael LaBianca died on May 29, 1969. I don’t know the full stories of what happened to the other three — not yet. But I remember them.

Remembering these boys by where they hung out might seem small, or too local. But every town has its pizzerias, its parks, its favorite corners. Every town sent sons off to war. They were young, full of promise, and above all, answered the call.

Sometimes I imagine them in Vietnam, trading stories with other young men and women from across the nation, each one describing his version of Jackson Heights — the streets, the schools, the girls, the music, the dumb things they did in summer. Maybe in those conversations, bonds were formed that cut across race and class and geography.

For those who came back, some of those bonds endure, often through VSOs such as Vietnam Veterans of America. In the end, memories make us who we are, and the places where we grow up pass on to others in the stories we tell.

I keep these thoughts as I perform final military honors, on a regular basis, as part of the All Veterans Honor Guard team at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver. Our AVHG team has a challenge coin inscribed with the words, “What brings us together sets us apart.”

I think of those words when I remember Glenn Lucas and Michael LaBianca, and the others from Jackson Heights whose fates I still don’t fully know. We mourn them, yes. But more than that, we remember them — not just for how they died, but for how they lived.

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