When our eighth graders visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial during their class trip to the nation’s capitol on March 19, they will have a better understanding of the war and are likely to seek out a section of the wall where the names of two fallen Marines are inscribed.
“Behind each name is a person,” said Jim Talone, who served in the Marines in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. On Monday, Jim spoke to two classes of eighth graders and answered the students’ questions in preparation for their three-day trip to Washington.
Jim, who is an uncle of Middle School Assistant Director Mark Smith, showed slides of photos and maps to describe the history of French and U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the natural beauty of the countryside and daily life while stationed at a military base in Khe Sanh.
“I was there during the worst year of the war, probably in the worst place to be,” he said. “Maybe I saw four to five days of fighting. But for the other 360 days, you wouldn’t know what was going to happen.”
At the age of 22, he had dropped out of graduate school to join the Marines and soon found himself, as a second lieutenant, responsible for a company of 50 men, most of them 18 or 19 years old. As he described this part of his tour of duty, he told the students about two Marines he knew well whose lives were lost.
One of them, Leonard “Doc” Long from Eureka, Calif., was a brave medic, “a really good corpsman.” When you were in his presence, Jim said, you figured you were going to be okay. Sadly, Doc Long was killed by an enemy mortar round.
Another Marine, Charles Keathley, “was a really decent guy” who learned to make moonshine out of popcorn and sugar, and for a month kept a pot-bellied pig he’d found in his pack. The Marine filled in on a patrol that needed a machine gunner and was killed in an ambush.
“You just wonder what someone like that would have done with his life,” Jim said.
As for Jim, he went on to become a teacher at Radnor High School for 29 years and 10 years at Delaware Valley Friends in Paoli.
Meanwhile, our students, are preparing for their trip, which also includes visits to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the Smithsonian museums and the U.S. Capitol.
