Vietnam vet makes sure others aren't forgotten

Vietnam vet makes sure others aren't forgotten

MICHELE HASKELL/Times Herald-Record
Published: 2:00 AM - 11/11/11
Forty-nine American soldiers lay dead in a town near Saigon. They had walked into an ambush. Most were kids, not long out of high school, in the thick of the Vietnam War.

"I had to pick up the bodies," says Eldred's Kevin Thomas Marrinan today. "Bits and pieces. It was awful."

This is what Marrinan saw as a young soldier in 1968, just a few years after he had left the Bronx. He had grown up near a veterans hospital, where he saw shellshocked men with vacant eyes, hiding behind Fords, Chevys and Pontiacs in the streets.

Those horrible memories of lost lives came rushing back to Marrinan, 64, just a few years ago. He was placing tiny American flags on the graves of veterans in small Sullivan County cemeteries in Lumberland and Highland for the American Legion Sylvan Liebla Post 1363 of Highland when he saw that some of the graves of World War II vets were littered with dirt and debris. The names of the soldiers and where they served were buried, like the soldiers.

Marrinan thought of the bodies he saw in Vietnam. He thought of the lonely bodies in the dozens of aluminum coffins he sat next to on the cargo plane he took home when his father died.

"I thought of what these guys went through," he says, "and how nobody remembers them."
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