Taps in Southie
By Myra MacPherson
September 15, 1981
Donnie Turner Jr., 12, never knew his father, who played football in the Boston Park League, graduated from high school, and then died in Vietnam. His mother, Donna, became a widow when she was barely old enough to vote. On Sunday, Donnie, with his scrubbed altar-boy's face, placed a wreath beside the black granite monument in South Boston in honor of his father and 24 others who left the streets of "Southie" for Vietnam and never came home. Donna Turner, a freckle-faced woman, watched as he laid the wreath as several thousand friends and neighbors clapped. The sun caught her tears as they coursed down her cheeks.
It was a day of Norman Rockwellian scenes -- bands and Marine brass, babies in strollers and old men in lawn chairs, of morning church services and wake-like partying late into the night. Chiseled on the granite monument were the names of the 25 men and the inscription, "If you forget my death, then I died in vain," but it was also a reunion for those who planned and participated in it -- the 200 Vietnam veterans of Southie, an enclave that has long given up its sons to war. The monument is the first in the country to be dedicated to the memory of Americans who died in Vietnam with official recognition from the president of the United States and all five branches of the military. Patriotism, Southie-style, placed a special, sad stamp on the neighborhood. Out of a population of 38,000, the 25 who died in Vietnam reveal a stunning statistic. "If every other community in this country had suffered the same losses, we would have experienced three times the casualties we did. Fifteen were Marines, that's a ratio of seven times that which the nation as a whole experienced for the Marine Corps," James Webb, former Marine captain and author of "Fields of Fire," told the crowd in the park.
In Southie there is a street called Marine Drive; in World War II every son on that block automatically joined the Marines. Vietnam was America's greatest class war and while the upper-class enclaves
