March 29, 2024

Remembering One Of 58,220

May 13, 2016

Memorial Day is coming up soon. If the weather’s good, there’ll be picnics, BBQs, family and friends. Only a few of us will take our kids to a ceremony marking the sacrifices that the day is supposed to commemorate. Only a few will fly a flag. And even fewer will go to an old scrapbook or photo album and recall a loved one who is not here to celebrate with them.

The one I will recall was — is — Larry Stephan. He is forever frozen in my memory, untouched by time. We went through Officer Candidate School together at Fort Benning, Georgia — the infantry school. We were both nineteen years old, his birthday just two weeks before mine. Both our names started with “S”, so we spent a lot of time together. We talked about what we were going through, about our lives before the Army, but never really talked about Vietnam.

At the infantry school, Larry and I shared a space called “cubicle” in our barracks. While far from comfortable, that little cubicle was our home for six months. Every Saturday was inspection. We had to “clean” our already pristine space — a bunk bed, two footlockers and spit-shined boots below and a dresser, everything gleaming to a level of perfection that was almost comical. It was all about learning to pay attention to detail.

Once, late in our training when an overnight pass was a possibility, our cubicle was so clean that the inspecting officer could find absolutely nothing wrong. Our floor shined to the necessary brilliance, he could read a newspaper in the reflection. But our sadistic lieutenant was determined to disappoint our dreams so he looked at a framed photo of my baby niece on the dresser and gave us both (not just me) demerits because the kid’s hair in the photo was too long. No weekend pass.

Larry was amazingly cheerful under such constant harassment and pressure. He understood that all the nonsense was to test us before we would have responsibility for the lives of a platoon of infantry soldiers. If we couldn’t take it during the training, no harm done. We would “wash out” of the course and return to being enlisted men, still bound for Vietnam, but not as leaders.

It seems ludicrous today to think that you could take a kid off the streets and turn him into a combat leader in six months. But the “whiz kids” in Robert McNamara’s Pentagon had convinced President Johnson to escalate our presence in Vietnam from 110,000 to 550,000 in the span of a year. That called for a certain amount of risktaking — risk-taking with the lives of the young men who would actually go out and search for “the enemy” and the hurriedly trained officers assigned to lead them.

The school’s motto was (and still is) “Follow Me.” It was our mantra. About the only thing we knew with any certainty was that we were going to Vietnam to lead other men in a war we knew nothing about. I marvel at how incurious I was at age nineteen. The anti-war protests and the “summer of love” were a couple years ahead. I never even considered not going.

Instead, after we graduated and were awarded our second lieutenant bars, we received a bit more training before shipping out to Vietnam. Larry arrived in Vietnam on March 22, 1967, assigned to the 1st Infantry Division, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry. I didn’t get to Vietnam until May. We lost touch.

Larry’s unit was in the final stages of something called “Operation Junction City.” It had begun in early January in an area known as “The Iron Triangle,” northwest of Saigon. By March 26, Larry’s battalion was under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander M. Haig. Yes, the same Alexander Haig who would later become Secretary of State and a key aide to Presidents Nixon and Reagan.

On March 31, the unit was engaged in one of the biggest battles of the war, at a place whose name means nothing today. The battle of “Ap Gu” cost the lives of 17 Americans and more than 600 Vietnamese. All those lives lost, and today it has returned to the obscurity of just another Vietnamese village.

I don’t know much about what actually happened to Larry. I wasn’t in his unit; I didn’t witness the tragedy myself. A fellow OCS graduate said he was hit by shrapnel; that he was “hit really bad.” I like to think it was quick. I’m sure it was unexpected, a dreadful surprise. Maybe he never even knew what was happening to him, to his life. I think that’s better than the way some guys died.

If you “Google” Larry Stephan, you won’t find much. He lived in the era before the Internet, Facebook, and Instagram. There’s hardly a mention of him online. Dig a bit deeper and you’ll find this poignant entry:

“Larry Stephan was born and raised in Glendale, California. We had three children and he was the only boy. He was an infantry lieutenant in the Army. He was in Vietnam five weeks when he was killed. — Carl and Marge Stephan.”

The cold report from the official U.S. National Archives database says, “Location: Bien Hoa province. Remains: Body recovered. Casualty type: Hostile, died of wounds. Reason: Multifragment wounds.” That’s all.

Larry’s name shows up in a few other places on the Web: the records of San Fernando Mission Cemetery, in a listing from a local newspaper of “Glendale’s Fallen.” Fifty-four names, among them, “Stephan, Larry Roy.” Fifty-four Larrys. What might they have accomplished? Larry lives for me in two places. His name is on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. About a third of the way up from the bottom of a large panel — large because it corresponds to the number of men killed at that violent stage of the war, just before the Tet Offensive. If you’re ever in Washington, say hello for me — Panel 19E, line 8.

The other place Larry exists for me is in my memory. He’ll always be there and he’ll always be a fresh-faced California kid who would have had a hard time growing a beard, had it been allowed. He’s still nineteen, never aging. He’s forever going to remain as he was, never having experienced the full life that his intellect, warmth and strength promised. I feel a bit of survivor’s regret just thinking about him these many years later.

On Memorial Day, if you have no one to remember, think for a minute about Larry, and the person he might have been.

Jack Segal served in Vietnam with the 3d Brigade 4th Infantry Division.

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