Read an extract from The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Crazy Adventure in a Crazy War by John Donohue

Read an extract from The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Crazy Adventure in a Crazy War by John Donohue.

 

As a result of a rowdy night in his local New York bar, ex-Marine and merchant seaman “Chick” Donohue volunteers for a legendary mission. He will sneak into Vietnam to track down his buddies in combat to bring them a cold beer and supportive messages from home. It’ll be the greatest beer run ever!

Now, decades on from 1968, this is the remarkable true story of how he actually did it.

Armed with Irish luck and a backpack full of alcohol, Chick works his passage to Vietnam, lands in Qui Nhon and begins to carry out his quest, tracking down the disbelieving soldiers one by one.

But things quickly go awry, and as he talks his way through checkpoints and unwittingly into dangerous situations, Chick sees a lot more of the war than he ever planned – spending a terrifying time in the Demilitarized Zone, and getting caught up in Saigon during the Tet Offensive.

With indomitable spirit, Chick survives on his wits, but what he finds in Vietnam comes as a shock. By the end of his epic adventure, battered and exhausted, Chick finds himself questioning why his friends were ever led into the war in the first place.

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We were in Doc Fiddler’s one cold night in November 1967. It was a favorite bar in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, at 275 Sherman Avenue, above Isham Street. George Lynch was the bartender. We called him the Colonel. It was an honorary title, since he had made only private first class in the army.

But he was a great military historian and patriot.

One day the Colonel commandeered the empty lot on the corner and erected a gigantic flagpole—something you might find in Central Park or in front of a government building. It’s still there. Every morning, he would ceremoniously raise the flag; every sunset, he would lower it. Each Memorial Day and Fourth of July, the Colonel would organize a parade up Sherman Avenue. He tapped his connections to make it huge.

He got Bill Lenahan, who was the commanding officer of the US Marine Corps Reserve at Fort Schuyler, the nineteenth-century fort in Throggs Neck that’s now home to the State University of New York’s Maritime College and Museum, to literally send in the marines to march. The Colonel’s efforts took on an even greater urgency now that we were at war in Vietnam and with so many of our neighborhood boys serving there.

The Colonel got Finbar Devine, a towering man who lived up the street and who headed the New York City Police Department (NYPD) Pipes and Drums of the Emerald Society, to lead the flying wedge of kilted bagpipers and drummers while wearing his plumed fur Hussar’s hat and thrusting his mace heavenward. Father Kevin Devine, Finbar’s brother and the Good Shepherd Parish priest, got all the priests and the nuns and the kids from the Catholic school to march, too. Another Devine brother was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Colonel convinced him to organize a contingent of FBI agents to come out from under cover and march. The Colonel was beautifully crazy.

He treated the boys who came back from the war like kings. At Doc Fiddler’s, they didn’t pay for a drink. Around the corner from the bar, in what we called the Barracks, he lived in a room with two army surplus bunk beds—one for himself and one for any GI who’d come home and needed a place to stay.

Behind the bar, the Colonel ruled. He listened and laughed and could tell a story like your Irish grandfather, doing every accent and voice, no word astray, with a finish that would cure your asthma laughing. But he was tough, and those who engaged in tomfoolery on his watch were soon jettisoned. The Colonel had become unhappy lately with what he was seeing on news reports about the war. Antiwar protesters were turning anti-soldier.

Not just anti–President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who escalated the conflict he’d inherited from President John F. Kennedy by increasing the troops from JFK’s sixteen thousand to half a million. Nor were they strictly focused on General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, who was asking for even more troops to be deployed. Protesters were now training their sights on teenagers who’d been drafted, and on veterans who’d come home from a hell they couldn’t express. We were told that when the neighborhood boys had gone down to the draft board on Whitehall Street—many so inexperienced that their fathers or older brothers accompanied them—they’d been met by picketers carrying signs that read, “GIs Are Murderers.”