My Friend Jimmy Fought the Elements to Keep a 47-Year Running Streak Alive. But He Could Not Outrun the Toxic Effects of the Vietnam War

“I had no idea what was going on in Vietnam. I was only 19 at the time. I only knew there was a war and there was danger…”

- Vietnam Voices, by James F. Behr (2004)

 

By Marc Bloom for DyeStat

Over the years, I’ve written a number of stories about my friend Jimmy, a former running partner, who amassed one of the world’s longest running streaks — over 47 years, that is, running every single day for 47.58 years, a total of 17,380 days to be exact.

How many of you have tried to carve out a running streak? I have. I would last about two weeks before giving up. Too much pressure. Too tired. Too whatever.

Some ambitious runners who are intent on building a streak are fortunate to reach a month, maybe six months, even a year or more. Bragging rights at the next race. Sooner or later, however, something usually comes up to stop it. Illness, injury, storms, travel, work schedules, a bad hair day. 

Or maybe just… life.

But forty-seven years? Who can fathom it?

In circumventing travel obstacles, Jimmy was at his keenest. Like the time on a cruise in the Mediterranean, when the next day’s group touring plans on the Italian coast lacked for running time. Not wanting to risk being locked into a tight schedule with no opening, Jim decided, once asleep, to rise just after midnight and proceed to log his minimum daily distance of five miles around the top deck of the ship so he could get in his run for the “day.” 

And then he went back to bed, comfy for the morning excursion.

Jim’s midnight run amused those up late sipping champagne, and irked those tucked into their upper cabins wondering what all that tap-tap-tap in their ears was about.

But when you gotta run, you gotta run.

It would be too easy to say that running was Jim’s salvation. Who among us can’t say that? But as a Vietnam veteran who “was never trained for jungle combat,” as he would tell me, Jim had the ravages of war to live down.

It was not without the most bitter irony that after Jimmy’s streak began on March 19, 1975, the international Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention took effect a mere nine days later. Established three years before, the BWC “prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological weapons.”

Never mind that while most nations would sign on (188 as of now), the treaty would be broken numerous times by tyrannical regimes, like the recently-deposed Asaad government in Syria or its primary benefactor, Putin’s Russia, hardly timid in inflicting the most vicious pain on its enemies, real or imagined.

But at least the biological weapons prohibition had established safeguards while offering a nod to humanity, even in wartime.

Nevertheless, all of that supposed goodwill was too late for my friend Jimmy.

Jimmy and I met in 1974 when we were neighbors on Staten Island. Jim had carrot-red hair, a lithe physique and nimble stride. He was unassuming and seemed to possess a quiet strength. 

I’d already been running for a few years and found Jim trying to get started. I helped him with training ideas and running shoes. I won’t say Jim was a “natural” from a performance standpoint but rather that he seemed to devour the inner satisfaction that running provided — that, and the ritualistic nature that was the hallmark of any serious runner. 

Running and Jimmy: perfect together.

Jimmy and me: a perfect union, running thousands of miles together in a nine-year period, solving the world’s problems while laughing our heads off at whatever came our way. Like the older gentleman we would often see bouncing a Spalding ball as he ran, in time like some acrobat.

Rituals?

If you ran with Jim on a Saturday morning, you had to start out at 8:30 sharp with a warm-up half-mile around the community; then shoot out to the main thoroughfare where a series of arduous hills took you to an access road that followed a highway connecting to a bridge linking New Jersey.

We would do 7 or 8 or 10 miles, more if we ventured as far as the Tottenville area, a shop-worn village unto itself in which hardscrabble natives who belonged on the set of “The Last Picture Show” would boast to the local paper that they had never set foot off the Island. And never would.

We would get some intimidating looks from the locals that signaled, “Hey, man, this is our turf, what do you hippie runners think you’re doing?”

This was the ‘70s, baby. We ran through the tucked-away streets like specimens of a new era on the cusp of New York Magazine cool-ness, at odds with homies who belonged to rod-and-gun clubs, not chic gyms with the latest Jane Fonda Workouts.

Next thing you know, God forbid, we’d be taking disco lessons from some gyrating John Travolta wannabee. Except, actually, Jimmy and I did just that, grabbing our wives for instruction in someone’s basement with the hippest guy around who called himself, “Disco Bart.”

Oh, the embarrassment!

Belly laughs for the next run.

But Staten Island was a great paradox then, rather like America itself. The Island stood for traditional values and a conservative outlook, yet it harbored this revolutionary idea of running and the outdoors, even among the working class, and a close-knit community formed around races and running clubs, high school programs and innovative coaches, and the Staten Island Advance newspaper even sponsored a Memorial Day five-miler that became a big deal.

Back in the day, a bunch of us formed the Greenery Racing Team named after a bar, and one of those savvy coaches, Jim O’Neill, another neighbor who sometimes ran with Jimmy and me, gave us workouts. We boasted some darn good runners, too, one a “visiting” club member of world-class stature -- Winnie Ng, who competed for Hong Kong in the first Olympic marathon for women in 1984 in Los Angeles. 

Winnie was an old friend of the O’Neill family and trained with us before L.A., where she would place 31st in 2:42:38. Once her career ended and Winnie gave birth to her first child, a daughter, she named her “Waitz” in honor of Grete, the silver medalist that day in L.A., and nine-time champion at New York.

We Greenery men trained on the roads, golf courses, wherever we could. Frankly, it wasn’t much, but in group formation we thrived. O’Neill helped sponsor a visit by Arthur Lydiard who came up from New Zealand to deliver lectures, and we took in his ideas about hill running and long mileage as the gospel.

This dichotomy of confinement and enlightenment that was the Island’s metier — the city’s smallest and most parochial borough, yet glamorized with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the start of the Marathon — was a vexing conflict throughout much of Jimmy’s life, as he sprang from dashing commuter at a mundane union job to learned Renaissance Man with multiple college degrees. The contradictions were never more anguished than when Jimmy could not help but dive into the historic catastrophe that was the Vietnam War.

Jimmy’s war. He would write a book about it.

The war that innocent, young people fought because they were called up; hurling themselves into a fire, a maelstrom of duty and service but also, it would be told, a war girded with lies and deceit, and those who came out of it were scarred--and some, like Jimmy, poisoned with chemicals that eventually made a man who had run for more than 17-thousand days in a row unable to walk or stand or help himself.

This will probably be my last story about my friend. James Francis Behr succumbed to the cancer brought on by the toxin Agent Orange in Vietnam and died on March 16 at 77. 

Jim’s last days were spent in Seattle. After living in Florida for many years, Jim and his wife, Pam, moved west about a year ago to be close to their kids and grandkids when Jimmy’s illness became more debilitating. 

More than 300,000 U.S. Vietnam Veterans have died from exposure to Agent Orange, which contained the cancer-causing contaminant dioxin. The chemicals were employed to remove enemy cover by destroying forests and vegetation. When we ran, Jimmy would describe how helicopters in his midst would unleash curtains of substances coating his body with a viscous poison like the “hard rain” Bob Dylan sang about.

The diseases caused by Agent Orange were many, and some would take years to materialize. In Florida and Seattle, Jim’s care was managed by the Veteran’s Administration, currently under siege from Trump’s cuts.

When Jimmy and his wife Pam moved to the Tampa area about 20 years ago, we kept in touch, and when he took ill, we spoke weekly. Jim would gradually reduce his running to a sluggish three miles a day even before the cancer, and decided on his own to stop the streak on Oct. 17, 2022. He no longer felt right running daily.

Before it ended, Jim’s longevity was seventh-longest among the world’s active streaks, and, once finished, fourth among “retired” streaks.

In Florida, Jimmy would start losing his balance, experience an array of health issues and need a cane and then a walker to ambulate. He grew frustrated that with all the specialists he saw, and tests he took, doctors could not identity his specific ailment with certainty.

Finally, his oncologist determined a clearcut diagnosis: a rare form of slow-growing blood cancer called, lymphoplasmactic lymphoma, also known as Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia. The Veterans doctors told him in no uncertain terms that Agent Orange was the culprit.

All along, Jim received chemotherapy and other treatments. In Seattle, he had to be hospitalized numerous times. All of Jim’s functioning was affected.

You become close with the people you run with, especially if it’s just the two of you, and Jimmy and I held that closeness dear, dripping sweat together as the summer sun beat down, begging stunned residents watering their lawns to spray us square in the kisser, a soaking we would relish in the miles onward.

On the day in 1983 when our running partnership ended and our family moved to New Jersey, I checked the odometer arriving at the new house. It read: 26.2 miles. That’s the truth.

As I put together this elegy to Jimmy’s life, I find I can still hear his voice, one that seemed framed by both possibility and resignation. I sensed he believed that running could take you far, but perhaps not all the way.

I am reminded of Paul Newman’s closing argument in “The Verdict,” in which his character, a defense attorney who is Catholic, states, “In my religion, they say, ‘Act as if you had faith; faith will be given to you.’”

While Jimmy was Catholic and me Jewish, our families were intertwined in faithful embrace. 

On one rainy day when our wives warned, “Don’t run, you’ll get stuck in a downpour,” of course we ran, got stuck in a downpour and took shelter in a bank, where the patrons looked at us in disbelief, Jimmy said, like the bus riders looked at Dustin Hoffman and his dressed-up bride in the final scene of “The Graduate.”

Puddling up the bank lobby, I called my wife, Andrea, to come pick us up. Reluctantly she piled our baby daughter into the car and made the trip. I-told-you-so’s never rang louder.

In time Andi herself caught the running bug and ran the first of her two New York City Marathons in 1981. Prior, Andi got a call from “Good Morning, America” to come to the ABC studio and talk about being a “strong, athletic woman.” With a limo picking us up at 4 A.M., we brought our young kids to Jim and Pam, for safekeeping, knowing that Jimmy was probably getting up anyway for his morning run.

In the ‘70s, races were not on every doorstep like today, and many were primitive to a fault. There was the half-marathon that Jimmy and I ran, found to be 14.2 miles. Events with no time clocks or water stops. Port-a-Johns? You must be joking.

In one New Jersey 10-k, based at the town’s municipal complex, the only open bathroom was in the police station, which functioned as the local jail. With the start minutes away, Jimmy and I rushed up to the top-floor men’s room for a final nature call, and we found ourselves locked in as part of the security apparatus. All we could do was yell out for help from the barred window — two crazy runners just trying to get out of jail free.

Jimmy’s running was legendary on Staten Island for how he applied his streaker’s zeitgeist to circumstances that would restrain anyone else. One February in the early ‘80s, the New York area got hit with a blizzard that made Island roads impassable. After work in Manhattan, when Jimmy’s commuter bus was stalled at the Verrazano late into the night, he proceeded to run the 13 miles home in his work clothes, refusing a hitch from a sanitation truck, and arriving at the front door, Pam said, encrusted in snow “like the abominable snowman.”

Just another day at the office. “I had a hat, gloves and scarf,” Jimmy told me. “I was comfortable.”

At one point, Pam realized she needed to do more to cover her husband’s behind. With their two kids, Sean and Elizabeth, now teenagers and runners on the high school team, the three of them formed an emergency unit they called, “The Assigned Runner Program.”

If Jimmy, for example, had the flu and still ran — which of course he did — someone would be assigned to follow him, either by foot or car in case he collapsed.

“That was usually me,” Elizabeth, 46, a consultant at Microsoft, remembered when we spoke recently. “One day the Streak was in jeopardy and Dad was sick. I ran at his side, trying to take his mind off how miserable he felt. I made sure he only did the minimum of five miles.”

Maintaining a running streak for decades on end might seem a trivial pursuit, but there’s a soulful quest to such durability and exceptionalism — that in itself might be worth the effort — and nary a retreat from questioning, “Why do it? Why keep it going? What does it mean? Am I better off for it?”

Sean, 49, a San Francisco businessman who’s headed up several tech companies, believed his father’s embrace of running could be traced to ancient philosophy and the “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, who wrote about the notion of one’s daily practice as an outlet, a space for solace. “Dad always felt, even if you could only do a few miles,” Sean recalled, “everything would be better.”

Jimmy’s streak also reflected a value system forged on the road and expanded to the perspicacious ebb and flow of daily life. “Be consistent. No shortcuts. Be tactful. Do things the way they should be done. Learn, always learn,” said Sean. “Dad was a lifelong learner. In his 70s, he took advanced math classes on-line from MIT.”

“Jim always had a book in his hands,” said his younger brother, Timmy, 70, who was a teacher, principal and then district superintendent in the New York City public schools’ system (pictured above, right). The two brothers bonded with season tickets to the football Jets for over 30 years. Tim scrutinized the games passionately. Jim sat in the stands reading a book or doing the Times crossword puzzle. “He was the smartest guy I ever knew,” said Tim.

My earlier stories about Jimmy chronicled his streak from its formative years, revealing how Jim grew into it rather quickly, in a dramatic change of life.

In a book of mine on marathon running, I devoted a chapter to Jimmy, who in the late ‘70s was working the 12-to-8 lobster shift for AT&T in lower Manhattan, and doing the first of his two daily workouts on his “lunch” break at 4:30 in the morning. He had given up smoking, the streak was now in its fourth year and Jim had broken 3 hours in the marathon, running 2:55:55. His training was vaulting toward 100 miles a week.

At AT&T, after several promotions, Jim was a scheduling supervisor assigning tours to 700 international operators on all three shifts. On Jim’s six-mile route, he could attest that the “city never sleeps.” He encountered junkies shooting up, ladies of the evening, street corner preachers and, on a good day, the aroma of fresh bread in the oven of a local market. 

“Hey Red!,” someone would call out, “keep it up.”

In a 1985 issue of The Runner magazine, which I edited, Jimmy’s streak was then a decade old. He’d amassed 33 marathons with what would be a lifetime best of 2:38:16 at Boston and had averaged 80 miles a week for ten years. Asked how he’d managed to avoid injury, Jim told me, “I don’t overdo it.”

Jim was enthused about a headline in the Staten Island paper that hailed, “Behr On Olympic Timetable,” referring to the next Olympic Trials Marathon. (All Jim would have to do is run 18 minutes faster in three years to qualify!)

But Jim had an idea. He took up the martial art of Tae Kwon Do for strength and flexibility, and before long he could touch his toes and break a board with his bare hands. “But, please, Jim,” I wrote then, “not every day.”

In a 1995 issue of Runner’s World, I wrote about the 20th anniversary of the Streak, celebrated with family and friends on the Island, with stories of how Jim ran despite being smacked up in a motorcycle crash. “Jim’s running is like a canvas,” Pam said then. “I’ve seen our whole lives played out with running as a backdrop.”

Jim, then 47, had run 7,305 days in a row. Trying to find an essence to his compulsion, Jimmy said, “Maybe it’s that running is something I don’t have to do…” 

We, his running pals, got it. And with the will that most us lacked, I always thought that Jimmy was running for us, too.

For the commemoration, I’d procured congratulatory letters from Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, Ron Hill and Eamonn Coghlan, who the year before had become the first man 40 or over to run a sub-4:00 mile, hitting 3:59.4 at 41 indoors. 

Coghlan wrote Jim, “I am ashamed to admit that the longest streak I’ve ever had is 49 days. On this great day of 20 years’ celebration, take my advice. Rest up, have a few pints on me, and get ready for the next twenty because I’m starting my streak today.”

Hill, the Olympic marathoner from Great Britain and 1970 Boston winner, was noted for a streak of his own. I’d visited Hill in Manchester in 1989 to write about the 25th anniversary of his streak in Runner’s World. Running with Hill over the English countryside reminded me of Jimmy: Hill was self-effacing with a wry wit, basked in the glow of discovery and possessed a fidelity to tradition. I saw milk being delivered in bottles by horse-drawn carts.

In the note Hill wrote to Jim, he said, “My own streak just passed 30 years. When you get that far, hopefully I’ll be past 40.”  

Hill’s streak would last just over 52 years, ending in 2017 (he died in 2021 at 82), as the third-longest on record. The longest ever belongs to Jon Sutherland, 74, of Utah, whose run of 55.60 years (20,309 days) ended last December 31. But that mark could be surpassed in September by Jim Pearson, 80, of Washington state, who has a little over 55 years in the bank and is still going strong.

Credit for the exactitude of streaking records goes to an organization called, Streak Runners International, and its president, Mark Washburne, 69, a college professor in New Jersey with a current streak himself of 35-plus years. SRI’s membership lists over 8,000 streakers from 78 countries. The group defines a streak as at least a mile a day and it can be done on any surface including a treadmill.

Streaks are based on the honor system, though Washburne attempts to authenticate the longer ones. (Hill told me he once “ran” a mile on crutches.)

In 1998, in a New York Times story about Jimmy before his 24th straight New York City Marathon, he told me, as the streak past 23 years, that rather than all the running drain him, it had given him the impetus to seek advancement in other fields — what Sean called his father’s “second act.”

After 32 years at AT&T, Jim was now teaching English at a Catholic high school as well as coaching. A graduate of Fordham University, taking night classes, Jim had also earned two master’s degrees from the City University of New York and was working on his doctor of letters in American history, which he would receive from Drew University in New Jersey.

Jim would tutor a nephew in “Beowulf.” Even while ill, he would help a grand-daughter with her English essay. Another Staten Islander who once put in some miles with us, said, “Running with Jim was an intellectual experience.”

In my last story about Jimmy, in Running Times, on the 40th anniversary of his Streak in 2015, he and Pam had been living in Florida for about a decade and Jim had retired from teaching at a local high school and college. He volunteered as a tutor, earned his third-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and started taking yoga.

At this milestone, Jim, then 67, took stock: 55 marathons including 26 New Yorks, 10 Boston’s and three Yonkers, the toughest course around. And, so far, 100,000 miles in his pocket.

We also discussed Jimmy’s voluminous running logs — of a piece with the annals of explorers like James Cook uncovering new facets of imagination — each run brimming with family engagement and embroidered with obscure details like what he ate. At 5-foot-10, Jim’s running weight was a consistent 135. At times, he could barely take in enough energy to support his volume.

A few early pages from Jimmy’s diary became immortalized by the New York Road Runners in their coffee-table book on the 25th anniversary of the Marathon. When someone from the club asked me if I knew of a marathoner whose diary could be used to help illustrate the book, I volunteered Jimmy.

And, so, about a half-dozen pages from 1977-78 dress up the inside covers exactly as the original, in Jimmy’s handwriting, including the “hilly as hell” Yonkers Marathon in which he ran 2:51; a 12-mile race in Newark in which he was “sick as a dog” but still ran 1:11:21 to finish 103rd out of 1,500 and then enjoyed his mom’s turkey for dinner; and the ’78 New York City Marathon in which he ran 2:46:27 to place 318th out of 11,800 and had Chinese food to replenish all those calories spent on the road.

A day in the life. In multitudes.

For the New York entry, there’s a reference to former Staten Islander Andy Ferrara, who’d driven up from his home in Houston to run with us. I’d known Andy since college. He would become one of the top high school track and cross country coaches in Texas, while starting a decades-long streak of his own.

Ferrara, 77, is currently doing a “retirement” gig as cross country coach, and assistant in track, at the University of Houston, where the head coach is Carl Lewis. When I notified him of Jim’s passing, Andy told me: “When people ask me about my streak, I would always say Jim was my catalyst, that on the run I felt him ‘with me.’ And I would add that I would never catch him.”

In a poignant fate, Andy has now surpassed Jimmy. Andy told me his streak is now 47 years and almost 8 months, 17,422 days as of May 1. He has averaged 5.66 miles per day and his total streak mileage is closing in on 100,000.

Jim Behr grew up in the Far Rockaway section of the borough of Queens, an outlying neck of the city that draws summer crowds to its beaches along the Atlantic, and once had columns of affordable bungalows for working-class families seeking respite from the heat. It was their “Hamptons.”

Jimmy surfed the waves and played trumpet in the Catholic school band that performed in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan. Many residents were Irish Catholic, and their politics stemmed from the fathers and uncles that had fought in World War II, the “good war,” as Studs Terkel called it.

The Far Rock Catholics were conservatives who revered the flag and saw their fealty to God and country as one. They believed in the Nixon era cry, “America: Love It or Leave it,” and if you were summoned to the service, with Vietnam waiting, in 1966, a year out of high school, as Jimmy was, you had no choice but pack your bags, say your good-byes, and go.

Jimmy’s father had fought Hitler all across Europe, in the D-Day invasions and in the Battle of the Bulge, the deadliest combat of the War with 19,000 U.S. army deaths and some 75,000 total American casualties.

An excellent student, Jimmy had passed the exam for academically elite Brooklyn Tech, and had he attended his life might have been different. But Jimmy was sent to Power Memorial, an all-boys Catholic academy in Manhattan, a 90-minute bus-and-train ride away, because that’s where his father went. After graduation, in 1965, Jim started working for AT&T. In 1966, he was drafted. (Jim is third from left in the Power Memorial Trumpet band photo above).

In New York, then as now, politics, culture and religion changed from one neighborhood to the next, or from one block to the next. In my Brooklyn community, all of my friends went to college, and we did everything we could to avoid the draft. I didn’t know anyone who wanted in.

Interestingly, there was apparently a strain of educational vitality at Jim’s local high school, Far Rockaway, which had produced three Nobel Prize winners over the years (it closed in 2011), and boasted other notable alumni like the financier Carl Icahn, whose philanthropy helped refurbish the track stadium on Randalls Island, called Icahn Stadium since 2005 and host to Grand Prix events. Prior, the facility was Downing Stadium.

Jimmy’s younger brother, Timmy, who attended Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn because it was a shorter trip, ran for the Lions under the reputed coach Ed Bowes, and competed at Downing, as all city kids did. It was Van Cortlandt in the fall, the Armory in winter and Randalls Island in spring.

I knew Timmy before I met Jimmy, writing up Timmy’s successes — he was Catholic schools indoor city champ in the two-mile in 9:17 in 1974, quite exceptional on the old Armory floor. Timmy would later run several marathons with Jim, with a best of 2:45, and considered Jim his mentor and role model.

Tim’s admiration of his older brother was about much more than running. Jim was the default parent. The boys’ father suffered emotional wounds from the War (today’s PTSD), became an alcoholic and died at 47. During the Depression, the boys’ mother and her family had come over from Ireland seeking opportunity. When things didn’t work out, the parents deposited their two young daughters (the boys’ future mother and aunt) at an upstate New York foundling home, returned to Ireland and never saw them again. In effect, the two girls were orphans, and as an adult Jim’s mother struggled.

“Jim took care of me. I was always under his wing,” Tim told me. “He reviewed my report cards, took me everywhere. He was like a father to me.”

Jim and Tim were not only a running team. In 1992, they drove together from New York to Florida to help their sister, Evelyn (a marathoner herself), whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew, which inflicted $25 billion damage on the state.

Because of looting, Jim slept with a gun, and when he went running amidst the debris, he had to look over his shoulder to make sure angry locals weren’t pegging him as a “disaster tourist.”

Once in the army, after basic training — with a Radio Telephone Operator position (“Teletype School”), and a 17-day leave home to tie up loose ends — Jimmy was shipped off to Vietnam as part of the Fourth Infantry Division, assigned to a field artillery battalion. The last thing Jim did before Vietnam was agree to serve as a back-up prom date for his sister’s friend, who’d had a fight with her boyfriend.

One day you’re in a tux taking pictures, the next you’re in camo packing ammo.

In Nam, Jim’s unit served in the Central Highlands around the provincial capital of Pleiku. He did field communications, pulled guard duty, rode shotgun on convoys. He saw some combat but was not wounded.

As he would write in his book, Vietnam Voices, based on his doctoral dissertation, “We were never trained for any of the things you needed to know. They’d issue us rifles, ammunition, hand grenades. We were not prepared to use any of it.” 

While there, Jim started out at 19 and turned 20. After 15 months’ duty, in 1967, a sergeant, he received an honorable discharge. Jim was awarded the Army Commendation Medal for Meritorious Service. Jim came home to his job at AT&T and, if not enthralled with the military, was satisfied that he had served his country.

“I did my duty in an honorable and dignified fashion,” he would write. “You develop your personal code of honor and morality in a combat zone. At 19, it was probably the defining moment of my life.”

It was also a defining moment in the nation’s history. Anti-war protests spread, soldiers in body bags were seen on the evening news, the alleged lies and deception of military brass gained credence, veterans returning home were disparaged and the country, rather like today, was consumed by painful division.

In a “red-vs.-blue” dynamic, one was either “for” or “against” the war. One was either marching in the streets to bring the troops home or supporting the troops who were “fighting communism.” 

Veterans like Jimmy, and especially those in pitched battles that made the front page, confronted animosity when they returned, exacerbating their wounds, physical and emotional, hurtful to this day. To many, they were not heroes but villains.

Jimmy would always feel this inner rage. In time, he would come to terms with it, telling me that while he felt the War was wrong, what he did — serving when called — was right.

“Jim was a patriot through and through,” said Tim.

U.S. involvement in the War ended early in 1973 with the Paris Peace Accords. The American death total was over 58,000. Over 300,000 were wounded, many of them suffering permanent disabilities. The defense secretary at the time, Robert McNamara, would come out with a book more than a decade later, “In Retrospect,” in which he admitted that the Vietnam War was a mistake.

Jimmy met Pam at a Christmas party in 1970 and they were married the following September in a church wedding near Pam’s home in the Woodhaven section of Queens. Their honeymoon was a night at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. Their first apartment was across from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal.

Pam would later complete her college courses and go into teaching. Her main job was manager of the Streak. “We were all accepting of it,” she said. 

With stoic strength and equanimity, Pam, who you’d want in your foxhole, served as care-giver when her husband took ill. She had had a bout with cancer herself and, after chemo, was given a promising bill of health.

In Seattle, Elizabeth and her family, would take Jim and Pam on excursions down to the Oregon coast to Cannon Beach, so her dad could try and enjoy the time he had left. “We created as much of a life as we could,” she said.

At the funeral, at a Veterans’ cemetery outside Seattle, military personnel played the ceremonial “Taps,” delivered a volley of gunfire in tribute, and folded an American flag just so, placing it on the casket, and then presenting it to Pam.

Then my friend Jimmy was laid to rest.

In his words of remembrance, Sean told the story of his father being a member of a wildlife club on Staten Island even though he didn’t fish or hunt. Jim had joined to support his mother’s gentleman friend and, I would suggest, to rub elbows with the type of good old boys he knew in Nam — young men who, the veteran Philip Caputo wrote, craved a genuine-ness outside an America “of salesmen and shopping centers.” 

The crusty codgers must have taken a shine to Jimmy as they recruited him as treasurer. But when a dispute arose over allowing women to join, and the rank-and-file objected, Jim up and quit.

One of Elizabeth’s fondest memories was running with her dad in high school. Jim never wavered from fostering a work ethic. She recalled, “Instead of doing two miles, which he termed “’The Terrible Twos,’” Jim encouraged her to do three miles, as he put it, “The Friendly Three.”

In March, comforting her father in hospice for the last time, Elizabeth told him he was a mirror of a life well-lived. “You were the best person you could be,” she said. “You gave to your country.”

It was a privilege for me to have been a part of it. #

The Vietnam War ended 50 years ago this week, on April 30, 1975.

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