By Michael F. Duggan
Eulogy delivered at Arlington National Cemetery, April 24, 2023
I want to thank you all for being here.
I am glad that the weather has cooperated so magnificently. Outdoor events in the spring are always dicey matters.
There is a story about how President Eisenhower was asked to be the commencement speaker at Penn State in 1955. His brother, Milton, was president of the university, and it was to be an outdoor graduation. And as is so often the case in these latitudes in May, storm clouds were moving in from the west. The event planners were not sure what to do, and Milton asked his brother, the president, if he thought the ceremony should be moved indoors.
“You decide,” Eisenhower said, “the last time I worried about the weather was June 6, 1944.” The story is neither apocryphal nor is it fully true; he also worried about the weather in December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.
But it is a gorgeous day with no chance of storms, and I thank you for coming. My dad would have been honored to see this group assembled here today.
My father was a soldier, a combat infantry officer: West Point ’59, airborne, ranger, special forces.
He was born in the small hamlet of Paia on the island of Maui, Territory of Hawaii on August 20, 1936. The son of teachers, his family moved to Oahu after the Pearl Harbor attacks—a formative event of his early life. His father’s family is famine Irish by way of Ontario and North Dakota; his mother’s family, from Texas, goes back to Jamestown.
He graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1954 and attended the University of Hawaii for a year before being selected for the United States Military Academy at West Point, his brother, _____, had gone off to the Naval Academy at Annapolis a couple of years before. And so, after 19 years of perfect weather, crystal blue seas, and palm trees, I suspect that the Academy and the winters of the Hudson highlands were a rude awakening.
But he graduated in 1959 and was commissioned into the infantry. After completing the Airborne and Ranger courses, he married _____ _____ in New York City the day after Christmas, 1959. We moved around a lot, and I lived in 10 houses and apartments by the time I was 9—the life of an Army family. But it was a wonderful upbringing, we lived and traveled throughout the US and took trips to Austria, Germany, England, and Scotland, and so, in the words of Jimmy Doolittle, “I could never have been so lucky again” (by the way, Doolittle is over in Section 7A of the cemetery, which I believe is that way).
My dad had a full career as an Army officer with progressive assignments in airborne infantry units. He served two combat tours in the Republic of Vietnam. A master parachutist, he jumped out of an airplane 104 times and participated in approximately 150 helicopter combat missions.
In the 1970s, he commanded a Basic Combat Training battalion at Ft. Jackson, SC. His career also included an early overseas tour in South Korea and an assignment with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, among others (he was the guy who briefed the Chairman of the JCS back when it was Creighton Abrams, namesake of the M-1 Abrams tank and the room that the reception will be in at Patton Hall). He retired as a full “bird” colonel in 1985 after 25 years of service.
And his awards include the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars with V—”Valor”—device, a Purple Heart, and many others.
In terms of his professional life, there was a kind of military purity to him. He was trained to be a career soldier at the tax-payers’ expense, he would tell me, and was skeptical about the “political guys.”
After his military service, he began a second career as an Assistant and Deputy Director and lobbyist for the American Legion, where he prepared and presented testimony before House and Senate Armed Services Subcommittees in support of a variety of veterans’ issues.
One of these was the concurrent receipt of military retirement pay and veterans’ disability compensation which passed Congress in 2003-04. I think was his proudest post-Army accomplishment: he told me that they owed the veterans their retirement, and that the wounded had paid for their disability compensation with their blood. He retired from The American Legion in 2007 with more than 20 years of service.
But as impressive as his service was—real accomplishments, involving great risk and sacrifice—all of this is also the stuff of resumes. There is a saying that there are old soldiers who would rather show you their medals and those who prefer to show you their wounds. As it happens, he was perfectly happy to show you either or both. He was proud of his service and made no secret about it.
And yet the outward signs, his medals, badges, and insignia, were not, I think, reflective of the biggest part of his character.
Shortly after he died, my mom began receiving sympathy cards and phone calls, some from relatives, friends, and classmates of course, but what was striking was that a number of them were from people she and I did not know—veterans and retired servicemen and servicewomen. Some of the condolences were from veterans with PTSD, people who he had helped navigate the various veterans’ bureaucracies, and people he had helped get into programs, including twelve-step programs.
When I was cleaning out the trunk of his car, a man who I never met before, came up to me on the street and offered his heartfelt condolences and went on and on about how he had helped him. There were also the more recently-wounded veterans that he had met as a volunteer in wards at Walter Reed-Bethesda to whom he had spoken in a way that only someone who has been there can do.
He also worked with the Maryland Department of Veterans Affairs helping those returning from Afghanistan and Iraq suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries—the signature wounds of those conflicts. But he knew this stuff and was happy to help, both in a professional capacity and on his own time as a volunteer.
Many of us fly the flag on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Some people put “I support the troops” bumper-stickers on their cars. But how many of us actually volunteer at veterans’ hospitals? (I know that _____’s father volunteered at Bethesda and so did my sister when she was a teenager). My dad did as well, as a kind of third act. So, after a year in the Maryland V.A., he transferred to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda to work as a Red Cross volunteer, again, with veterans suffering from PTSD and TBI.
He was himself combat wounded, and if you have not been wounded, it is a community—a siblinghood—to which you can never belong. I think that for a veteran, volunteering in a hospital ward of the combat wounded—as he did—it is a two-way street of healing, and I know that he especially valued this service and his Red Cross vest.
But except for his vest, he gave little indication of his help to others. My sense is that he saw it as a duty and it was probably too personal to mention. Medals and ribbons are conspicuous and there is a certain anonymity to the wearing them—they are symbols whose general meaning is inferred. They do not quite tell the full story. But volunteering in a ward of the wounded is a quiet and personal duty.
A few weeks before he died, he said that he admired my sister, _____, and that she tried harder than most people. Effort counted a lot with him, and it was sheer doggedness that had gotten him through West Point. And he said that my mom was the love of his life.
Like all of us, he was full of ironies and contradictions: a soldier who had served two combat tours, he always seemed a little too concerned about his health. He jumped out of airplanes for a living, and yet I could never coax him into go parasailing with me at Ocean City. He also had a sense of humor that could be downright silly. For instance his favorite marching cadence at West Point had the sardonic refrain: “For it’s GI beans and GI gravy… gee I wish I joined the Navy.”
He was a soldier who loved Peter, Paul, and Mary, and tested my sister’s patience by playing Elton John CDs while driving to the beach. Apparently Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was a particular favorite.
One of my earliest memories is of him standing in the doorway of our apartment in Queens New York one morning when I was three. It was 1966 and he was leaving for Vietnam for the first time. He told me in words I can hear now that I was “the man of the house.”
But even at the age of three, I had no illusions. It was my mom who was the real CEO and the person who managed the finances, scheduled interstate moves every 10 to 12 months, took me and my sister to Rockaway Beach with my cousins, the _____, as well as to the American Museum of Natural History, Mets games, the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, and the movies, just to name a few things. She magnificently ran the show day in and day out. She also taught us how to be comfortable in any and all company.
His favorite film was From Here to Eternity. Set in Hawaii, it came out the year he graduated from high school. As a young man, he looked a little like Montgomery Clift, and he internalized some of the film’s themes, like boxing. He would go on to box at West Point, and taught me how to throw a punch and a football. He ran three miles a day in combat jump boots—Corcorans—well into his 50s.
He embraced the easily spoken but hard-lived values of duty, honor, and service, and the services he rendered, but about which he never spoke, of are in some ways the most admirable. And there is something poetic about an old warrior who dies in peace after helping others as a second and third act.
He was away a lot when I was young. But he instilled in me a love of history, literature, and the outdoors. It is because of him that I voluntarily chose to attend a military high school. It is no doubt because of him that I got my doctorate in US History; when he returned from Vietnam for the second time in the fall of 1969, he brought with him The Golden Book of the American Revolution (a book that is still on my shelf) and then, for my next birthday, I received the accompanying volume on the Civil War. And so, at the age of six, I was hooked.
He emphasized the importance of education and service to others, and was unendingly generous. He had an abiding love of his family, the Hawaiian Islands (and Hawaiian shirts), West Point, Army football, grilled steaks, gardening, and old rock and roll music.
So aloha, Dad, and thanks for everything. We love you. “Well done, be thou at peace.”