Elegy for all our Buddys
Monday, May 26th, 2003
His name was Buddy Kelly. In memory, he was a tall, quiet man, with dark blond hair and polished shoes.
He and the other Kellys lived in a house they owned on 14th St. in Brooklyn, and his younger brother Billy was my best friend until I was 8. Then we moved to a larger flat less than two blocks away, next to the Ansonia Clock Factory. It was like entering another country. I soon had new friends.
Still, I would walk to Holy Name School each day along 14th St., which was leafy and green in spring, with houses that still had stoops and front gardens. It was a kind of small, lost Eden.
Along the way, I would see all the Kellys - the parents and the four sons, including Buddy, who was the oldest. I always said hello, and he always answered in a quiet way.
We moved one final time at the end of World War II, again a mere two blocks, and in 1949, the year I started high school, someone told me that Buddy had joined the Army.
He was in Japan, his brother Billy told me. He liked the Army and was seeing the world. It seemed a marvelous thing to be doing.
Then, in June 1950, the Korean War began, on my 15th birthday. American reinforcements were shipped to Korea from Japan, and the fighting was savage. There was no television then, so we followed the war on radio and in the newspapers. "Buddy Kelly must be there," my mother said. "Pray for him."
Finally, before the summer was over, word came to the neighborhood: Buddy Kelly from 14th St. had been killed in combat.
There must have been a Mass for him at Holy Name. There must have been prayers and condolences and many family tears. After more than half a century, I can't remember any of that.
I do remember my mother saying, "He was such a handsome boy." And my father withdrawing for a few days into a pool of baffled solitude. There were some emotions for which he could never find words.
Buddy Kelly was not the last man from our neighborhood to die in Korea, but he was the first, and during all the American wars, large and small, that followed, I have always remembered him walking among the maple trees on 14th St.
That made him more than a simple statistic, more than a digit among the 33,686 soldiers who were killed in action in Korea, that now-forgotten war, and the more than 20,000 others who died from going to the war.
I thought of him in Vietnam. I remembered him on a brief visit to South Korea in 1967. I thought of him on March 19 when young soldiers his age dashed into Iraq.
This is Memorial Day, of course, in a spring of cold, grisly weather, but like millions of other Americans, remembrance for me must be personal, not abstract. As I grow older, and try to reconstruct what I knew of Buddy Kelly, I realize that I know very little.
Was there a woman he loved? Did he have visions of a future paid for by the G.I. Bill? Was he buried here at home? And what was his actual name? Surely not Buddy.
There is nobody to ask. I don't know where his brothers are. I don't know anybody anymore who knew him.
I do know that his life was cut short, because he was a soldier, and that he missed all that would follow.
By dying in the summer of 1950, Buddy Kelly didn't live to hear rock 'n' roll, for example, and I don't mean the Beatles and the Stones; he almost certainly didn't hear Little Richard or Chuck Berry or even Elvis.
One night in a bar on Tu Do St. in Saigon, I was drinking alone and listening to Aretha and the Doors, and thought of Buddy Kelly, who had never heard them, or Dylan or Jimi Hendrix or the Mamas and the Papas, either.
Perhaps he would have hated them. Perhaps he would have preferred Tommy Edwards or Nat Cole. But he didn't even live to hear the best of Sinatra.
He never got to see "On the Waterfront" or "Roman Holiday," or a thousand other movies. He didn't live to see television take over the country, and so he missed everything from "The Honeymooners" to "The Sopranos."
He was not alive to see an Irish Catholic elected President of the United States, and he was not around a thousand days later, when that President was murdered in a Dallas motorcade.
If he had stayed in the Army as a lifer, he'd have seen Vietnam (when I asked some old Korean War noncoms there if they'd by any chance known him, nobody had). On that ferocious battlefield in the summer of 1950, Buddy Kelly lost his own future.
No sorrow, no elation
And that's what happens to all the young dead of our wars, of course. They lose everything that makes a human life a life: love, food, wine, children, baseball on summer afternoons; brothers and sisters and parents; friends and enemies; beaches, lakes and sea gulls over a harbor; music, art and illusions.
They lose those small triumphs that give our lives some meaning. They lose sorrow. They lose elation. They don't live long enough to make those mistakes that often lead to wisdom.
The Romans, in their imperial heyday, said Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: "It is sweet and fitting to die for your country." I never met a foot soldier who believed that slogan for a minute. They all wanted to live for their country, not die for it.
Today, we should mourn for all those young dead, at least for a moment, remembering them in life. For a few of us, this duty is ever sadder as the years pile up. Ah, Buddy - as the Irish would say - we hardly knew ye.
