John Chick Donohue - The Greatest Beer Run Ever

We were in Doc Fiddlers 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 flagpolesomething you might find in Central Park or in front of a government building. Its 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 thats now home to the State University of New Yorks Maritime College and Museum, to literally send in the marines to march. The Colonels 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 Hussars hat and thrusting his mace heavenward. Father Kevin Devine, Finbars 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 Fiddlers, they didnt 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 bedsone for himself and one for any GI whod 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 antiPresident Lyndon Baines Johnson, who escalated the conflict hed inherited from President John F. Kennedy by increasing the troops from JFKs 16,000 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 whod been drafted, and on veterans whod come home from a hell they couldnt express. We were told that when the neighborhood boys had gone down to the draft board on Whitehall Streetmany so inexperienced that their fathers or older brothers accompanied themtheyd been met by picketers carrying signs that read, GIs Are Murderers.

As these news scenes played out on the TV above the bar, the Colonel didnt hide his disgust.

You know how demoralized they must be while theyre over there doing their duty? he would growl. Weve got to do something for them!

Yeah! shouted the assembled.

Weve got to show them we support them!

Thats right!! came the shouts, even louder.

Somebody ought to go over to Nam, track down our boys from the neighborhood, and bring them each a beer!

Yeah!!Wait. What?

You heard me! Bring them excellent beer, bring them messages from back home. Bring them... encouragement. Tell them were with them every step of the way!

The Colonel folded his arms on the bar and looked me dead serious in the eyes. Chickie, he said, I want to borrow your seamans card.

It sounded more like an order than a request.

I was a US merchant mariner, a civilian seaman working on tankers and other commercial ships. I had joined after serving in the US Marine Corps for four years into the early 1960s.