Thanks overdue to American hero
Dennis Crowley is a true son of Southie, born and bred. He also is an unsung American hero, the special kind who risk their lives on foreign soil to protect us all.
Crowley is 80 and retired. He lives in Florida, but he and his wife, Peg, fly back to Boston often to visit their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
His heroism was in Vietnam, where he served as a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Although he held the rank of captain, he never wore a uniform, instead posing as an American civilian contractor among the population of the port city of Da Nang. His ruse was not terribly effective. Captured documents revealed that the North Vietnamese communists had a price on his head in the thousands of dollars.
His face, as the saying goes, mimics the map of Ireland and his bloodline carries the fighting spirit of generations of Crowleys, a small clan that in ancient times hired itself out to serve as the rear guard for the larger Irish families. From time to time, he travels to Ireland to visit the old family farm and attend clan gatherings.
He grew up attending Boston schools and graduated from Boston Latin, the University of Massachusetts, where he earned an ROTC commission in 1959, and Suffolk Law.
After Vietnam, he returned to his beloved Boston area, bought a home in Walpole and lived there for 38 years.
He became the lead investigator for two agencies fighting organized crime, one in Massachusetts and the second for the entire New England region. He and Peg started their own security company out of their kitchen. It became the 12th largest in America, and when they sold out in 2016, Apollo Security had more than 2,600 employees.
Crowley was often behind enemy lines in Vietnam, slipping out of town as dusk brought quiet to keep track of enemy movements. He was awarded a Bronze Star for calling in the positions of mortars that were hammering American troops. Crowley resigned his commission when his tour was up, put on a uniform for the first time in years and headed home. The Vietnam protests were at fever pitch at the time and he was shunned. Nobody spoke to him on the plane or as he walked through the airports.
He speaks with unabashed delight about arriving in Boston and hearing a golden-haired 2-year-old call out, “Daddeeeeee.” She was his first child, a daughter he’d never met.
Thirty-five years later, he visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington to touch the name on the wall of his command replacement, who didn’t make it home.
Crowley was wearing the hat of a Vietnam veteran. Several school buses pulled up and as the young people piled out, they came up to Dennis and shook his hand.
“It was the first time anybody had ever thanked me,” he said.