GELZINIS: Gold Star families memorial
Memorial dedication today
In the photo, Richard “Dick” Murphy, a strapping 20-year-old Marine lance corporal, appears to keep a protective watch over his three kid brothers, Jack, Paul and Brian.
The picture is 49 years old and was taken the night before Dick Murphy left his Norwood living room for Vietnam.
Almost a year to the day later, Dick Murphy would be cut down by two bullets fired by a sniper in Quang Tri province.
This afternoon, Brian Murphy, who was 11 when his big brother rested a left hand upon his shoulder for the last time, will address a universe of fellow Gold Star families when the Massachusetts Gold Star families memorial is dedicated in Fall River’s Bicentennial Park.
It is a different kind of memorial, one that speaks not just to the ultimate sacrifice made by those lost across decades of conflicts, but to the families who waited and hoped and prayed in vain that their fathers, sons and daughters would return. The dream Dick Murphy carried with him to Vietnam was blissfully small-town … our town. He wanted to come home to Norwood and become a member of the local police department, where his father, Jim, served as chief. “That’s what Dick wanted,” said his brother Brian. “That was the plan.” Yesterday, Brian Murphy stood across the street from Norwood Cemetery and just in front of a sign that for years has dedicated this intersection to the memory of his big brother. The irony was that Brian Murphy stood there as the 60-year-old retired police chief of Norwood, who had followed the path his father set out for Dick.
When he speaks today for the Gold Star families of the Vietnam conflict, he will talk about being one of 10 children born of two Marines who met during World War II.
Six of Brian Murphy’s siblings — Dick, Bill, Maureen, Tom, Sheila and Jack — all followed their mother and father into the Marine Corps.
Brian did not, but he has chosen to keep his brother’s memory alive by, among other things, volunteering every year to serve as a guide at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C.
Brian has every letter his brother sent home from Vietnam, along with those his father wrote back to him.
Yesterday, he mentioned the one Dick wrote from a hospital ship after he was wounded early in his tour, asking the family to send toys and candy that he could pass out to Vietnamese children who were also patients on the same medical
ship. What Dick Murphy’s kid brother will remember today is not just the valiant young Marine who went off to Vietnam half a century ago. He will remember the man with the generous heart who wrote home about the joy he felt after being able to pass out the candy to a wounded Vietnamese child with one eye.
“Even though the little boy had one eye,” Dick Murphy wrote to his family, “that eye was twinkling with delight.”