We Walked Right Into It: Pennsbury High and the Vietnam War by Nau Terry

Author:Nau, Terry [Nau, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Terry L. Nau
Published: 2015-02-22T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE:

DEATH WITH HONOR IN VIETNAM

WAR CASUALTIES STRIKE AT THE heart and soul of families, taking away a brave son or daughter who cannot be replaced. Parents’ lives are forever changed. Siblings try to understand complex feelings as they grow older. Time may never heal the wounds but it does provide distance and perhaps, for the fortunate few, some closure. Only the survivors of the McGinnis family from Levittown, who lost Michael Brian McGinnis in Vietnam at the age of 20 in 1969, can really know their own truth.

“I’ve been told my Uncle Mike was a nice, happy-go-lucky kid,” said Liz (McGinnis) Peter. “I was only two years old when he died and it took me a long time to realize how young he really was at 20. Uncle Mike was my Godfather. My father (Joseph McGinnis Jr.) told me that his youngest brother was a happy person. They were very close, even though my dad was 11 years older. Mike gave the toast at my parents’ wedding. My dad said Mike was very nervous. He was only 18 at the time. He was allergic to beer but he drank a glass before he gave the toast and he became sick. My dad said he gave a nice toast anyway. Mike just always wanted to do the right thing.”

The McGinnis family sent out tons of energy from its home on Tall Pine Drive in the Thornridge section of Levittown. Joe McGinnis Sr., a World War II Navy veteran, owned a successful real estate business. His wife, Elizabeth, presided over a household of seven children – four girls and three boys. The children were born between 1937 and 1958. By the late 1960s, oldest son Joe Jr. co-owned a popular night club on Trenton Road called “The Oasis” that became a mecca for young people eager to dance and drink the night away. Oldest sibling Adrienne graduated from Pennsbury in 1956. She got married and raised her family across the state, near Pittsburgh.

Bob McGinnis graduated from Bishop Egan High in 1961. He would join the Air Force Reserves after taking a job with MacMillan Publishing. Mary McGinnis graduated from Pennsbury in 1966. Mike McGinnis would follow two years later. Peggy McGinnis finished high school in 1971. The youngest McGinnis child, Coreen, trailed Peggy by four years. Despite the age difference, this was a close-knit group from top to bottom.

The emerging war in Southeast Asia hit the front page of the local newspaper right before Christmas of 1965 when Joseph Yatsko Jr., who grew up less than two miles from the McGinnis home, became the first soldier from Lower Bucks County to die in South Vietnam.

The Levittown Times (which merged into the Courier & Times newspaper in 1966) would write obituaries about fallen soldiers more frequently over the next few years. Levittown alone would suffer 19 combat deaths in the war.

So why did Mike McGinnis join the Marines not long after he graduated from high school? Mary McGinnis Gallagher provided her own perspective on his fateful decision many years later.

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