Jack Lawler and Arnie Kaufman are lifelong friends.
That they didn?t see each other for some 40 years, doesn?t matter.
They met in the Navy in 1955 as teens, serving on U.S.S. Forrestal super carrier for two years, and worked and saw the world, and hitched hiked home to Baltimore together on weekend liberty from their Norfolk port.
“We went to places we never would have seen otherwise,” Lawler said.
“Places we just could never have ever afforded to go,” said Kaufman, who decided to make the Navy a career, staying on board for 22 years.
But after Lawler got shipped to the West Coast in 1958, they lost touch.
“I figured Jack had stayed in California,” Kaufman said. “I had no idea he was living 30 minutes away all those years. They reconnected eight years ago when Kaufman saw Lawler?s names listed on a Forrestal association list and called his old pal.
“We met at the Mt. Washington Tavern for lunch,” Kaufman said. “I recognized Jack as soon as he walked in the door. We gave each other a big hug.”
?You never forget?
On Veteran?s Day, as they?ve been doing traditionally for years now, Kaufman will drive from his home in northwest Baltimore to Ellicott City and together again the now 70-year old men will head to Washington, D.C. They?ll pay tribute to the Forrestal?s fallen heroes, the 134 men, including three Marylanders, James McVickar of Annapolis, Robert Swain of Silver Spring and Robert Geller from Montgomery County, who died aboard ship on July 29, 1967 in a tragic fire during the Vietnam War. Afterwards, they?ll travel across the Potomac to the Arlington National Cemetery.
They lost a number of shipmates along the way themselves, once during a stormy refueling effort in the North Atlantic. And once when an airmen came into the land too low on the carrier.
“I saw the whole thing from the tower,” Lawler said. “He came in too high the first two times and they waved him off. It was a really windy day. The third time he came in too low and the fuselage hit the deck, not the landing gear, and the plane skidded across the strip and exploded into a fuel tank. It?s just something you never forget.”
Each year at the Vietnam Memorial on The Mall, Forestall veterans arrive with flowers, prayers and remembrances for the men who died in 1967, whether they were on the ship at the time or not.
Lawler has met fellow crewmen he hasn?t seen in 50 years at the Vietnam Wall, and has had sibling and relatives of men lost in fire, in other accidents and conflicts, tell him their story and cry and embrace.
He has sailed to Rome, visited Capri, saw the Sistine Chapel and heard Pope Pius XII address a St. Peter?s crowd.
He traveled to Cuba, Haiti, Portugal, Turkey, England, Greece and France, but the Veteran?s day pilgrimage has become his most important trip and part of a new mission.
A floating museum
Lawler graduated from Calvert Hall High School in 1954 and earned a business degree from Loyola College after his four-year service. His time in the Navy and the men he prepared to go battle with were so important to him, he has devoted much of the last decade to turning the Forrestal into a floating museum, much like the U.S.S. Intrepid in New York.
Though the Forestall association has received the support of many local politicians, the proposal to bring the historic, cold war carrier to port near Fort McHenry has stalled.
The Navy is preparing to sink the ship, docked in Providence, and leave it on the ocean floor to become a coral reef.
“We don?t wantany federal money,” Lawler said. “We just want more time to do the fundraising. We figure if we just get half the people who visit for Fort McHenry, we can break even.”
Meanwhile, Kaufman, now also a retired a bank employee, spends much of his free time volunteering with the Veterans of Foreign War Post 521 in Owings Mills.
Three times a month, he and others visit veterans at the local VA centers on Green St., at Perring Point, and on Loch Raven Blvd.
On Thursday afternoon Kaufman and Lawler joined Bill DePuey, 73, an Air Force vet from 1952 to 1972, Gary McHenry, an Air Force vet from 1963-1967, Barbara Floyd, an Air Force vet, from 1963-1967 and Chester Silverman, 86, who served in the Army in Europe during World War II.
They spent a few hours with veterans at the U.S. Veteran?s Medical Center in North Baltimore, passing out fruit, and telling jokes, and playing bingo with a dozen or so men and women, mostly their age and older disabled servicemen in wheelchairs.
“Without arms or legs”
Earlier this summer, the VFW post invited the younger Iraq War veterans from Walter Reed to Owings Mills for a big crab feast.
“Most of the Walter Reed guys and girls were without arms or legs,” Silverman said. “We just had fun and treated everybody like a normal person, but a lot of those kids were 18-19, 20-21 years old and you could have cried your eyes out. We don?t ever want to forget our veterans.”
At Christmas, they will invite more vets to the Owings Mills VFW post for another celebration.
Many local vets, including DePuey and McHenry, will be driving to the Garrison Forest Veterans Cemetery for a service and honor guard presentation this morning.
“Memorial Day is important,” Lawler said. “But Veteran Day is even a bigger day. Veteran?s Day is the day we honor all the men and women whoput their life on the line for this country.”
