Naphtali Daggett took over as president pro tempore of Yale University in 1766. He succeeded Thomas Clap, who seemed to piss off everybody in New Haven and the colony of Connecticut.
Daggett never held the full-time title of president when he resigned in 1777, but he remained part of the Yale community. So when the British attacked New Haven in 1779, the 52-year-old divinity professor took on a new title: sniper. He picked off Redcoats until his capture.
The British felt no need to defer to Daggett. They forced him on a long march to West Haven, bayoneting him along the way.
Daggett never recovered, dying in 1780. His son, Ebenezer died a year later after contracting smallpox fighting in Virginia.
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Everybody remembers the Battle of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812 because a lawyer, Francis Scott Key, wrote lyrics to a song about it.
But Frederick Hall spent the night of September 10, 1814 in a ditch surrounding the fort, tasked with preventing the British from getting through. Although his fellow soldiers knew him by a different name – William Williams (apparently, that old New York DJ wasn’t the first to claim that name).
There was a good reason for the identity change. Earlier in the year, Hall ran away from the plantation where he was born and enslaved. Even though the British promised freedom to slaves who helped them, Hall signed up to defend Baltimore.
Hall/Williams endured the 25-hour bombardment. He and the 38th Infantry watched the rockets’ red glare probably in terror – an unidentified woman helping out was torn in half by one of the projectiles.
What Hall/Williams couldn’t survive was tuberculosis. He died of it in March 1815, one of four American fatalities in the battle that gave us the National Anthem.
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William Watson had it going. In his late 30s, he was the speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates, one of two bodies in the state legislature.
He also had a military bent and was a captain in the state’s 5th Regiment.
When the Mexican-American War broke out, the governor promoted Watson to lieutenant colonel and sent him south to join Gen. Zachary Taylor. From Texas, the army marched to Monterrey, Mexico.
It was there that Watson and the regiment fought house to house. First, his horse was shot out from under him. Then he got hit.
Fifty-seven years later, a monument to Watson and those who fought in Mexico was dedicated near a park in Baltimore. The ceremony was led by Watson’s daughter, born the day he died.
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Thanks to the movie “Glory,” the heroism of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry is known to millions.
One of the real soldiers who took part in the siege of Fort Wagner in South Carolina was James Henry Gooding. He was born a slave in 1838, but someone – most likely his father – purchased his freedom as a child. He eventually became a whaler, working out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he married in early 1863.
He didn’t spend much time with his wife. Just before the wedding, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation – and Gooding enlisted a month later.
Gooding actually survived Fort Wagner – as we saw in “Glory,” much of the 54th Massachusetts didn’t. But in early 1864, he was wounded in the thigh in Olustee, Florida, and captured by the Confederates. He died in the notorious Andersonville, Georgia, prison that summer and is buried there.
His war letters – including one to Lincoln demanding that soldiers receive equal pay regardless of race – were published more than a century later.
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Newell Rising sounds like one of those young men who has trouble figuring it all out.
At age 27, after working as a mold maker in an iron works and a clerk for an insurance agency, Rising went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1896 and enlisted.
He was first assigned to the U.S.S. Vermont, but soon moved to the U.S.S. Maine. His job was coal passer, lifting 140-pound buckets of coal to the firemen keeping the ship running. He also had to clean coal dust from strainers and other not-particularly-pleasant-sounding tasks.
Rising was aboard the Maine on February 12, 1898 when it suffered an explosion while on a tense mission in Havana, as the United States and Spain faced off over Cuba.
In all likelihood, the coal was responsible for the blast. But William Randolph Hearst preferred a different theory – that the Spanish set it off. Thus began the Spanish-American War, which led to the U.S. gaining territory in Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Newell Rising’s body was never identified. What’s presumed to be his remains – and those of 228 other sailors and marines – are buried at the Maine Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. There’s also a marker commemorating Rising at Summerfield Park in his hometown of Port Chester, New York.
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The New York Yankees finished in seventh place in the American League in 1914.
One of the team’s players that year was Tom Burr – but that’s kind of stretching it. Burr was put in as a defensive replacement against the Washington Nationals on April 21. He played one inning in center field.
That is the sum total of his MLB career. He didn’t get to bat, a la Moonlight Graham in “Field of Dreams.”
Barr went back to college at Williams, then found his way to France when World War I broke out. After serving as an ambulance driver, he signed up for the aviation corps.
Exactly 30 days before the war ended, Burr was flying over France when his plane collided with another aircraft. His body was recovered 12 days later.
Burr was one of eight major leaguers killed in what was once called the Great War.
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Joseph Takata worked as a clerk for Castle & Cooke, the conglomerate that developed Hawaii beginning in the 19th century.
Less than a month before Pearl Harbor, the Nisei – second-generation Japanese – man was inducted into the military and assigned close to his Honolulu home. He got married in the spring of ’42 as he began his tour throughout the world.
That tour took him to Italy, of all places. He was part of the 100th Infantry Battalion – an all-Nisei unit, some of whose soldiers had family members in relocation camps because they were Japanese in origin.
The 100th – and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team – got stuck with the brutal task of freeing Italy from fascism. On September 29, 1943, at Salerno, Takata was killed in combat – the first, but far from the last, Nisei to give his life for a country that didn’t respect him.
He was not forgotten. Every year, a ceremony is held in September at the National Memorial Ceremony of the Pacific at Punchbowl to honor Takata and his comrades.
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Despite being born in Evanston, Illinois, the home of Northwestern University, Thomas Baldwin Jr. chose to attend Cornell, where he studied architectural engineering. It was the family legacy – his father worked as an architect for the Crane Co.
Baldwin was 25 years old when his was called to active duty as the Korean War broke out.
About six months later, Baldwin was wounded as American-led U.N. forces faced down the last major offensive mounted by the North Koreans and their Chinese allies. It either wasn’t that serious an injury or he just talked his way back to his unit.
In any event, a few days after returning, Baldwin was killed on what now would be North Korean territory.
He was buried in Maryland. His parents, who outlived him by more than 20 years, are buried there with him.
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Yesterday would have been Paul F. Doyon’s 77th birthday. Unfortunately, last Sunday was the 55th anniversary of his death.
Doyon was a lance corporal in the U.S. Marines. He was from Ipswich, in the northeast corner of Massachusetts.
On May 21, 1967, Doyon’s company in the Third Marine Amphibious Force was in action in Quang Tri province in South Vietnam. He would have been 19 three days later.
Doyon was the first resident of Ipswich killed in Vietnam. To honor him, the community voted to name its relatively new elementary school after him – it wasn’t the one he would have attended when he was of age. The vote was 99-98, which says a little something about the frictions the Vietnam War created throughout America.
It is still Paul F. Doyon Elementary School. There’s a picture of him in the lobby
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Meredeth Holland would be about my age right now.
She grew up around Corpus Christi, Texas, with a love of the sea. She studied marine resource management at Texas A&M, but found that going out on survey expeditions made her seasick.
So Holland did the logical thing. She became a firefighter, then got involved in investigating fires for insurers, moving to the San Francisco Bay area.
She also enlisted in the Army Reserve at the age of 34. She got into the military for the benefits, fearing that she might otherwise grow old and live on the streets.
Holland married Hugh Hvolboll in December 2005, just after she learned that her unit was being deployed to Afghanistan. They had known each other for years, but thought it important to get hitched before she went into danger.
Her job in Afghanistan wasn’t supposed to involve combat. She was part of a campaign to help educate kids – especially girls – gifting backpacks to them.
But on September 8, 2006, Holland was the gunner on a humvee rolling through downtown Kabul. A suicide bomber smashed his car into the military vehicle, killing Holland. At 52, she was the oldest female fatality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is no final resting place for Meredith Holland – unless you count the water near her two hometowns. Her husband ran a fireworks company. Some of her ashes went up in a fireworks display over Corpus Christi, the rest in one over San Francisco Bay on what would have been the couple’s first anniversary.
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Memorial Day has become big parades and civil ceremonies. Placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington. Furniture sales and baseball teams wearing camo outfits.
We know that thousands of Americans have lost their lives in our 249-year history.
But what’s also been lost is the idea that these people weren’t just Risk board pieces. Or easily wrapped into one giant flag.
They were people with lives and loves. Dreams of careers and even careers themselves. Families sometimes. Troubled and privileged pasts. Ex-slaves.
They were individuals. And they gave up that individuality for the idea that this country, for all its faults, is a land of promise. They didn’t revel in victory – the notion of victory in war as if it’s a sporting event is disgusting, in case Trump or one of his moronic adherents reads this.
They just served their country because it was what they thought they were supposed to do.
When you get to Monday, try to think not of the collective sacrifice but the individual ones. The lives interrupted and the courage it takes to endure that. The loved ones missing someone so badly it hurts.
I feel privileged to have gotten to know the stories of the ten people above. May their memories be a blessing.
SUBJECTISM 