Even after all these years, Joan Brown-Smith’s eyes still well up with tears when she recalls the last time she saw him.
It was November of 1968 and he was walking toward the plane that would take him on the first leg of his journey to the Vietnamese jungle from which he would never return.
He stopped on the tarmac and turned for one last look at his family — and Brown-Smith, his fiancée.
“There was something about that moment,” Brown-Smith recalls. “I knew — I somehow just knew — he was never coming back.”
PFC Garfield Langhorn was just 20 years old when he was killed in action in Pleiku Province, Vietnam, two months later. On Jan. 15, 1969, he threw himself on a live grenade to save the lives of wounded soldiers he was attempting to rescue from enemy attack.
More than 44 years later, Brown-Smith remembers him as was a gangly young man with a broad, easy smile and eyes that twinkled when he shared his dreams of what their life would be like after he returned from Vietnam and they married.
Once he’d shipped out, the young lovers wrote to each other every day. She saved all his letters — all but the last one, which arrived two weeks after he was killed, after news of his death had reached home.
“I got so upset. I was crying and crying. I tore it up. I can’t believe I did that,” she says.
She dabs at her eyes with a tissue and continues.
“In his official portrait and the pictures you see of him, he always looks so serious, but that wasn’t Garfield at all. Garfield had the most beautiful smile, and he was always smiling,” Brown-Smith recalls. “I want people to know that about him.”
She was just 16 years old when Langhorn, then 19, asked her parents for her hand in marriage.
“I was his baby sister’s classmate, three years his junior,” says Brown-Smith.
“My Mom said, ‘Garfield, you must be kidding,’ but he wasn’t,” Brown-Smith says, smiling wistfully.
Now a certified nurse anesthetist at a Baltimore-area hospital, Brown-Smith regularly visits her elderly parents in Riverhead — and the woman who would have been her mother-in-law, Mary Langhorn, had her fiancée returned alive from Vietnam.
Last Saturday, she held the Gold Star Mother’s hand, seated side by side at a table in the lobby of First Baptist Church of Riverhead, as they shared memories of the young man whose memory has bound them together for the better part of five decades.
“She will always be a daughter to me,” Mary Langhorn, 89, says, stroking Brown-Smith’s hand.
The pair were at the church last week for a recording session organized by Mary Anne Harroun, a retired Riverhead school teacher and a member of the board of the PFC Garfield M. Langhorn Jr. Memorial Library at the Pulaski Street Elementary School.
“I wanted to gather primary source documentation” of the Riverhead Medal of Honor recipient’s life, Harroun said of the reason she set up the recording session.
Harroun, who started the Garfield Langhorn Memorial Essay Contest at the Pulaski Street School a decade ago, said she was inspired to produce the audio recordings by a poem written by the wife of a man who served with Langhorn in Vietnam. She’d heard Langhorn’s mother read the poem, “Garfield’s Bible” by Elizabeth Napolitano.
Langhorn, a devout Christian who in his youth served as an usher at First Baptist, was the first Christian Jim Napolitano had ever known. The friendship, though cut short by Langhorn’s death, would change his life. Years later, after learning of her son’s witness to his fellow soldier, Mary Langhorn sent her son’s Bible to Napolitano. It inspired his wife to write the poem, which in turn sparked Harroun’s idea to produce audio recordings of his family and friends’ recollections.
At Harroun’s invitation, about a dozen of Langhorn’s friends and relatives sat before a microphone in a room at First Baptist Church to record memories of his life.
Langhorn taught Brown-Smith how to drive a car with a standard transmission. “He had the patience of Job,” she says, laughing at the memory of the sound made by the grinding gears of his beloved 1958 Chevy.
He gave the Chevy to Eugene Robinson before he left for basic training. Robinson, a few years younger than Langhorn, met him when he became an usher at church at age 11 or 12.
“I was their paper boy. I delivered the paper to their house every day,” Robinson says.
Robinson’s family later moved to the street the Langhorns lived on, Maple Avenue — which was dedicated to the war hero’s memory in 2011.
“He became my mentor,” Robsinson recalls. “He gave me my first car. It was his first car and he gave it to me when he got drafted.”
Others in Langhorn’s life who recorded memories of the man last week included his best friend, Hubbard Harris, Jenny Corbin, Robert “Bubbie” Brown and Eric Eve, the son of a man who served in Vietnam with Langhorn and was one of the soldiers saved by Langhorn’s selfless sacrifice.
Langhorn’s parents had read accounts of their son’s heroism in the papers, Mary Langhorn said in a 2010 interview. Though they knew their son’s giving nature, “We didn’t know what to believe,” she said. Then they got a call from Rodney Eve, a West Islip man who said he served with their son and wanted to visit them. Eve came to Riverhead and described to them their son’s heroic actions that saved fellow soldiers’ lives, including his own.
“It was good to hear it from an eyewitness,” Mary Langhorn says.
Eve succumbed to cancer in 2007, but his son Eric, a history teacher, honors his own father’s memory by recounting the story of the hero that saved the life of the man who would be his father.
“I am here today because of his actions,” Eric Eve says.
Clarence Simpson, of Medford, vice president of Vietnam Veterans of America, didn’t know Garfield Langhorn personally, but the two shared many acquaintances, he says. Simpson, a career military man, played a key role in having the Riverhead Post Office named in memory of the Medal of Honor recipient. He has since become involved with the Langhorn Memorial Library board and on Saturday recorded a narration for the audio recollections organized by Harroun.
Harroun says she’s thinking about applying for a grant to cover the cost of creating a video to accompany the audio recordings.
The memories are all so rich and vibrant, the retired educator says. For the people who came together to record their memories of Langhorn for posterity, it was an emotional Saturday morning.
Indeed for the fallen hero’s mother, the stories of her son’s life get harder — rather than easier — to hear as time passes on, she says. Seeing his childhood friends last week was difficult, perhaps because seeing them in the fullness of their years is a painful reminder of the decades of life robbed by that grenade in the Pleiku Province jungle.
“You would think it gets easier with time, but I find the opposite is true,” she says quietly.
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