The gravestone of Glenn H. Kelley, the first Chattanoogan killed in the Vietnam War, is located in section BB site 123 of the Chattanooga National Cemetery on Wednesday, February 11, 2015. Fifty years ago this week, Elizabeth Kelley had a 17-month-old baby girl on her hip and a husband overseas.
Half a world away in Southeast Asia, Glenn Kelley was a young Army enlistee just deployed to the emerging Cold War hot spot called Vietnam. To the former restaurant dishwasher, the Army was a job — a way to provide for his wife and young daughter in Chattanooga.
But just as Glenn and Elizabeth Kelley, former high-school sweethearts at Howard School, were preparing to settle into his long tour of duty, the unthinkable happened.
Mark KennedyElizabeth still has the government letter with the words that pierced her heart.
The Army said that two days after the air war started in Vietnam — Feb. 10, 1965 — Glenn Kelley “died as the result of extreme, multiple injuries when an explosive device was detonated in his quarters by hostile forces.”
The official start of the Vietnam War is a bit of a moving target, so Glenn Kelley’s death represents either the very first, or one of the first, Vietnam War fatalities from the Chattanooga area. All told, 57 local service-people are said to have lost their lives in Vietnam by the time the war ended.
With each passing year, the memories of those killed in Vietnam retreat deeper into the mist of history. But for Elizabeth Kelley — who never remarried after her husband’s death and now lives in Decatur, Ga. — the loss still seems fresh.
“I still get upset about it,” says Elizabeth, a retired pharmacy worker. “I had a young child. No job. I didn’t know what to do.”
Glenn and Elizabeth had grown up together in a little neighborhood off East Third Street. They both attended Orchard Knob Elementary School. By the time they were in the ninth grade at Howard School, it must have been clear to anyone who was paying attention that they would someday be a couple. Even when Glenn moved out of the neighborhood as a teenager, he still found ways to circle back and hang out near Elizabeth’s house.
“You know how it works,” she says. “He was good looking, and by about the ninth grade he started talking to me. I remember him asking, ‘Don’t you want to be my girlfriend?’
“Other boys would try to talk to me, but I wasn’t interested,” Elizabeth remembers.
After high school, Glenn went into the Army and the two were married in LaFayette, Ga., in 1962, when he was on leave. In their two years of marriage, they only lived together for about six months because of Glenn’s service-related travels.
They had a long, serious talk before Glenn re-enlisted in the Army and went to Vietnam, and Elizabeth says she deferred to her husband, who wanted to stay in uniform so she wouldn’t have to work. He even talked about taking the family to Germany some day when his service in Vietnam was over.
In Elizabeth’s mind, Glenn is forever 22, a kind-hearted man who never seemed to get upset. Week after week, Elizabeth says, she cooked liver for dinner and Glenn never complained — although she later overheard him tell friends that liver was his least-favorite food.
Elizabeth called the newspaper a couple of weeks ago to have an “In Memory” note about Glenn placed in the Times Free Press. She is trying to get Glenn’s picture in the Chattanooga African-American Museum and Bessie Smith Cultural Center on M.L. King Boulevard as the area’s first, official Vietnam War fatality. Somehow his name was left off a memorial plaque listing the war dead at the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport, a fact that still rankles Elizabeth.
She cherishes Glenn’s Purple Heart medal and a photo of him and his young daughter, Glennett, who now lives in Decatur with her mother.
Every year, Elizabeth visits Glenn’s grave at Chattanooga National Cemetery on Bailey Avenue. Sometimes, she says, her heart fills up and she ends up on her knees hugging his gravestone.
“I was in love with my husband,” she says. “I could never see anybody replacing him in my heart.”
Fifty years of widowhood have done little to blunt the pain from a fateful February day in 1965.
But such is the heartbreak of war.
Young warriors lost. Families blown apart. Pain that lingers a lifetime.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.