Approaching the long Memorial Day weekend, let’s remember one of the boys who went off to war. His name was Rodger Snyder. He went to Milford Mill High School back in the mid-‘60s, and then he thought he heard his country calling, so he shipped out to Vietnam when things there were coming apart at the seams.
He was a pale, skinny kid with bad eyes. When he’d play catch in the street, every move seemed double-timed, herky-jerky, speeded-up. When he took off his shirt, you could count every rib on his frame. He didn’t look like anybody’s image of John Wayne on a movie poster.
But he became a paratrooper, part of the 101st Airborne Division, an act of complete craziness since Rodger was always afraid of heights. But there he was, jumping out of planes before the infantry arrived, getting some idea how treacherous things might be for those coming in on the ground.
It looked like he’d gotten through theworst of it. He won a bunch of medals, including a Bronze Star and a PurpleHeart. And then the Army sent him to a place called Qui Nhon to cool off for awhile.
Three weeks before his year’s combat was up, he placed a phone call all the way to Courtleigh Drive, off Liberty Road just below Old Court, to tell his family he was coming home.
“Be extra careful,” his father,Sidney, hollered into the phone. “Extra careful.”
Rodger started to say something back, but his voice faded, the signal was gone, and the whole family sat there in the silence of the moment.
His mother, Delores, fixed up his old bedroom, bought him a little TV, tried to make things special. But she walked around with a sense of dread. One haunted afternoon she thought she heard Rodger calling her through the house. She telephoned her older daughter, Patty.
“Your brother’s not coming home,”she said.
“Mom,” said Patty, “he’s cominghome. You’ve got to calm yourself.”
It was 10 minutes later when the doorbell rang. An Army lieutenant stood there with the worst news in the world. Rodger was standing in a field somewhere in Qui Nhon when a sniper’s bullet took him out. He was 20 years old.
He’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery, in Virginia. In Baltimore, a Jewish War Veterans post was named for him. When they buried Rodger, a rabbi stood there in the snow and said, “I wish it could have been me, I’m three times his age.”
We thought Vietnam lasted forever, didn’t we? But we’ve been at various wars now for such a long time that the new kids signing up weren’t even born when we were hit by the terror attacks that started all of it.
And so Rodger’s got a lot of company out at Arlington – rows and rows of youngsters who heard their country’s call and signed up. They keep coming, and so do the endless, endless wars.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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