At the height of the Vietnam War, former US Marine John Chickie Donohue from Inwood, NY grew tired of attending military funerals and antiwar demonstrators extending their criticism to American soldiers.
A bartender at Doc Fiddler’s in Inwood felt the same and said that someone should go to Vietnam to give the soldiers a pat on the back and buy them a beer...so in November of 1967, Chickie set out to make the greatest beer run happen and boarded a merchant ship with cases of beer bound towards Vietnam.
When he arrived, he used clever and gutsy navigating through military officialdom and hitching all sorts of rides on jeeps and planes in order to get to his boys.
He traveled over 8000 miles and spent over 2 months in country delivering beer to his buddies in different zones. At one point, Donohue talked his way onto a military mail plane and headed to find Rick Duggan, who lived in the same building in Manhattan as him growing up. Rick was serving as a specialist with the Army First Air Cavalry Division fighting in Khe Sanh. “When he showed up, I felt like I was in ‘The Twilight Zone,’” Rick recalled. “All my guys were flabbergasted, like, ‘You mean he’s here voluntarily?’”He spent the night and even exchanged fire with the enemy.
Chickie manged to get back to the US in 1968, and even though most didn't believe him or his story, the photos and testimony from his buddies that he visited proved otherwise. "For half a century, I've been told I was full of it, to the point where I stopped even telling this story..but still, I didn't have to buy a beer for a long time in Inwood." #badass #beer #vietnamwar #stayzero #zerofoxtrot