[B&N] In 1967, a former U.S. Marine named John "Chick" Donohue snuck into Vietnam to find his buddies serving in the war and bring them beer and bear hugs from back home. It would be called "The Greatest Beer Run Ever" and it is now being filmed for Skydance by Oscar winner Peter Farrelly, starring Zac Efron as Chick.Who put the idea in Chick’s head? "The Colonel," Chick says. "George E. Lynch. He was the bartender at Doc Fiddler’s in Inwood and he was a holy man. He was a very patriotic individual."
Twenty-eight boys from Inwood would be killed in Vietnam — and most people in the neighborhood would attend their funerals, whether they had known the boys or not. "I’m gonna get on one of those ships that goes to Vietnam," the Colonel asserted, "and I’m gonna bring all the guys over there from the neighborhood a drink."
"I looked in the Colonel’s eyes to see if he could possibly be serious," thought Chick. "Oh, he was."
And though it would be Chick who endeavored on this epic journey, the Colonel supported the troops in other ways.
Kathleen "Sissy" O’Sullivan, who edited a neighborhood newsletter for the boys, and is now making a documentary about their lifelong bonds, recalls The Colonel’s unique contributions. In the envelopes with their newsletters, GIs would find flat sticks of gum with a bonus ingredient: they had been soaked in whiskey sours or gin and tonics, and dried so no military mail inspector would discover it.
On St. Patrick’s Day, the Colonel found an even larger surface. As O’Sullivan wrote then, "The management of Doc Fiddler’s wanted to send each and every one of you a bottle of scotch, but it wouldn’t fit in the envelope. So [the Colonel] did the next best thing — he soaked the enclosed coaster" with whiskey, dried it out, with orders to the troops to suck on the coasters
The Colonel had a flagpole outside the bar as big as the one outside City Hall, Chick recalls. He also organized a parade contingent of 600 people to march from Inwood to midtown for the Loyalty Day parade on May 13, 1967. [See photo.] While it didn’t get the press coverage the anti-war marches and moratoriums did, it gathered 250,000 people and lasted for eight hours. "I began to see that the protestors were at least trying to stop the madness," Chick says. "But they weren’t acknowledging that so many of the young men were doing what they truly believed was their duty to their country." It was partly a class issue, since many of these working-class boys were drafted, and couldn’t get a college deferment, or a single note from the right doctor.
"We knew we were the lucky ones," Sissy O’Sullivan recently recalled. "As girls, we couldn’t get drafted. We were going to funerals every month. When our guys left for Vietnam, we were heartbroken for them."
What she and other young Inwood women were determined to do was give them a sense of home and normalcy in the jungle with news from the neighborhood. Engagement announcements, usually three a month, weddings — sometimes as many as eight — babies born, announcements of soldiers’ return home.
