THE WALL OF FACES

First things first, Mike Barnicle, you did a great tribute to Bobby.
I grew up in Cooperstown with Bobby. I knew his parents and sister and I graduated from Cooperstown Central School in the same class, 1966. I was also grateful for the times that Bobby and I spent together, and I'm proud to be one of his best friends. I can also say that his death hit his classmates and the community very hard, he was loved by all of us. All of us who knew him could share many stories about him, myself remembering the two of us at age 10 wearing sport coats with toy cap pistols in the inside pocket and going to church. Six years later, borrowing his grandmothers car and driving to Sidney to visit our girlfriends. Without hesitation, I have to say I miss him. Bobby, thank you for who you are and what you did.

Dear PFC Robert Wagner Atwell, sir

As an American, I would like to thank you for your service and for your sacrifice made on behalf of our wonderful country. The youth of today could gain much by learning of heroes such as yourself, men and women whose courage and heart can never be questioned.

May God allow you to read this, and may He allow me to someday shake your hand when I get to Heaven to personally thank you. May he also allow my father to find you and shake your hand now to say thank you; for America, and for those who love you.

With respect, and the best salute a civilian can muster for you, Sir

Curt Carter

Robert is buried at Fly
Creek Cemetery, Fly Creek,NY. BSM PH

Mr. Barnicle, htat was truly a beatuful remembrance of a true hero. I never knew Robert Atwell, but we do share the last name and we both served with the 101st. What really caught me was that his name was Robert. I had a brother named Robert who died as an infant from pneumonia. I was stationed in Fort Drum from 1997-2000, and made two trips to Cooperstown, for obvious reasons. Had I read this story before I made those trips, I would have paid the respect and honor that Robert Atwell so richly deserves. Thanks for your words in remembering our Nation's true Heros.

Near the soft, rolling hills that surround the Hall of Fame where those boys of summer are memorialized for the ages, the village of Cooperstown thrives, like a wonderful relic of an earlier, easier time in history when innocence was both expected and predictable.
It is a small town built around big memories and the great American saga. It is a place of friendly people and civic ceremony strong enough to survive all the long winters. And it is the only place Bobby Atwell ever called home.
Robert Wagner Atwell was born Aug. 14, 1947. His dad had just returned from his own war to become the clerk of Otsego County.
His mother, Mabel, taught English at Cooperstown High. He had one older sister, Neal. The family lived in a fine, rambling home about a ground-rule double from the front door of the Hall of Fame.
All of it -- the picture post-card perfect streets, fishing on the lake, running, laughing, growing up in the soft, summery mountain dusk was totally remote from events taking place on a larger stage that was soon to demand an appearance from Bobby Atwell and 58,000 others.
"He was very popular in high school," his sister Neal Atwell Franklin recalled the other day. "He played football and baseball.
It is a small school. Everyone knows one another. My brother had dyslexia, and bak then they knew far less about it than they do now. After he graduated, may parents sent him to prep school in Connecticut, but his choices narrowed down to going to a junior college or going into the Army. Bobby went into the Army."
Robert Atwell's story is part of the fabric of the nation. It is what Memorial Day used to be about before commerce, social amnesia, a hesitance to comprehend hardship and a lust for instant gratification combined to infect huge parts of the American outlook. Simply put, he went off to a war designed by architects in Washington and left his life in a place called Vietnam.
He became part of the regiment of the dead, one of 4,120 New Yorkers killed in that land for a cause that nobody could define.
He died in a ghoulishly bloody year, 1968, alongside 16,589 others whose names were posted on weekly casualty lists in newspapers, large and small, that people read in places as different as Chicago and Cooperstown, the staggering numbers eventually changing minds and politics, too.
Oh, Bobby Atwell had plenty of company. He was joined by guys like Dominick Cuccia of Huntington Station, Richard Brown of Rockville Center, Mike Cutri of Syracuse, Ray D'Angelo of Flushing, Billy Flynn of East Hampton, Jimmy Perrone of the Bronx, Mike Harley of Buffalo, Noble Jackson of Queens, Robert Schmidt of Levittown and Frank Keller of Bayonne, all of them killed fighting a war that still sends shudders rippling through the national psyche.
"Bobby was killed March 21, 1968. It was the day before my mother's birthday," his sister Neal remembered. He died at Hue. I was living in New Jersey at the time. I had a 10-month old baby, Ned. The last image I have of my brother is him sitting with my son, his only nephew, right before Bobby went to Vietnam.
"I went home to Cooperstown as soon as we got the news. I remember that they couldn't tell us how long it would take to get his body back for burial because there were so many casualties that week. I remember that when he did come home 10 days later they thought that he made it back so quickly.
"He was shipped in a closed casket, but my father insisted they open it. He said he could identify him by a mole. He wanted to make sure it was his boy. My father and I went to the funeral home so dad could do this. My mother would not go. They opened the casket for Dad, and afterwards he told me that Bobby looked very peaceful. That seemed to be a comfort to him."
Robert Wagner Atwell was 20 years old. He was buried on a chilly Sunday at the end of March in a year that haunts the land still. The service was held at Christ Church in Cooperstown. Then, the cortege went down Main Street, where merchants, neighbors and visitors stood like sentries and all the shops were adorned with flags in honor of the fallen dead boy who had grown up in a village where memory is part of each day's existence.
The sad procession wound around the edge of Otsego Lake, where winter was just surrendering to spring, and on down the road to the cemetery in Fly Creek where Bobby Atwell, 101st Airborne, son of a county clerk and a high school English teacher, now rests right alongside both parents.
"The day after we buried my brother, Lyndon Johnson announced he wouldn't run for President," the soldier's sister Neal was saying. "My parents never got over it. Never. My dad lost his only boy. He could never bring himself to cash the Army insurance check on my brother's life. He called it blood money. My mother was a drama teacher. She sang in the choir and loved singing. She never sang again after my brother died. She said she just couldn't do it."
Across the land today, some will pause for a moment to think about the fallen legions of the dead. There will be civic ceremonies, cookouts, a few parades and a lot of baseball. And in a village where fame is married to memory, a very brave Bobby Atwell mingles comfortably with all the other heroes of the land.
"He was a nice kid," his sister said. "A kind kid. And he was the only boy from Cooperstown ever killed in Vietnam."