[00:00:00] (HOST) We’re trying something new here at the podcast, shaking things up a little bit. We often collect way more material than we can use in an episode. Historically, when that’s happened, we’ve made the story a two parter, as we did with Rocket Man and the Sea Wolves and the Tunnel Rats. Today, for the first time, we’re presenting you with a short bonus episode, a kind of companion to Episode 55: Born on the 4th of July. It’s a beautiful little story about Dennis Lobozzo, a little bite sized thing that didn’t make it into the episode, but is definitely worth sharing. Stick around.

In Episode 55, we introduced you to Joyce Washburn, who shared her story about Dennis Lobozzo, one of 142 service members whose names are on The Wall and who were born on the 4th of July. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, it’s okay. There are no spoilers here. Just a little postscript that we thought you’d enjoy. Dennis, or Denny, as he was sometimes called, was a Marine at the Siege of Khe Sanh in March of 1968. He received shrapnel wounds severe enough that he was sent to the hospital ship Repose for treatment. That’s where Joyce picks up the story.

Did he write to you from the Repose?

[00:01:31] (JOYCE) Oh, yeah. And he called me.

[00:01:34] (HOST) He did?

[00:01:35] (JOYCE) Yeah.

[00:01:36] (HOST) So what do you remember about that conversation?

[00:01:39] (JOYCE) I just remember hearing his voice and just this really warm feeling, you know, just. It was like he was there with me. It was. Yeah, it was great.

[00:01:59] (HOST) Tell me the story of what happened on that ship besides the phone call home.

[00:02:06] (JOYCE) Besides a phone call home? You know, Doctor Bird was the doctor. Edward Bird was the surgeon that was assigned to him, who, you know, took care of all the shrapnel wounds and, you know, fixed him up. And, um, apparently they just, for some reason, they had a connection. And, um, doctor, I don’t know whether it was his goofy last name. You know, I wondered about it. Was it. Why would he remember, Dennis, of all the people that, you know, he took care of on that hospital ship? Because he must have taken care of thousands of people. Um, but they apparently struck up a kind of a friendship with Doctor Bird. Of course he was, you know, he’s just a special person.

[00:03:05] (HOST) Upon his recovery, Denny was released back to his unit, and he was killed in action on the 6th of June. Here’s an excerpt from a December 2013 article on Michigan Live. “Doctor Edward Bird was struck by how Dennis Lobozzo carried himself when they met on a US Navy medical ship off the coast of Vietnam in 1968. When the doctor learned that his former patient, months later, was killed in action.” That first impression lingered.

[00:03:37] (JOYCE) They must have posted the casualty report casualty lists, or they were in some newspaper or something. He saw that he had gotten killed, and he he said that that really affected him a lot. And it was like he was this almost ghost or this, this thing that just kind of stayed with him about Vietnam. When he’d think about being on the ship, he’d think about him. So he went home. He was a neurosurgeon. And when he retired, he decided he wanted to do something to remember Dennis. And he, he became a sculptor. So his wife, um, saw my name in, on The Wall of Faces because, uh, that’s one of the ways that I communicate with Dennis. And it had my email address. So he wrote to me and he said, said what he wanted to do. He wanted to. He had been making the sculpture, and he wanted to bring it to Grand Rapids, because he wanted to bring people to, you know, to know that, you know, everybody knows that people get, you know, soldiers and they’re casualties of war, but that there are casualties in their own community. And to remember him. And would that be okay? Like, of course it’d be okay, you know. And so we started emailing back and forth, and he was working on the piece and, and sent me pictures and all these kinds of things. And so then I started looking around where, you know, where could where could we place it, where, where could we put it? That would more the most people would see and that it would, you know, I talked to my state rep and she said, don’t put it at the veterans home because you never know where it might end up. It might end up in a closet. And so then I talked to the people at the city and I, you know, I just checked all over. And so then he came, came in January of 2014.

[00:06:20] (HOST) Yeah. The headline, the headline in December of 2013 is “Doctor Turned Artist Seeks Home for Sculpture.”

[00:06:27] (JOYCE) Yes.

[00:06:28] (HOST) So he’s looking for a place to put it.

[00:06:29] (JOYCE) Right. So he came to Grand Rapids in January and, um, brought the, brought it with him. It was a horrible snowstorm. Of course. Just, you know, of course, you know, horrible snowstorm. But he came, he got here. He did change, change his flight, the whole thing.

[00:06:48] (HOST) Mhm.

[00:06:49] (JOYCE) And I got him, picked him up at the airport and I got to see it. We had a great big dinner at the hotel where he was staying, and all sorts of my high school classmates came. And I invited his sister and brother to, to join us. And then we spent the whole next week looking at all these places. And the last place we went was Grand Valley State University, which is where I went to college. And they have a new campus in the downtown Grand Rapids. And the, um, the art director, because they have a huge art collection at Grand Valley, Henry Matthews, we met with him and it was like he said, “we will take care of it. We will display it,” you know, and he you know, he went on and on and told us all the things that they were, they would do. And I mean, that was the place that was where, the place… So in November of that year, every year, Grand Valley has a breakfast on veterans, Veterans Day morning for all their students that are are veterans and, and their alumni. Alumni get invited to. And so after that breakfast, then they held the dedication. And they, the dedication in that it’s in the same building. It’s right next to the library, and it’s a place where people go by all the time. And it’s and he made the statue so that it would be short enough for people in wheelchairs to be able to see. He wanted everyone to be able to enjoy it and to learn from it.

[00:08:56] (HOST) Joyce, what do you make of the fact that this doctor, I mean, this is decades later?

[00:09:00] (JOYCE) I know.

[00:09:01] (HOST) Decades later, like to the point where he needs, he needs, he probably needed to borrow photographs in order to make the sculpture because he couldn’t possibly have remembered what Dennis looked like.

[00:09:10] (JOYCE) Well, he said it didn’t matter whether it looked like him or not, but it did. But it did.

[00:09:17] (HOST) Did it? What did you make of the fact that decades later, I mean, this guy went on to have an entire medical career?

[00:09:23] (JOYCE) Exactly.

[00:09:24] (HOST) And he’s still thinking about Dennis?

[00:09:26] (JOYCE) Yeah, this one guy. This one guy with a crazy name, you know, it it just. Well, when he, the first time he emailed me, I thought is, you know, is this a, you know, some kind of a scam thing? Is this, you know, a real person? Because, I mean, out of the blue I get this email and, you know, and I get this email, you know, not nobody in this family, I get it. And, um, so I wrote to my friend, my friend Larry, and a couple of the other guys that were with him and said, what do you think? You know, do you think this is, you know, and they wrote me back and they said, no, I think this I think this is real. Write them back. And, um, yeah. And he truly, you know, it was truly a labor of love for him. And we were driving down the road and I said, thank you for bringing Dennis home. He’s finally home. And he said, “you know, that’s just how I felt. I felt it, felt that it was important that I could bring him home.” Yeah. It was, it was special. It was really special.

[00:10:54] (HOST) In the article on Michigan Live, Doctor Byrd says, “I’ve always had this memory of Dennis in my mind and felt terrible about what happened to him. And I thought, here’s my chance. I’m going to make some kind of memorial to him. It just seemed a terrible tragedy to me, and it upset me a lot. Why does somebody like this, who has all the qualities you’d want in a son of your own? Why does he have to be over here in the mud and the jungle getting shot at?” We’ll be back with another full episode this time next week. See you then.

No video interviews are available for this episode.