Floral Park's Pfc. Arthur Kearney with Regina Schiavi in 1971...

Floral Park's Pfc. Arthur Kearney with Regina Schiavi in 1971 in a photo provided by the Pegnitz City Archive in Germany.  Credit: Courtesy of Pegnitz City Archive, Germany

When Arthur Kearney’s orders to serve in Vietnam were scuttled in 1970 and he was told to pack for West Germany, his family was ecstatic. The Floral Park 24-year-old, with an undergraduate degree from Boston University and a master's from West Virginia University, was the beloved oldest of 10.

His mother fought to keep her son from enlisting in the Army even as his father beamed with pride. But everyone figured Germany was a soft spot while a war waged elsewhere. There is even a lingering rumor in the family that a well-connected relative pulled strings to keep Artie safe.

Months later, on Aug. 18, 1971, Pfc. Arthur Kearney was one of 37 men killed in the crash of a Chinook helicopter in the Bavarian countryside near the town of Pegnitz.

"My mother knew when the Army men pulled up to the house," Kearney’s sister, Clare O’Brien, said in an interview. "She had already heard news of the crash, and she had a lot of … psychic vision. She knew Artie was on the helicopter, and she knew he was dead."

O’Brien was not home but her 7-year-old brother was playing outside, and his memory of his mother’s wailing disintegration as she was told is seared into the family’s collective soul.

And, in a way, of Pegnitz’s.

Last weekend, O’Brien and her husband and other family members, nine in all, left for Pegnitz, where the town and its historian, Andreas Bayerlein, are hosting a commemoration Wednesday, and a multi-month exhibit on the crash. Locals will memorialize the crash’s place in their own history, even as they welcome families of victims and offer closure.

So, as our nation exits its longest war, in Afghanistan, families mourn loved ones they lost to service during our last longest war, Vietnam. And they will be welcomed by the nation that we bombed into submission 26 years before this helicopter fell from the sky, during our largest war.

The family has never stopped thinking of Arthur. The crash is central to their story. A biography they created for him, complete with photos from every era of a life cut short, is comprehensive, and adoring, and incomplete. It includes stellar report cards all the way through graduate school. And it includes the telegram confirming Kearney’s physical identification as a crash fatality.

When O’Brien reached out in April, who could have known the headlines would be full of the U.S. attempt to leave Afghanistan on the 50th anniversary of her brother’s death? She simply had a story about loss and love, mourning and commemoration, and kindness.

The families have been overwhelmed by the commitment of Bayerlein, the Pegnitz historian, and the townspeople, to this event.

We have been told, in this era, that love is love is love is love, and this is true.

Grief is grief is grief is grief.

For Afghans and Germans and Vietnamese and Iraqis and Haitians and Americans, for parents mourning offspring killed in wars, or peacetime service, or car crashes or illnesses or acts of God.

That there are 50-year holes in the hearts of Kearney’s family where Arthur belonged is a tragedy. That there are strangers nearly 4,000 miles away going to extraordinary lengths to fill those holes is a miracle.

And the truth of the human experience is simply these tragic and miraculous polarities, and the actions we take to move the world toward one, or the other.

Columnist Lane Filler's opinions are his own.

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