Longtime Newton resident and Vietnam War veteran Kevin McNamara has led an effort to hang banners honoring Newton residents killed in war at the intersection of Adams and Watertown streets ahead of Memorial Day.
Wearing a Vietnam War museum hat and a tropical shirt, McNamara stood at that intersection admiring the banners he had spent months bringing to life. The idea came to him about two years ago while driving through small towns in Western Massachusetts, where banners hung from telephone poles to honor local soldiers killed in Vietnam.
McNamara remembers the day he returned home from the war. He flew from Vietnam to Japan, then to California, before landing in Boston. He took the train from Logan Airport to Woodland Station and walked to his home in West Newton.
His mother was standing at the kitchen sink with her back to the door when McNamara quietly walked into the house in his uniform and dropped his duffel bag on the floor. She turned around, saw him, and fainted on the spot. She had expected him to arrive a week later.
“She was out cold,” McNamara said.
His mother had lung cancer and relied on an oxygen tank to breathe. Serving thousands of miles away in Vietnam, McNamara had not known how seriously ill she had become.
Three days after he returned, his mother died. A week later, his father died too from what McNamara believes to be a broken heart.
“I came home and my world started changing,” he said.
Many other young men from Newton served in the war as well. Twenty-four of them never came back home.
Coming of age
Before Vietnam, McNamara paid little attention to politics or the future. Growing up in Newton, he spent his days driving around with friends and looking for a good time.
“I didn’t care about anything but my own pleasures,” he said.
After McNamara graduated from high school, his father had grown frustrated with the direction his son’s life was heading and told him he could no longer stay at home. McNamara moved to Southern California, getting by on odd jobs and sleeping on couches. Eventually, he returned home to Newton.
Not long after that, McNamara enlisted in the military.
He cut his long hair and adjusted to military life. While stationed in Kansas, he received orders to deploy to Vietnam.
“I was just lucky and unlucky enough to be in that position,” McNamara said.
He was paired with a South Vietnamese infantry unit in an area soldiers referred to as “Rocket Alley,” where incoming rockets and small-arms fire were common.
“It wasn’t always dire,” McNamara said. “You made friends too.”
Those who didn’t return
McNamara originally hesitated when fellow veterans at American Legion Post 440 in Nonantum asked him to join the organization’s leadership. Now about 15 years later, he serves as the post’s vice commander.
As the ranks of Vietnam veterans continue to shrink, McNamara said he has felt a growing urgency to preserve the memory of those who never came home.
“There’s only half of us left,” he said.
He grew up with many of the 24 young men from Newton killed in Vietnam.
“Bad place, wrong time,” McNamara said.
During a meeting at Post 440 last year, McNamara proposed creating banners to honor these men.
Realizing he was not getting any younger, McNamara decided to take on the project on his own.
Memory into focus
McNamara was able to acquire photos of six of the 24 Newton men killed in Vietnam, as well as of one killed in the Korean War.
McNamara reached out to the Graphic Communications department at Newton North High School, where teacher Tom Donnellan enthusiastically joined the effort to make the banners a reality. Donnellan assigned teaching assistant Stephanie Mamis to supervise seniors Matthews Santana and Anushka Dattar as they worked under a tight two-week deadline to complete the banners.
Each of the banners would display a portrait photograph of a veteran, but many of the original photographs were grainy, low-resolution images pulled from old yearbooks and newspaper clippings. Santana found an AI-assisted image-enhancement tool that helped refine the photos so the faces would remain clear when enlarged onto the banners.
Santana said it meant a lot to restore the images in high resolution to honor those who had died. When McNamara came in to see the finished product, Santana saw McNamara’s emotional reaction to the before-and-after transformation. To Santana, that emotion made the impact of the work feel real.
“When I see their faces and the face of happiness, I get really happy, honestly,” Santana said.
Mamis said students rarely get to see the direct impact that their work has on the community.
“I always think of the kids, like these kids are about that age,” she said.
She said the project was a reminder that many students in McNamara’s generation left high school and entered a world shaped by war and the possibility of death.
Now, seven banners hang above the intersection of Adams and Watertown streets, bearing the faces of six Newton residents killed in Vietnam and one killed in the Korean War.
McNamara has found others in Newton willing to help carry the project forward.
Shortly after McNamara returned home from the war, his father took McNamara down to the bar in the basement and poured him a drink. Now, after his father has died, McNamara says he had never seen his father as proud as he was then.
Decades later, McNamara hopes to continue adding banners honoring Newton residents killed in Vietnam and other wars.
He says of his work, “If you don’t do it, who’s going to do it?”