Robert Omer Gagne

West Point, 1965

Be Thou At Peace

Posted by John Swensson on October 10, 2001:

THE CHICOPEE FLASH Last night, about midnight, I went to The Wall. I went to visit our 23 West point classmates who were killed in Vietnam. They were all there: our First Captain, Bob Arvin; our class comic, Patrick O'Toole; our first fatality, Gary Kadetz, whose death had been a great personal shock when I tripped over his body bag, another midnight, at the airstrip at Cu Chi. But last night I went, mostly, to see my roommate from senior year: "The Chicopee Flash." Bob's nickname was a deliberate misnomer. He was from Chicopee, but he was no flash.. Like Patton, it took him five years to get through West Point. Unlike Patton, Bob was slow and laid back, in part because of his natural inclinations, and in part because he was overweight. He was seldom on time, seldom had his shoes shined, and was at the bottom of the class in both academics and military aptitude. He was "Mr. No Sweat," and he loved to play cribbage. The perspectives now are changing as we change and get older. I started to cry and turned away from The Wall. Finally smoked a cigarette Ranger School style between cupped hands, and I found a new perspective as I faced out from the wall that Jack Wheeler, the freshman across the hall, had built. God, what a contribution he has made to our country and the Long Grey line of our alumni. The perspective of the Chicopee Flash looks out from The Wall at the Hart statue of the three soldiers, and the Women's Memorial. To the left, the Washington Monument, to the right, the Lincoln. Two of our finest Presidents, and the Chicopee Flash shares the mall with them, and our other classmates, the other members of the Long Grey Line who gave their lives in Vietnam-and the 58,000 other soldiers, men and women, whose service The Wall honors. And I thought, my God, what a privilege, what an honor, to have roomed with the Chicopee Flash, the Corps of Cadets' finest cribbage player, who was also one of our country's finest soldiers. When I was a child, I climbed the steps of the Washington Monument, the fewer steps of the Lincoln, and dreamed, intermittently, of the idea of West Point that I had seen in pictures. And in my life it was my great privilege to play cribbage with a man who now has a monument alongside those two Presidents; the Vietnam memorial had not been there when I was a child. The radiators banged, the minute callers yelled the number of minutes remaining until formation, and we still played cribbage, oblivious to the legacy that would be ours, the shared service to country, or the monument the would be his own, The Chicopee Flash. He graduated before the weight rules were that strictly enforced and he weighed 260 when he got to Fort Benning. He ate only one steak and drank only water each day of jump school and still lost nothing. Despite that, he made it through, earned his parachute wings, and then soldiered on through Ranger School, losing only five pounds in the process. It took courage and it took guts, but he made the mark and went on to lead our soldiers in Vietnam. But the weight finally got him. It complicated a stomach wound from a small caliber rifle bullet that would not heal, and things got worse, and after thirteen days, there was no more cribbage, here, for The Chicopee Flash. And we miss him. And Bob Arvin and Patty O'Toole, and Gary Kadetz, and all the others. We mourn their loss-we each deal with those losses in various ways. A trip to The Wall, as Jack Wheeler intended, really will help heal the nation-and the individual. Bob was an unlikely hero, but he was a hero. How fortunate we were to have known him, how much richer our lives for his sacrifice, and our collective service. And now his name is on the mall, on The Wall, next to the monuments with the names of Washington and Lincoln. And I suspect this midnight, in Heaven, it's after Taps, and Bob Gagne's got the blanket over the windows, and he's running the biggest cribbage tournament up there. And I'll bet they still call him. . .The Chicopee Flash. A classmate

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