Richard Reynolds

Quick Facts

• Role: Marine Second Lieutenant; one of the Inwood soldiers Chick sets out to find in Vietnam
• First Mention: Chapter 2
• Unit/Context: Officer in the Third Marine Division’s A Company
• Fate: Killed in action near Dong Ha on January 20, 1968—the day after Chick arrived in Vietnam
• Key Relationships: John “Chick” Donohue; his younger brother Kevin; the men of his platoon
• Physical description: Not provided; the narrative defines him by duty, leadership, and loss

Who They Are

Richard “Richie” Reynolds is the soldier Chick hopes to surprise with a beer—and never reaches. As a name on a crumpled list that becomes an absence at the center of the story, Reynolds embodies the war’s irrevocable cost. His death transforms the beer run from a comic, quixotic errand into a pilgrimage shadowed by grief, anchoring the book’s exploration of The Realities and Absurdities of War. He stands for the Inwood boys who didn’t come home, and for the communities that kept sending love across an ocean even when love couldn’t stop the bullets.

Personality & Traits

Reynolds never appears “onstage,” but the circumstances of his final hours reveal a great deal. His leadership role, the mission he undertook, and the men who followed him sketch a portrait of courage fused to obligation—an officer who led from the front, even when the odds were terrible.

• Brave and dutiful: He led a charge to rescue a surrounded scouting party near Dong Ha, despite facing more than 300 North Vietnamese Army soldiers; that decision reflects a duty to protect his men over his own safety.
• Decisive leadership: As a Second Lieutenant riding atop an amphibious troop carrier, he made himself visible and vulnerable to direct his platoon—leadership as exposure, not distance.
• Self-sacrificing: He was killed along with twelve of his men, but the trapped scouts were saved; his final act exchanged his life for theirs.
• Community-rooted: His younger brother Kevin’s eagerness to give Chick his location shows a family tied tightly to Inwood’s web of care and expectation—a home front that believed presence, even via a beer and a message, mattered.

Character Journey

Reynolds’s arc is posthumous: from a hopeful name on Chick’s list to the most sobering line in the epilogue. Added early in Chick’s mission, he is killed on January 20, 1968—before Chick can find him. That absence becomes a kind of constant presence, reframing every lucky break and comic detour as something that could just as easily end in a letter home or a name on a wall. When the “Where Are They Now?” section confirms the details, it retroactively darkens the earlier chapters: the beer that never arrives reveals what the beer run can and cannot do.

Key Relationships

• John “Chick” Donohue: Reynolds is a core reason Chick goes at all—a friend to be found, a promise to be kept. Chick’s ignorance of Reynolds’s death throughout the journey creates tragic irony: the goodwill and bravado propelling him exist alongside a loss he can’t yet see, reminding readers that courage and futility can occupy the same mission.

• His Brother (Kevin): Kevin’s sharing of Richie’s last known location captures the neighborhood’s faith in Chick’s errand and the families’ hunger for connection. The exchange is small—an address, a nod—but it carries the weight of hope that a message, a handshake, or a beer might ward off distance and danger.

• His Platoon: As their officer, Reynolds embodies the military code of care and accountability. His decision to charge in defense of a trapped scouting party is leadership as communal protection, the lived expression of Friendship, Loyalty, and Camaraderie.

Defining Moments

Reynolds’s life intersects the narrative at crucial points, each one redefining the tone of Chick’s quest.

• Added to the list: Early in Chick’s planning, Kevin provides Richie’s location, turning a barroom idea into a ledger of real people with real risks. It personalizes the mission and sets up the story’s most painful absence.

• Killed near Dong Ha while rescuing a trapped scouting party: On January 20, 1968, Reynolds leads his platoon—A Company, Third Marine Division—against overwhelming numbers and is machine-gunned from atop his amphibious troop carrier. His death, along with twelve of his men, saves the scouts; it crystallizes the book’s meditation on Patriotism and Support for Soldiers, showing patriotism as a willingness to spend one’s life for others.

• Epilogue revelation: The “Where Are They Now?” section confirms what Chick never learned on the ground. This delayed knowledge recontextualizes the earlier humor and luck, insisting that even the most well-meaning gestures live under the shadow of loss.

Essential Quotes

“He had Richard (Richie) Reynolds Jr. on his list, but he never found him, because the young Marine 2nd Lieutenant was killed the day after Chick arrived.”

This sentence delivers the book’s hardest irony: a mission premised on presence undone by time. It collapses the distance between intention and outcome, turning Chick’s odyssey into a memorial he didn’t realize he was making.

“Reynolds’s younger brother Kevin said that the twenty-three-year-old officer was leading his platoon, part of the Third Marine Division’s A Company, in a charge to rescue a scouting party near Dong Ha…”

The details—age, unit, location—ground the abstraction of sacrifice in concrete fact. “Leading his platoon” signals an ethos: authority as obligation, the kind that must be exercised at the point of greatest risk.

“Reynolds was machine-gunned down from atop his amphibious troop carrier, killed along with twelve of his men, but the scouting party was saved.”

The juxtaposition is brutal and clarifying: death and salvation in the same breath. The sentence preserves the rescue as a victory while refusing to prettify its cost, capturing the book’s insistence that courage does not cancel tragedy—it coexists with it.