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Point and hoped to eventually study medicine. He had received two bronze stars for valor

while in Vietnam. He piloted a small motorboat for the Mobile Assistance Training

Team, and his wife, Mary Anne Pettit, remembers his letters describing the fear he felt as

he trolled up and down the river with the Vietcong watching from both banks. He

believed he would die at any moment.

After six months in Vietnam, Pettit was ready to go home. His good friend and high

school lacrosse rival, Lieutenant Ray Enners, had been killed in an ambush, and the

futility of teaching military maneuvers to the South Vietnamese was wearing on him. He

wanted to go back to Long Island, back to his wife.

In tenth grade, he'd started dating Mary Anne Mollico, a pretty, auburn-haired

cheerleader and gymnast at Huntington High School, where Pettit had been a top athlete

and scholar. They married six years later, in 1967. Though they were poor, Mary Anne

regarded their marriage as a "fairy tale." Chris was, it seemed to those who knew him

then, a prince of a man. There was something about him, they recall, that held your

attention--when he looked at you, it was as if he saw straight into your soul. He was a

man other men and women instinctively followed.

Pettit had chosen West Point over Harvard because it offered a salary, and he knew his

family needed the income. Additionally, Pettit wanted to play for the West Point lacrosse

coach, James F. Adams, who was a legend in the sport. At West Point, Pettit was the

academy's leading scorer and team captain, and was twice named to the All-American

team. He graduated with honors in 1967, the year General Westmoreland declared U.S.

victory in Vietnam. After two and a half years of training at the Nike Hercules Missile

Battery Site in Zweibrucken, Germany, Pettit was shipped off to Vietnam.

When Mary Anne received a telegram at their home in Huntington, New York, in May

1970, she assumed the worst. She and Chris had planned to spend his upcoming R&R

together in Hawaii, and Mary Anne now feared that that wasn't going to happen. Her

hands shook as she opened the envelope, and read: "Captain Pettit has suffered a severe

hematoma to his right thigh, and it 's traveling toward his heart. We have to Medevac him

to Japan."

It was only a bruise--a nasty bruise that felt as if he'd broken his femur, but still only a

bruise. He'd caught a knee from another player while fighting for a loose basketball at

district headquarters in Vietnam, and a week later was in Japan being diagnosed by

Captain Marvel, a marvelously named Army doctor who assured him, "We' ll fix you."

But Pettit didn't want to be fixed--at least, not in order to return to combat in a war he no

longer believed in. He wanted out. According to Mary Anne, her husband--like so many

other soldiers--had been traumatized by the war. A devout Roman Catholic (in the 1980s

he would become a eucharistic minister in his local church, Lady Queen of Martyrs), he'd

had serious philosophical issues with what he and the U.S. military were doing in

Vietnam. He'd had especial difficulty with carrying out his assigned task of teaching the

Vietnamese how to fight once he realized that they didn't want to learn. They'd rather die.

Captain Marvel was surprised when Pettit told him that he didn't want to go back. "This is

not going to be my career," he said. Pettit was shipped to St. Albans Hospital, in Queens,

New York, and he was there for six weeks, until the hematoma dissipated. He resigned

his commission in June 1971.

Major Peter Bouton, his commanding office, wrote:

It is extremely unfortunate that this outstanding young officer will not continue to pursue

an Army career, as he has the potential of surpassing the vast majority of his

contemporaries in individual professional development.

Pettit still wanted to become a doctor. He had hoped that his outstanding high school

record, his schooling at West Point, and his service in Vietnam would be enough to get

him into a top