To the Editor:

These names Delano Jr., Crocker, Price, Avery, Bobson Jr., and Cyr are not names in the phone book. These are the names of young boys, as you are now who plied the streets of Bath, played on her playgrounds and attended her schools. These young men gave the full measure to protect your First Amendment rights.

I know you were expressing those rights. You callously and deliberately destroyed a bench bearing their names.

You, as an American, who find fault with his or her government, can burn the American flag or a draft card.

You see, it wasn’t the burning the flag or draft card that was important to them, it was the U.S. Constitution that gives you that right to express your displeasure. That one document is more powerful than any weapon yet devised by man.

I know that you don’t have a complaint with the names Delano Jr., Crocker, Price, Avery, Bobson Jr. and Cyr, because you took out your frustration on a park bench.

Those names would allow you that. But I don’t.

That was a very trying time in our nation history. Most Americans did not know a country called Vietnam. But Delano Jr., Crocker, Price, Avery, Bobson Jr., and Cyr would come to know her like the streets of Bath.

The language was unknown, the food was almost uneatable and conditions almost unbearable. Places they would know with names not known to them, Tet Offensive, Bong Son, Kham Duc — all just names, places to pass through, before home.

Now Delano Jr., Crocker, Price, Avery, Bobson Jr., Cyr, not names in a phone book, stand at parade rest, in the Pantheon of heroes at the side of God.

Your day will come, as mine and all mortals will.

David S. Kaler
Bath