Display memorializes Bethel Park Marine

The portrait shows a youthful, handsome Marine in his dress blues, a slight smile surrounded by his square jaw and bright eyes conveying pride and determination.

That’s the way his parents wanted to remember him when they commissioned Washington County artist Nat Youngblood to paint the image of 2nd Lt. Leo J. Kelly III of Bethel Park.

Jack, as he was called by family members and friends, lost his life to an errant mortar shell on May 19, 1967, near the ostensibly demilitarized zone once separating Hồ Chí Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam from its U.S.-aligned neighbor to the south.

Two days after Jack’s death, a pair of Marines arrived at the Kelly house in the Brookside Farms neighborhood to deliver the news.

“I was playing at a friend’s house across the street, as we’d always do on a Sunday, and we were going to celebrate my birthday that day,” his brother Brian said. “I remember getting called home. I saw my dad on the phone. I didn’t see my mom anywhere. And I think my dad took me down into the backyard and told me what happened.”

With Brian’s assistance, the memory of his brother is being preserved at the Bethel Park Municipal Building. In a display case just inside the front entrance are items of Jack’s such as his Marine hat and sword, medals he was awarded, photographs and news clippings, and the U.S. flag that was sent to his family.

The planned eventual destination for the memorabilia is the Bethel Park Historical Society’s military display at the Schoolhouse Arts and History Center on South Park Road.

Of particular interest is a sizable scrapbook compiled by the Kellys’ mother, Margaret, including letters she and Jack exchanged while he was in Vietnam, plus correspondences between her and military officials after his death.

‘We need to have this book’

“There’s one letter in there that’s really touching. She wanted to know what really happened, and she got the usual drill from the government: This is what happened during the battle; he was injured,” Brian said. “She wanted to know very specifically what happened, and finally wrote her back about what specifically happened that night.”

Eventually, the collection came into the possession of Janice Kelly, Brian’s sister.

“About four years ago, she reached out to the Heinz History Center and took it down there,” he said. “They looked at it and said, ‘We need to have this book. We need to have it for study. We need to have it for the history of the Vietnam War, that part of it.’”

The history center kept the original contents and made copies for Brian, Janice and their brother, Jim.

Brian, who lives in Bethel Park, decided his book would make for a suitable donation on behalf of local history.

Regarding Jack Kelly’s history, he and his parents lived in Brookline until 1952, when they moved to a house on Comanche Road in Brookside Farms. Jack attended St. Anne’s School in Castle Shannon and then the all-male South Hills Catholic High School.

“He ended up at South Catholic with guys from Brookline and Beechview, tough group of guys,” Brian recalled, and Jack was subjected to classmates’ bullying. “My parents said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to send you downtown to the YMCA, and you’re going to start boxing.’

“He also bought a weight set, and we, as kids, remember him out in the driveway lifting weights. And he, by the time he was a junior at South Catholic, became a tackle on the football team.”

‘There wasn’t a war going on’

Jack graduated in 1962 and headed for Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., where he made all-state as a tackle. He also was recruited by the Marine Corps to attend officer training school.

“Back then, there wasn’t a war going on,” Brian said about John F. Kennedy’s tragically abbreviated presidency.

By the time Jack Kelly graduated from college in 1966, more than 300,000 American troops had been sent to southeastern Asia as the conflict in Vietnam intensified, with President Lyndon Johnson pledging on Memorial Day that the United States would not pull out of the war until victory had been achieved.

Having made a commitment to the Marines, Jack decided to continue officer training, delaying his plans to attend law school.

“He ended up coming home finally at Christmas and New Year’s,” Brian, who was 14 at the time, recalled. “He brought Jeannette (Noel of Nashville, Tenn.), who was his Southern belle he met down at Washington & Lee. They got engaged over Christmas. She was absolutely beautiful.”

Then Jack embarked overseas as an infantry platoon leader attached to Company I, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Division.

“Most of Lt. Kelly’s first three months in the war was spent on patrol, and a later rest-and-recreation stint in Okinawa was cut short for Operation Hickory,” a contemporary newspaper story reported.

The operation was intended to counter North Vietnam’s incursion to the Quảng Trị province, just to the south of the demilitarized zone established following the 1954 French withdrawal from the divided nation.

On the morning of May 18, the 3d Marine Division units launched Operation Hickory. Over the next 10 days, at least 156 Marines and sailors died in the fighting, according to The Virtual Wall Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Leo J. Kelly III is buried at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Peters.

“My mother once said her life was divided, and it really was, into before Jack died and after Jack died,” Brian Kelly said. “This was true for everyone in our family.”