CONWAY — “He was a true leader. You just knew it when you first saw him. We would have gone to the gates of hell if he had said that was the thing to do. Our loyalty was to him; loyalty to country and even the Marine Corps all came secondarily — the greatest shame you could have had was to screw up in front of him (and you didn’t even want to come close to even remotely finding out what that might be like). He brought the best out of all of us. He was my hero.”
So spoke Gary Neely, 73, of Pennsylvania, who was an 18-year-old Marine lance corporal and company gunner when he first met Lt. Frank McCarthy on Neely’s first tour of duty in Vietnam in 1967.
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