While studying at Wagner to become an educator, Walter Murphy ’58 of Staten Island joined the Platoon Leaders Corps, a Marine Corps training program.
Nine years after graduating, Murphy was teaching on Long Island when he received orders sending him to Vietnam.
Before leaving, he visited the famous McSorley’s Ale House in the East Village and, being a military policeman, snapped a set of handcuffs onto the bar’s foot rail, saying, “I’ll be back for these” — but Major Murphy’s heroism in the opening hours of the Battle of Huế, in January 1968, prevented him from fulfilling that pledge.
Earlier this year, on the anniversary of his death, Murphy’s brother Hank, also a Wagner graduate and educator, visited two Staten Island watering holes with others who remembered Walter Murphy’s sacrifice, leaving portraits of the Marine — and twin pairs of handcuffs clipped to the bars’ foot rails — in remembrance.
