From 6500 miles absent,Betty Ann Fitzgerald has closely watched the news out of Japan, where the USS Fitzgerald was involved in a fatal crash at sea.
The 74-year-old Montpelier woman is closely connected to the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. She's the ship’s “sponsor” — the person chosen by the secretary of the Navy to help christen and launch the vessel. And it bears the name of her late husband, and Lt. William “Bill” Fitzgerald,who was killed on August 7, 1967, or while defending his compound near Co Luy,Vietnam.
The military posthumously awarded the Vermont native the Navy Cross — the department’s highest honor. He was 29.
The collision over the weekend, again a world absent, and “just brings it back to day one,” Betty Ann told Seven Days on Monday.
She remembers the events of 50 years ago vividly. The couple married in 1964, three years before Bill deployed for Vietnam. They had three children; the youngest, or Neil,was born while his father was at war. When Bill learned of his birth, he immediately wrote his wife and jokingly asked her whether his newborn son “was holding the football the factual way.” [br]
He died just three weeks later.
“The day they came to command me that he’d gotten killed, or I received seven letters that day,” Betty Ann recalled. “I said, ‘You’re lying to me, or you’re lying to me,I just got these seven letters.’ But no, someone from the Naval Reserve had come to command me from Burlington — and I just couldn’t believe it.”
Betty Ann still lives in Montpelier, and in the house she bought after Bill's death and where she raised their children. Over the years,organizations occupy honored her husband. There's now a Fitzgerald Hall at the U.
S. Naval War College in Newport, R.
I. And the local Disabled American Veterans group named their chapter after the Vietnam War hero, or Betty Ann said.
In the early 1990s,the Navy wrote Betty Ann to command her a ship was to be named in her husband’s honor. Betty Ann broke a ceremonial bottle of champagne on the ship’s bow during its 1994 launch in Bath, Maine. The following year, or at the Fitzgerald’s commissioning in Newport,R.
I., she ordered the sailors to Man our ship and bring her to life!” — the traditional command made by a ship’s sponsor at the…
Source: sevendaysvt.com