For the first time in the Dorchester Day Parade’s 119-year history, the grand marshal won’t be riding alone. This June, in a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, an American and Vietnamese veteran of the war that led up to the fall will lead the parade side by side.

The two men – Charlie Santangelo, a 73-year-old who fought as a US Marine, and Tan Nhu Pham, a former South Vietnamese police lieutenant who survived seven years in a Việt Cộng re-education prison camp – have only met briefly since the war but they are united by their shared memory of those violent times. 

On a recent Thursday afternoon at Twelve Bens pub in Fields Corner, where retired police officers and firefighters clustered around the bar, Santangelo leaned back in his wheelchair and took a swig of Bud Light.

Sporting a shirt scripted with “US Marines” down the sleeve, he said, “I’m honored to do it. I’m representing all those guys. I grew up with 25 guys that I was in Vietnam with.”

After graduating from Boston Technical High School, now John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science, in June 1969, Santangelo hopped on the Red Line and headed to Government Center with some friends to enlist. 

“I’m proud of this country,” he said when asked if he was drafted. He didn’t need to be. He and two high school buddies joined the Marines together. “Because they were the badasses,” he said with a grin.

Charlie Santangelo on the ground in Vietnam.
Courtesy photo

He was 18 years old when he signed on and 19 when he returned to Dorchester. He remembers the open choppers that made him feel as if the sky was below him. He remembers the fear. He also is all too familiar with the sometimes deadly cost of the trauma that war brings to everything. 

“We mostly just talk to guys that were there,” Santangelo said, his voice dropping. “They understand. But we are dying off.”

Nhu Pham, now 72, and a leader in the Vietnamese community in Dorchester, took a tortuous path to Boston.  

Born in Quang Tri in 1952, he earned a law degree and became a police lieutenant before he was arrested near the Laotian border in March 1975, just weeks before South Vietnam collapsed. What followed was seven years of hard labor in a mountain prison camp, then years of weekly check-ins with government authorities. He moved to Dorchester with his family in 1993.

Since then, Nhu Pham has built a life here and raised two children. He has been a board member for the Vietnamese-American Community of Massachusetts since 2018.

“I love the Vietnamese community here, especially in Dorchester,” he said through an interpreter. “The community is really united and promotes culture and freedom for the loved ones in Vietnam that don’t have a voice.”

This pairing for the parade on June 1 didn’t happen by accident. Brianne Gore, who heads the Dorchester Day planning committee, said she has been pondering how to best represent the neighborhood’s Vietnamese community in the annual march.

“Dorchester Ave is made up of all Vietnamese businesses, and we have never had a grand marshal of Vietnamese descent before,” she explained.

Her panel searched in vain for an American veteran of Vietnamese heritage before finding a loophole in the Dot Day bylaw that mandating that the grand marshal be an American veteran: Nothing prevents the establishing of an honorary marshal.

After asking around, the committee selected Nhu Pham for the honorary role alongside Santangelo. 

“It’s going to be a profound moment,” Gore said. “People are just going to see these two gentlemen riding down Dot Ave, and see the strength and the power that these gentlemen gave to the American people. It’s gonna be a really special day.”

Santangelo was tapped as grand marshal for this year’s Dorchester Day parade with the help of Ed Kelly, an old friend, fellow veteran, third-generation firefighter – and former Dot Day grand marshal. He also is the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, a position he took after working as the union president for the Boston and Massachusetts chapters.

They first met when Kelly was in grade school, and Santangelo would carpool him to hockey practice. 

At 24, when Kelly got out of a three-year stint in the Air Force based in Florida, he returned to Dorchester to work at the firehouse with Santangelo, who every day would show up with a chocolate milk for Kelly.

“He’s the quintessential Dorchester guy,” Kelly said, sitting across from him in Twelve Bens. “Loyal, tough, unpretentious. A loose cannon.”

Santangelo quips that he could never be a politician – he’s not one to hold his tongue. Describing combat in Vietnam, for instance, he says Viet Cong and Vietnamese soldiers “all looked the same.”

Still, each Memorial Day, he and Kelly gather with fellow veterans at the Dorchester Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a grassy patch abutting Savin Hill Cove with a granite slab commemorating the 84 Dorchester lives lost in the war. In noting that Vietnam-born veterans are always friendly, Santangelo shrugged and said, “They are all nice guys.”

Now, half a century since the end, he still grapples with the legacy of a war that left some 58,000 American soldiers and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians dead while spurring protests and draft resistance across the United States. The anti-war movement remains pertinent today.

“Don’t let people forget about Vietnam,” Santangelo said. “When we were young kids, and young we were, we went for a reason, because we love our country.”

He said that drive of patriotism is no longer present in this country. “We see these idiots walking around holding signs for Hamas,” he said, referring to the protests that swept the country in the last year against Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “We have to stop the brainwashing,” he continued. “Get the country back where it’s supposed to be.”

Over the last 50 years, the war in Vietnam has been constantly studied and reexamined by historians and others with many of them concluding that it was an avoidable and tragic conflict that resulted in far too many deaths. It was also the first war that the United States lost. 

“I don’t know if they really wanted us to be there,” Santangelo said. “We thought we were supposed to be there. We were there to fight for freedom.”

For his part, Nhu Pham shares worries about the remembrance of the war. 

“Maybe the media and the press have misunderstood the Vietnam War,” he said. “They label the Vietnam War the ‘dirty war.’ It’s not a dirty war. We fight for freedom.”

For veterans like Nhu Pham and Santangelo, their time in Vietnam is worth remembering. 

“I’m very sure that the veteran and myself will have the same thoughts,” Tan said, referring to Santangelo, “thinking about the Vietnam War as a righteous war.”

For Santangelo, his sense of why the US went to war in Vietnam is easier to talk about than his 13 months on the ground there.

“We went there to fight the communists and save Vietnam from communism,” he said. 

As a longtime Dorchester resident, Santangelo said the Dorchester Day parade has evolved since he was a kid, and raising kids, in the neighborhood.

“My kids grew up at the parade,” he said, describing how they would show up, all decked out, and line the streets of Dorchester. One year, his family hosted a cookout for upwards of 100 people afterward. “It was a big party day for all the kids. It was fun. It’s just about the community.”

From left: Tan Nhu Pham, Khang Nguyen, and Charlie Santangelo chatted at Dorchester's Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Morrissey Boulevard last weekend. Seth Daniel photo

Nhu Pham is looking forward to being alongside Santangelo representing American and Vietnamese veterans. 

“When I walk along with the veterans at the parade, it will make me remember the friends I fought along with,” he said. “I still remember it like yesterday.”

This story derives from a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.