Letters of man killed in Vietnam become book

SOUTH PORTLAND – For more than three decades, Gary Toppi tried not to think about the death of his big brother Chris in Vietnam.

It felt like torture when South Portland High School, in 1986, honored Chris and the city’s other veterans who were killed in the war. Gary could never get himself to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

“I wanted to bury it,” Gary said. “For a long time I wouldn’t even talk about him … Family life went downhill when he died.”

But a chance meeting with a local writer last November offered Gary and his family the impetus to deal with 34 years of grief. The writer, Robert Carr, was hoping to compile letters from Vietnam veterans into a book. Carr got in touch with Gary, hoping he was related to the Christopher John Toppi who had a street named for him over by the Maine Mall.

“At first, when he called, I was defensive,” Gary said. “I was reluctant to bring up those emotions again. On the other hand, I wanted to do the right thing for Chris.”

At Carr’s request, Gary asked his mother whether she had any letters Chris had written home from Vietnam. His mother, Virginia, produced a cache of old shoe boxes containing 126 letters from Chris, from the time he enlisted in the Marines until his death in January 1968 at age 18.

When Gary and his wife, Bernice, started poring over the letters, they understood right away how special they were.

“It brought Chris back to me,” Gary said of the letters that trace his experiences from boot camp in 1966 to his final assignment along the DMZ.

“For a young boy to write all those letters was amazing. You see such growth in them,” said Bernice, who never had the chance to meet Chris. “Every letter is positive and caring. They show him to be a very dedicated man.”

The letters, which Bernice and Gary spent weeks putting in order and mounting into three archival-quality binders, reveal how a rebellious high school dropout grew into a still funny, but also wise, sensitive man.

His last letter, on Jan. 20, 1968, apologized for how little chance he’d had to write in the past week.

“For the last eight days we’ve hardly had a chance to sleep,” he wrote. “Just about every day and night, always either one or the other, we had some kind of a patrol or ambush.”

After they’d read the letters, Gary and Bernice tried to copy them to share with others. But there were so many and the copies so poor in quality, that they soon gave up. Carr advised the Toppis to publish the letters in book form.

The couple enlisted the aid of Kathy Morrissette of Legacy Life Stories, a company that turns family memorabilia and memories into books. She urged Gary and Bernice to include old photographs, their research into family history and other letters of remembrance about Chris from old friends and relatives.

The project, which took more than a year to complete, produced a 199-page, hardbound book, titled “In Honor of Chris Toppi,” that was published in May.

Upon its completion, Gary and Bernice held a barbecue on the deck of their South Portland home for all the people who were mentioned in Chris’ letters or included letters about Chris for the epilogue. Close to 30 of Chris’ relatives and old friends ordered copies, at $85 each.

For Gary, the book of letters has brought Chris to life and helped him start to say goodbye.

In October, Gary and Bernice traveled to Washington, D.C., to see for the first time the 20-year-old Vietnam Veterans Memorial that bears Chris’ name.

They had heard that park rangers gather up the things that people leave at the memorial and put some of them into an archive. So, as they took their leave, Gary bent down and propped a copy of Chris’ book at the base of the wall, beneath his name.

“The most important thing for us is giving people the opportunity to remember Chris long after his generation is gone,” Gary said. “It definitely makes it easier to talk about it.”