#Meet the man who brought his buddies beer in the Vietnam War

In January 1968, Sergeant Rick Duggan did a double take when he saw his old friend, John “Chick” Donahue, standing in front of him.

“Chickie!” Duggan exclaimed. “Holy sh-t! What the hell are you doing here?!”

He had good reason to be confused. Donahue was a childhood friend from New York, where they played together as kids in the Inwood neighborhood. But their reunion was happening in Vietnam, more than 8,000 miles away. Weirder still, they were right in the middle of a combat zone in the Quang Tri province.

Donahue, then 26, had served four years in the Marine Corps, but he wasn’t currently enlisted. This was pretty obvious to everyone, given his casual outfit of blue jeans and a plaid shirt.

What was he doing there?

“I brought you some great beer from New York,” he told Duggan.

He wasn’t kidding. As Donahue explains in his new memoir, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Memoir of Friendship, Loyalty, and War” (William Morrow), co-written with Joanna Molloy, he set out on a four-month odyssey during the height of one of the most unpopular wars in US history, to find a half-dozen enlisted men from his neighborhood and hand-deliver each of them a cold — well, more like lukewarm — beer as a token of appreciation.

It was a crazy scheme, so much so that few of the soldiers he encountered in Vietnam believed him.

“Wait a minute,” one of Duggan’s fellow GIs in the 1st Air Cavalry Division’s Bravo Company exclaimed after learning of Donahue’s mission. “You’re telling me you don’t have to be here and you’re here?”

His task was anything but easy. Finding Duggan involved talking his way onto several military helicopters and fabricating a story that Duggan was his stepbrother, before finally tracking him down in the middle of an ambush patrol.

Donahue’s harebrained quest was hatched a few months earlier in New York, in November 1967, at a now-closed Irish pub on Sherman Avenue called Doc Fiddler’s. Donahue and several other regulars were watching a news report about an anti-war demonstration in Central Park. The bartender, nicknamed the Colonel, remarked to the group, “Somebody ought to go over to ’Nam, track down our boys from the neighborhood, and bring them each a beer!”

Donahue accepted the challenge. He loaded a duffel bag full of American beer — brands like Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz — and landed a job as an oiler on the Drake Victory, a merchant ship taking ammunition from New York to Vietnam.

Two months later, Donahue was in the middle of a war zone, with little to go on but the names of a half-dozen neighborhood friends and vague notions of their whereabouts, including in some cases their last known coordinates.

He traveled from Qui Nhon to Khe Sahn, talking his way onto convoys, military planes and helicopters, before arriving in Saigon right in the middle of the Tet Offensive, one of the bloodiest battles of the war. What he witnessed changed Donahue’s views — not his respect for the young men who sacrificed everything, but his feelings about the conflict.

“I had believed that we were winning,” the now-80-year-old writes, “because I’d believed what our leaders were saying.” What he found was something very different, even among his old neighborhood friends, who had much less confidence that the war would end in their favor.

Donahue managed to find four people on his list, and his beer-soaked reunions with them were both emotional and cathartic. Donahue remembers watching them as they “popped the cans open and … took their first sip of beer in a while.”

The soldiers weren’t just happy for a taste of their old lives, but a reminder that they weren’t forgotten. As Duggan told him, “The fact that you showed up is, like, whoa, there are actually people back home who care about us.”

All four of the neighborhood vets that Donahue found are still alive and reunited for a Pabst Blue Ribbon video in 2015. Donahue fondly recalls returning to Doc Fiddler’s in New York in 1968, after completing most of his mission, and the astonishment among the regulars that he somehow pulled it off.

“The Colonel, who never drank on duty, poured himself and everyone else a beer and raised it,” Donahue writes. “ ‘To Chickie,’ he said, ‘who brought our boys beer, respect, pride — and love, goddamn it!’ ”