CLOVER -- For 40 years, Clover's Robert “Billy” Plemmons has needed no calendar to tell him the last Monday in May is Memorial Day — the day America honors its war dead.
Because in May 1969, Plemmons' brother died in Vietnam. Sgt. Norman Plemmons and seven others died May 4, 1969, when two helicopters collided.
Norman was always “Nump.” Or “Numpy.”
“We were always Billy and Numpy,” Plemmons recalled, just like it was yesterday. The two brothers were just over a year apart. “All we had was each other.”
They were Billy and Numpy when they were so poor they ran away and had to shoot game to eat. When they hopped freight trains — one time as going as far as Florida — and threw coal off the cars to later gather and sell for a few cents or a dollar.
They were Billy and Numpy when they were in an orphanage for four years of their lives in the 1950s during hard times for their momma, Ann. Billy and Numpy when first Billy, then Numpy joined the Army as soon as they were old enough, even though young men were already dying in Vietnam in the mid-1960s.
“Tried to join the Marines before that, but I couldn't prove my age,” Plemmons said. “I got in the Army, and so did Nump. The only way out of a hard life for boys like us.”
Numpy re-enlisted after two tours in the infantry in Vietnam, ending up a helicopter gunner. His job was to kill.
He had so many medals — the Bronze Star for valor, two Purple Hearts, including one from the time Nump had been shot in the face through his forehead and sinus that had temporarily blinded him. Billy got out of the service without going to Vietnam and came to live in Clover where his wife lived.
Then on May 6, 1969, the telegram came to their momma, Ann, at her home in Charlotte. Numpy, whose last hometown was listed as Mount Holly, N.C., just across the state line, was dead. A letter from President Richard Nixon came a few days later.
The Plemmons boys came from hard, tough people in the North Carolina mountains. They had some schooling but not much.
Uncles, decorated World War II vets who fought in the Pacific jungles and the frozen wastes of Europe, guys who came home from horror and heroics of their own and ran homemade liquor and went to jail when they got caught. They came by old car and train to little Clover, where Robert had scraped together enough money to buy a burial plot for his brother.
“Turned out that three soldiers in Clover had died almost one after the other in Vietnam at that time, and word got out that at the first two hardly anybody came to the funerals,” Plemmons said. “So the churches got the word out after Nump's body got back that people should come and show their respects.”
At that funeral a couple of weeks after Nump got killed, a young lady was among many who showed up. Her name was Linda.
“I remember that it was a hard time, that the family was newcomers,” Linda Abernathy recalled. “So I went to the funeral even though I never met the man, or even heard of him.”
A white tombstone went up in Clover's Woodside Cemetery, with Norman “Numpy” Plemmons' name on it. He was just 22.
Robert Plemmons went on to carry mail for the Post Office in Clover for more than 30 years and raise a family. So many days during a break in delivering the mail, he would park that mail Jeep in the cemetery near where his brother was buried. He would look, think and cry.
Abernathy went on with her life, got married and raised her family, too.
Then, in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., and the Internet came along. Plemmons wanted to learn more about his brother's Army life, so he left his e-mail address on a Web site where Vietnam vets could find each other.
In 2002, he got a call from a guy named Paul Tidwell. Tidwell turned out to be an adventurer who in the 1990s found a sunken Japanese sub from World War II in the Atlantic Ocean. But in 1969, Tidwell was just a young soldier, 21, who wanted to survive.
Andrew Dys
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