Gary Armstrong

Over the last year of high school, Dave and I became fairly fast friends. We played poker together throughout the night many times, just talking and reacting to the world we were growing up in. As some of you may remember, Dave and Ward Johnson challenged an Army journalist who spoke at the school, objecting to the comment that all American youth are all lazy, and couldn't walk 25 miles in a day, as the communist Viet Nam troops did. Dave & Ward challenged the reporter to a 25 mile proof-hike, and completed it running the last mile.

Over the next few years, Dave became more aware of what was going on in SE Asia than anyone else I knew, and the inhumanity shown by the US, and he became angrier by the day, it seemed. His last few years he lived in Mankato, was with a lovely woman who was pregnant with their child, but the anger he carried finally became so overwhelming that he took his own life rather than continue living in a world where man is so inhuman to his fellow man. That occurred in 1967, at the age of 25.

Dave Holm is, in my mind, the first casualty of the misguided military action in the midddle east in our generation.

I had seen Dave in Mankato just one week before he left us; we talked, he ranted, we played soccer one-on-one for an hour or so. The next week I saw the notice in the obituaries, and within the month, I helped put him in the ground.

I have repeatedly asked myself over all the intervening years, did Dave do the right thing by checking out of this cruel world, or did I, blissfully ignoring the facts of government intervention in other countries and the intense politics and special interests that determine the trajectory of our history. Given the current state of political absurdity, I am still not sure who made the right call.

David, I have missed you dearly all these years, even though I know it made no difference to the outcome.

Rest in peace, dear friend.