Kevin Booker

Before he shipped out to Vietnam, a 19-year-old Marine climbed onto a workbench and set a can of beer on a beam high above the garage. He said he would drink it when he came home. His name was Marcus Stoddard, and everybody called him Marc. He was a mechanic at Henry's Garage in Port Henry, a small town on Lake Champlain in upstate New York. He loved cars, his motorcycle, and eating his lunch on the garage roof, looking out over the lake. In August 1968 he enlisted in the Marines. That December, home on leave before his final training, his friends at the garage threw him a little party and handed out beers. Marc didn't open his. He jumped up on the bench and put the Schaefer can on a girder 12 feet up, next to the windows over the lake. About two months after he arrived in Vietnam, on April 26, 1969, Marc was killed by mortar fire on a hilltop in Quang Tri Province. He was 20. The garage closed that same year, and the fire department moved into part of the building. Over the years, almost everyone forgot about the beer. In May 2016, a group of officials toured the old garage to put it on the National Register of Historic Places. A woman from the Henry family remembered something her mother had told her when she was 14: Marc had left his beer up in the rafters. "It might still be there," she said. They searched the huge, dark building with flashlights for more than an hour. Then one beam of light landed on a faded can, high on a steel girder. The whole group went silent. It had been waiting for him for 47 years. It became the strangest war memorial in Port Henry: one unopened beer, for the boy who never came back for it.