Ex-GI Makes Good on Wartime Promise to His Slain Buddy

The vision of his own death came to Walter Murphy somewhere west of Saigon in the winter of 1967.

In preparation, the 20-year-old soldier from California slipped off the gold ring that his high school sweetheart had given him and asked his best war buddy to return it to the girl as a reminder of their love.

Two weeks later, a land mine ended Murphy’s life. For his friend, Robert Buono, it was the beginning of a dogged quest to fulfill the wartime promise.

Last week, after 20 years of searching, Buono finally talked with Dorothy Hughes, a 37-year-old Covina woman who was once a bubbly young teen-ager with a crush on a varsity football player named Murphy.

Talking by telephone, the two shared memories and discussed plans for Buono, 40, of Hammond, Ind., to give Hughes the ring that the slain soldier wanted her to have. No date for the meeting has been set.

“I never despaired,” Buono said of his years of searching. “I promised a friend, and it was a promise I wanted to keep.”

For Hughes, who never married, news of the ring was bittersweet.

“After he died, I just put on blinders,” she said. “I never dealt with it. I never wanted to discuss it. But I think the time is right now. I feel like I can handle it.”

The sweethearts met at Northview High School in Covina, where Hughes was a 14-year-old freshman and Murphy was the 17-year-old junior who took her to the movies, Johnny Mathis concerts and surfing parties at Huntington Beach.

Enlisted in Army

After three years of courtship, Murphy enlisted in the Army. Before leaving for Vietnam he asked Hughes to marry him, but she said she first wanted to finish her senior year in high school.

“I gave him this ring to let him know that I loved him,” she said, “but we just had to wait.”

Serving together in Vietnam in the 1/11th Armored Cavalry, Buono became a friend of Murphy, who he described as a “California surfer boy,” with a muscular build, sun-bleached hair and an easy smile.

Over the next six months, they developed the trust that comes from watching one another’s backside in the face of danger. Then, one day, Murphy told Buono of his vision.

“It was like he had a hot line to God,” Buono said. “He just knew it was going to happen.”

Murphy gave his friend the ring, as well as a photo of a bikini-clad Hughes and her address. Buono slipped the ring onto his own pinky and promised he would try to find her.

“He wanted her to know that he loved her,” Buono said. “But he also didn’t want her to miss any part of her life because of the loss of him.”

Two days after Murphy died, Buono was seriously wounded in an ambush, and the photo and the address were lost. By the time he returned home from the war, he had forgotten Hughes’ name.

The Army and the Veterans Administration refused to release any information on Murphy’s family, Buono said. Other locater groups had no luck.

Came Up Empty-Handed

Undaunted, he took the ring and wound his way across the country during the next few years, ultimately hitchhiking down the California coast in the hope of finding a brokenhearted girl named Dorothy. But he continued to come up empty-handed.

“I had no ideas,” Buono said. “All I had was a description of a good-looking blonde in a bikini on a beach and I would imagine that’s a relatively common scene in California.”

Over the years he made various attempts to locate the families of Hughes and Murphy, but it wasn’t until Buono, who had become an artist, memorialized the scene in a painting that any doors began to open. On a 5-by-6-foot canvas, he sketched himself, Murphy and another war buddy surrounded by a rendering of the ring.

Eventually, Chicago-based columnist Bob Greene learned of the painting, which is on display at the Hammond, Ind., public library, and used his syndicated column to launch a search for Hughes.

When Greene learned that she had attended the Covina high school, he contacted the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, which located Hughes on June 1.

“It’s like I feel that a circle has been completed in my life and I can go on with another circle,” she said. “But this story really isn’t about me. It’s about the bonding that these boys have.”

Buono, who is married with two children, concurred.

“Vietnam veterans are calling me from across the country and telling me about this burden they’ve carried all this time,” he said. “I’m giving them absolution with the ring story.”