‘A smile like he knew something no one else knew’: Poe killed in Vietnam less than a month after turning 21

Published 8:00 am Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Editor’s note: This is the fifteenth in a series of stories profiling the veterans of Whitfield and Murray counties who lost their life during the Vietnam War.

Leonard Suggs was working part time at the old Boylston Crown Cotton Mill, and knew his friend Jerry Poe was returning to Dalton on leave before shipping out with the Army to Vietnam. Jerry’s father, Idus Poe Sr., was also working at the mill when Jerry walked in during their lunch break.

“Jerry talked for a little while and all of a sudden he went to cryin’ a little bit,” Leonard recalled. “He said, ‘Dad, I’m not going to make it back — I’m not coming back home.’ Idus said, ‘Now, Son, if you feel that strong, I don’t want you to go back.’ Jerry said, ‘Dad, I have to.’ We sat there in the break room and I couldn’t stand it — I cried like a baby. He said to me, ‘Leonard, don’t cry. Don’t worry about it. The Lord’s going to take care of us. But I’m telling you, I won’t be back. I feel it in my heart, I won’t be back.’”

Three-and-a-half weeks after arriving in Vietnam, Pfc. Jerry Lynn Poe was killed on Sept. 15, 1968, during a firefight in Long An Province as part of a light weapons unit of C Company, 2nd Battalion, 60th Infantry Regiment of the 9th Infantry Division. He was also the son of Christine Keeter Poe, and a 1966 graduate of North Whitfield High School. He is buried in Whitfield Memorial Gardens.

Jerry had turned 21 on Aug. 17 and called his family from California that day. He began his tour of duty in Vietnam on Aug. 21, and was killed just two days after Raymond Beam of Murray County died in Pleiku Province during a combat mission. A Western Union telegram to his parents announcing Jerry’s death, dated Sept. 18, stated, “Gunshot wound received while on combat operation when engaged with a hostile force in a firefight.”

Oldest brother Idus Jr. remembered he and next brother H.R. and Jerry liked to camp out in the woods around their neighborhood behind Carolyn Baptist Church.

“We’d build a little old hut and sometimes we had a tent, and he was right in the middle of it although he was the youngest boy,” Junior said. “He was always ambitious about getting it ready to go, and one of the leaders. One time he and H.R. and I all piled on one bicycle and rode around the block — Jerry was sitting on the handlebars. We had a trail through the woods that went to Albertson’s Swimming Pool, and we also swam at Mitchell Bridge when we were teenagers. Jerry was real protective of our younger sisters, Patricia and Sheila.”

Leonard said the neighborhood boys “fought and boxed and everything else.”

“Me and him both was in the RAs (Royal Ambassadors at Carolyn Baptist); Ralph Schneider taught us in RAs,” he noted. “We’d ride our bikes and camp out in that Carolyn neighborhood, and sometimes we’d go sneak into the Cherokee Drive-In. Jerry was a good guy. He was into weight lifting, and he put so much weight on the bar it’d end up bending. It was unreal how strong the boy was … he could take an apple and just bust it all to pieces with his hand.”

Competitive yet generous

“Competitive” was a word that described Jerry, H.R. said.

“We were playing on the church RA baseball team,” he remembered. “I was pitching, Junior was hind catcher and Jerry was in center field. I walked several batters and Jerry hollered, ‘Hey, H.R., quit walking ’em — let ’em hit the ball! We’re wanting to play out here in the field too!’”

H.R. said Jerry won bodybuilding trophies three years in a row at the Dalton Recreation Center. Junior said Jerry moved up a weight class the last year he won so one of his workout pals could win first in his former weight category.

Junior had married and moved out, but came back one day to find Jerry lifting weights.

“What he had was a horse-and-buggy axle and some spinning weights on it (used to hold down spools of yarn in a mill),” he said. “That was his workout, he did the clean-and-jerk and everything. He was pressing it over his head standing when I saw him.”

Oldest sister Patricia said the family was very close.

“He was so good to us, watched over us,” she continued. “When my mother would cook us squash and okra, the two of us girls sat there at the table when everyone got (finished), and Jerry would stand there and peep around the corner and see we weren’t eating our squash and okra. He’d come over there and hold his little fist up and say, ‘You girls better eat!’ and he’d shake his fist at us — but he never touched us. So we would choke that squash and okra down because he was taking care of us.”

Sheila remembers Jerry’s generosity.

“All the boys worked hard, and when Jerry was old enough he would push his mower around the neighborhood and cut yards,” she said. “Sometimes a truck would pick the boys up to take them to pick cotton on Rauschenberg Road or in Chatsworth …

“One time Jerry was walking down the hall at Pleasant Grove Elementary and stopped at the Coke machine. Me and Pat were coming down the hall the other way, and saw Jerry was fixin’ to get him a Co-Cola, and we didn’t have any money. We kinda ducked and was going to go down the other hall but he saw us, and he knew what we was doing. We wanted him to enjoy his Co-Cola and not feel bad about having the money to get it. We knew that he’d worked hard, but he hollered at us and said, ‘Hey girls, come here’ and he bought us a Coke with his money. He was real generous like that. He sent money home (from his duty stations) for me to put in the bank for him. He always told me in his letters that if Daddy or any of us needed money, to let them have it.”

Pat said Jane Rogers was Jerry’s high school sweetheart, and they had plans to wed and buy a house in Dawnville near her parents.

“He had a 1962 Ford he sometimes had to push off to get started because he wanted to save his money to get married,” said Pat.

Pat added that her husband, Billy, and Jerry were friends, and they both bought her and Jane cashmere sweaters and Chanel No. 5 perfume as Christmas presents — and as gag gifts, they wrapped up coconuts.

“Momma laughed with them,” she recalled. “Billy has missed Jerry so much too.”

Pat remembered carrying Jerry to the airport for his deployment with Billy, Sheila and Jane also going along.

“It was sad when he left. We were standing there — us girls was just crying — and Jerry hugged us all bye and looked at Billy and said, ‘Take care of my girls,’” she said tearfully. “Then when he went to get on the plane — I can still see him going up to the very top — he hesitated and looked back at us, and the guy behind him that went to boot camp with him just sorta put his hand gently on his shoulder, and Jerry went on.”

H.R. said Jerry was killed in only his second or third mission.

“He wrote us a letter telling where they’d jumped out of some helicopters, and he was one of the lucky guys — he got to lay on some pretty dry ground while some of the guys had to lay in wet rice paddies,” he recollected. “They called in air strikes all during the night and then went in there the next morning and blew their bunkers out.”

H.R. was working at Candlewick Yarns on Waring Road when his father and Junior drove up.

“I was sitting out on the shipping dock, and when they got out of the car I knew something was wrong — I could see it on their faces,” he said. “They had just gotten the news that Jerry had been killed … some days it seems just like yesterday.”

Junior pointed out their father had been wounded in World War II in Europe, and worried about Jerry’s deployment.

“The first three months and the last three months,” he specified, “because Jerry would be ‘green’ at first, or get careless later on thinking of coming home. With Jerry going over there, he was reliving it.”

Pat was working as a receptionist at Adams Machine Shop, which was across Cleveland Highway from their home on Todd Avenue.

“I could walk there because I didn’t have a car,” she said. “Junior came across the parking lot, and I knew Jerry had gotten killed, and I just lost it and started screaming. I knew it because Jane had told me the Sunday before she knew something had happened.

“Junior carried me out (from work). We got to Daddy’s, and Eugenia Cavender lived next door and she was wanting me to go with her and tell Sheila (at North Whitfield High). I said, ‘I can’t do it.’ I was so tore up and could not do it, and I’ve always regretted not being able to be a big sister like Junior was an older brother to me.”

Eugenia remembers two men in Army uniforms came to their door mistakenly.

“We told them that they needed to go next door, and then Bill (her husband) said, ‘You need to go see if there’s something you can do,’” she said. “When I got there, they told me Sheila’s at school, and I said, ‘Shall I go and tell her what’s happened?’ So I went up to the school to get her released to go home. I was rather nervous about it because I didn’t know quite what to tell her. And knowing this was going to be a shock for her, I was very fearful that I would do it the wrong way. But it was something that needed to be done, and I felt I should do it.”

Sheila, a senior, was in Margaret Gregory’s VOT (vocational office training) class when Eugenia arrived.

“She was talking to Mrs. Gregory, and they called me up there and told me I needed to go with Mrs. Cavender,” Sheila recalled. “And I said, ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ She said you just need to go with Mrs. Cavender. They wouldn’t tell me.

“We started toward her car and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ Something was wrong — I could tell by looking at her face. At first, I thought it might be Daddy, that he’d had an accident or something. I asked her and she said no, your daddy’s OK. And then I said, ‘It’s Jerry.’ And she said yes. I asked her if he was hurt bad — I just thought he’d been shot or something — and she told me. From that point on, I don’t know what we did.”

Sheila and Bobby Sneed had been married one week when Jerry was killed. Bobby’s mother worked in the plant at Adams Machine and word spread quickly. She went home immediately and told Bobby, who was getting ready to go to work, that he needed to get over to the Poes’ house.

“He was just a real good boy,” Bobby said of Jerry. “He was tough, and I thought he would be back, that he wouldn’t get killed. I believe we all thought that to some degree. He was all boy. He wasn’t a troublemaker or nothing, but if you wanted to fight, he would sure oblige you. He didn’t like bullies.”

Pat said the Love Funeral Home hearse driver went by their home before he pulled in at Carolyn Baptist, where the church was packed.

“I had my eyes closed, but I could hear (Pastor) Carl King saying that Jerry had gotten killed in a faraway land and quoted some Bible scripture pertaining to that,” she said. “They sang ‘On the Wings of a Snow White Dove’ — Jerry’s favorite song. We had to wait two weeks for Jerry’s body, and people in Carolyn Baptist — where we were all members — brought food for two weeks.”

At the family’s request, Jerry was escorted back stateside by the late Tony Hambright, a neighborhood friend and member of the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. Carol Hill, a friend of Tony’s, said he once told her about that fateful trip back home that took an exhausting two weeks.

“He told me he was picked up by a helicopter out in the field, but was not told the reason,” Carol relayed. “Tony said he was not allowed to leave the body and was leaning on the casket asleep at the Atlanta airport when Love Funeral Home arrived to bring the body back to Dalton.”

Included with Jerry’s belongings were two Bibles with his blood on them, and an ID bracelet the family had given to him, with mud and blood on it.

Sheila said it still hurts that Jerry was sealed in a closed coffin, and for some reason all the letters family members and Jane mailed to him were returned unopened.

H.R. remarked that “he had a smile like he knew something no one else knew.”

Pfc. Jerry Lynn Poe was awarded a Bronze Star posthumously “for meritorious service in connection with military operations against a hostile force,” according to the commendation. Other medals include the Purple Heart, Combat Infantryman Badge, Marksmanship Badge, National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Campaign Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, Army Presidential Unit Citation, Vietnam Gallantry Cross and Army Good Conduct Medal.

He ‘had high hopes for our lives’

Jerry Poe had been dating Jane Rogers for three years, and gave her an engagement ring when she was a senior at North Whitfield High. After Jerry went to Vietnam, she had a premonition.

“It was on a Sunday,” she recalled. “I spent a lot of time at his family’s house because I was close to his sisters, and would visit on weekends. The girls had gone somewhere and the guys were playing horseshoes, so I just went into Jerry’s room and laid across his bed. I had this weird feeling come over me, it was like you could feel somebody close to you, like breathing on your neck — anticipating somebody trying to scare you or something. I thought, ‘Somebody’s snuck in here and they’re trying to scare me,’ because they were a little bit mischievous … and I opened my eyes and there was nobody there.”

From that moment, Jane knew “something was not right.”

“I mentioned it to several people, and called Pat and told her about it,” she said. “Pat told me he was probably all right, but for the next several days I had this haunting in my head that something really bad was wrong … I’d been to lunch with several of my friends from school, and I didn’t have an appetite. I was just still really worried. When I came back to work — at the old First National Bank building at the time — and I turned the corner, I saw my parents sitting there waiting for me. And immediately I knew what was wrong.”

Since Jerry was killed on Sunday, Sept. 15, it appears Jane’s premonition may have occurred the moment he died.

“I think it was three or four days later that we got the notice that he had been killed,” she said. “The next few days were a bit of a blur. I stayed at his house with his family; I didn’t go back home to my family until after the funeral. I was extremely upset at the funeral, and couldn’t stop crying. I was very young then and didn’t know a whole lot, but that was the most devastating experience of my life. That really has stuck with me my whole life.

“I do want to pay respect to Jerry, because he deserves it. He was a very caring person, and tried to not just care for me but his family as well. He was a hard worker and had high hopes for our lives.”

Jane eventually married after Jerry was killed — Pat and Sheila went to her wedding and told her husband that Jerry would be proud he was taking care of her. H.R. said Jane put flowers on his grave for about 10 years after she married.

Remembering Jerry

From the vvmf.org/wall-of-faces website (Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund)

“We fondly remember the sweet smile and friendly talks with us every morning in the hallway of North Whitfield High. We stood together, Jerry and Jane, and Johnny and Brenda, sharing our dreams of being married after we graduated. We often thought about how the circumstances could have turned out for us if Johnny had been drafted into the war.

“Many years have passed, but we still think of you and our memories of good times together. We found your name on The Wall (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.) and it sent chills up our spines. Thank you, Jerry, for the ultimate sacrifice. Since we all trust in our Lord, Jesus Christ, we hold to his promises, and when this life is over, look forward to being reunited with him and our Christian friends in heaven. We look forward to that day.”

Johnny and Brenda Caldwell, March 15, 2003

“I knew Jerry in the first grade, and went all through school with him as a good friend. Shortly after I had returned from Vietnam, he was sent there. He was only there a few days. I do miss my little buddy.”

Jesse Poteet, Nov. 6, 2002

“In remembrance of Jerry Poe, good friend and fellow classmate, graduating class of North Whitfield High, 1966. We had some great times together, you will forever be in my memories.”

Steve W. Payne, Jan. 4, 2001

“In memory and honor of my brother, Jerry Poe. He never gave Mom and Dad any trouble. He followed the fifth commandment, ‘Honor thy father and mother.’ Jerry had high morals and never allowed guys to use foul language around his sisters or his girlfriend.

“Jerry, I just want to say your family has missed you so much. We’ve cried so many tears. We see you in our children and we pass your goodness on to them. We received the Bible that you carried on you when you died, and God’s Word was covered with your precious blood. We know you’re one of God’s precious angels and that he must have needed you more than we did. We are human and we hurt just like it was today … some day we will have a grand reunion when we meet.

“I am bitter about the war, it cost us so much, but maybe that is part of the reason we turned out like we did. So, I must stop and say, ‘Thank you, Jerry, for the sacrifice and a job well done.’”

Pat Barton, Jan. 6, 2001