HEROES: Report on a Drug Clerk

Until the day he died at 21, stocky, brown-haired Francis C. Hammond of Alexandria. Va. showed virtually none of those traits of character that are usually thought to mark the outstanding man. He was an indifferent student at his home town's George Washington High School. He took no part in athletics. He worked part time in his uncle's drugstore and plunked away on the guitar; among his friends he was a follower, never a leader. He had no great desire to join the armed services, but when he became 19, in 1951, he picked the Navy without seeming to...

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