Final Salute

Raymond J. Riley

Riley, of Auburn, passed away Oct. 13, 2019. He was a Seabee, a member of a Navy construction battalion. He served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969, his daughter Amba Hyde told The Citizen.

Among the projects Riley helped build were the country’s Highway No. 1, as well as an asphalt plant.

“He told me they took down a mountain, built the plant and then put the mountain back on top of it,” Hyde said.

Riley’s job, which at one point stationed him near Phu Bai, meant handling explosives regularly. He also told his daughter about quietly venturing down roads early in the morning, before they were swept by bomb detectors. They would later tell him how many bombs they found just footsteps away from her father’s path, she said.

Riley didn’t see much combat himself, aside from being knocked out of his bunk by a shell hitting the area. He was once shot at by enemy forces not to kill him, but to “let him know they were there.”

Hyde thinks her father didn’t face much trouble because he worked by himself a lot. But he took pleasure helping the people he met, she said, including a Vietnamese girl he called “Little John.”

The war was one chapter in a 17-year military career for Riley that took him to the Army and Air Force in addition to the Navy. In Auburn, he worked as a lumberjack and replaced and repaired railroad tracks. But he stopped working in 1982, when he had an artificial valve placed in his heart as a result of his exposure to Agent Orange. He became a stay-at-home dad, Hyde said.

Riley spent a lot of time with Hyde as she grew up, and with her daughters as they grew up. He was as big a kid as any of them, she said, going roller-skating and camping with glee. He used to snow-blow their entire neighborhood, sometimes wearing his beloved Seabee jacket. He had the insignia added to many of his belongings.

“I know he enjoyed life,” Hyde said. “He was just different. He walked to his own drum. He always did the unexpected, at least around us. But that was just how he was.”

Riley later developed lung cancer, again due to Agent Orange. Riley was stitching the Seabee emblem onto another jacket, but wasn’t able to finish it before he passed away. He was 87.