CHARLES NICASTRO • VIETNAM WAR
Charles Nicastro, 77
Gloucester, MA
Born 2/28/1948
Born/Raised: Gloucester MA
Service: US Army, 10th Transportation Unit
Rank: Spec. 5/Sergeant
Dates of Service: 1968-1970
Charles Nicastro met his wife Marianne Lograsso in 1958 outside of a Gloucester High School football game when he was ten years old. She said to him, “why don’t you get outta here and leave me alone,” and with that, he turned to a friend and said, “I’m gonna marry that girl someday.” That “someday” came ten years later when he pleaded before the local draft board to get permission to marry her before getting shipped out to Vietnam. They granted him 30 days and on June 2nd 1968 they wed. On July 10th, he was at basic training at Fort Gordon, GA.
Charles is the son of John M. and Rosaline Nicastro. His father was a WWII US Navy veteran who was an engineer on fishing vessels, Serafina N. and the Rockaway out of Gloucester. Charles fished the same boats for five years. He has four brothers (Jerry, John, Bruce and Michael) and one sister, Serafina “Joy” Balzarini.
Following basic, he was sent to Fort Polk, LA, for advanced infantry training. Once in Vietnam, his pre-military training as a truck driver put him in line to do ammunition resupply convoys out of Long Binh to forward fire support bases. He remembers well his first convoy on July 10, 1969. Before setting out, one of the other drivers asked him, “you going to wear that helmet?” Two and a half hours later, the convoy stopped at a set of gates guarded by MPs and tanks on their way to Quan Loi.
“An RPG came down right next to the tank and the guy behind me started driving right up my ass. RPGs and bullets were flying. Two Cobra helicopters took them out and dropped napalm. You could feel the heat.” They bolted from the checkpoint at about 40 mph (their usual speed was 10-15 mph) causing his helmet to bounce wildly off his nose sending blood everywhere. The other driver checked in on him to see if he was alright and said, “It doesn’t get any better from here.”
He would make these treks scores of times over the next eight months. Every day they would load up their trucks at 6 AM and every day the RPGs would come raining down on them first thing in the morning. Eight months into his tour, he secured a job as one of the dispatchers and loved every minute of it.
On July 1st, 1970, Charles returned home to Gloucester. “The first thing I did was change into civilian clothes.” He worked construction for a few years, fished for a few years, worked at Gloucester Engineering and in 1983 took a job with the City of Gloucester’s DPW as a heavy equipment operator. One of his favorite jobs was cleaning Gloucester’s beaches. He retired in 2015.
Charles and Marianne, a daycare provider, have a son, Christopher, and a daughter, Amber Nicastro Driscoll who lives in Hawaii. They have five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.