By Brian Wright O'Connor
Nearly 50 years after leaving the University of Pennsylvania for Vietnam, Lt. Col. Mortimer Lenane O'Connor '53 will receive a posthumous Ph.D. in a ceremony honoring academic achievement and sacrifice on the field of battle.
My father, who set aside his dissertation to lead soldiers in war, will be included in the Class of 1968, the year he would most likely have completed his doctorate had fate not intervened.
Born in 1930, my dad grew up in the company of soldier-storytellers on Army garrisons from Manila to the Old West, and watched his own father and three uncles set off for war in Europe.
The whiff of cordite and tales of valor turned him into an infantry officer with a taste for ballads and bravado. He walked off demerits at West Point while reciting Rudyard Kipling and told the story of Beowulf around the family campfire as a bare-knuckled brawl between an Airborne Ranger and a Nazi monster.
In 1958, my dad was sent to Penn to study English in preparation for teaching at West Point. In his year at Penn, the young officer set aside the Cold War for Chaucer and refined his taste for poetry and prose.
After that teaching assignment and a year in Korea, my dad returned to Penn - living in Willingboro with Betsy and the six kids, teaching at Temple, and plodding through Ph.D. course work and research.
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