BOURNE — They gathered to honor the service of a stranger who had bled decades ago for the flag draped across his coffin. With a pair of exceptions, Richard Cubetus, a Vietnam War veteran, had never met any of the 80 or so people who stood under the windswept pavilion at the Massachusetts National Cemetery for his funeral service.
“You’re all really beautiful to be here for my buddy, who I really miss,” said Beth Hill, a social worker at the Chelsea Soldiers’ Home, her voice cracking with emotion.
Cubetus, a Malden native, spent his final 15 years at the home and had died without any close relatives.
Hill knew Cubetus’s final wishes. This spot near Buzzards Bay is where he wanted to be laid to rest.
Cubetus deserved recognition for the sacrifices he made during his two tours, she thought. He suffered serious combat wounds as a young man serving in Vietnam that he lived with for the rest of his life. He was a quiet man of good humor and fundamental decency, a man who loved baseball and two-stepping to country music.
“It was the right thing to do,” she said.
She reached out to a state representative, who connected her to Jim Seymour, executive director for the Cape and Islands Veterans Outreach Center. Seymour didn’t like the idea of Cubetus being buried essentially alone and put out a clarion call, encouraging people to attend the memorial service. Last week, dozens, many of them veterans themselves, showed up to honor Cubetus, despite never having met the man.
“A veteran should never be buried by themselves because that’s not the nature of who we are or what we do,” Seymour told the crowd.
Peg Kelley was among the few here who knew Cubetus. They had dated for years in the 1990s and remained friends after their relationship ended. Kelley, who had grown up mostly in Quincy, had flown in from Ohio, where she now lives, to attend the service.
Cubetus grew up in Malden, the middle of three brothers. From early on, his life was faced with challenges. At 6 years old, he found the body of his father, who had hanged himself. His mother raised the three boys on her own after that, working as a waitress. The family struggled financially, said Kelley. His younger brother killed himself as a teenager, and his older brother died decades ago.
“He had a horrible start to life,” recalled Kelley before the ceremony started.
He joined the Army while he was still a teenager, during the summer of 1964. On his first tour of Vietnam, he broke his jaw in a nighttime firefight. All of his teeth were removed in a subsequent procedure to mend his injuries, Kelley said. He had fake teeth for the majority of his life, and it was decades before he obtained a “nice” set of dentures, said Kelley.
On his second tour, Kelley said, Cubetus fought as a sniper, and he suffered more injuries from combat. He was thrown from a helicopter that spun out after being struck by enemy fire, according to Kelley. He broke both his feet in the incident. He was honorably discharged in the summer of 1967, according to Hill.
Later in his life, according to Kelley, his bloodwork suggested he was exposed to Agent Orange, a herbicide dropped from planes during the war to clear jungle brush, and which was later found to cause a wide range of health problems.
He had health complications in recent years, said Kelley, and died on Jan. 16 at 80.
Kelley met Cubetus at a now-defunct bar in Peabody called the OK Corral that featured live country music. She said he loved to dance despite his feet being “wrecked” from his time in Vietnam.
To be sure, there were times when Cubetus felt overwhelmed, she said, but he never buckled under the heaviness of the world, he was always able “to pull himself back from the abyss,” and get on with life.
“He was kind of a miracle walking,” she said. “In the sense of: there’s no reason he would have turned out to be the good person he was. And yet he was, and he deserves all the credit for that.”
During one rough patch, she said, he stayed at a shelter for homeless veterans in downtown Boston.
But, she emphasized, “He always walked upright.”
After his military service, he worked at a warehouse in Malden, and at hardware stores in Brighton and Newton, said Kelley. He loved horse racing, and worked at Suffolk Downs in Boston as a youth. He liked to bet on the horses, and would examine the racing form as if he was studying “quantum physics,” she said.
Over the phone and in emails, he would allude to his love of the betting on the sport.
“I’m still ahead,” he would say, according to Kelley.
He never had children of his own, but because of his mother’s experience raising three boys after his father’s death, Cubetus was always “very protective of women with children who were single.”
He paid for the full tuition at Bunker Hill Community College of two locals who had a single mother. He made charitable contributions to Catholic Charities and St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in his mother’s name. During his time at the Chelsea Soldiers’ Home, he bought equipment and uniforms for a local Little League team.
Through it all, he never liked talking about Vietnam much.
Kelley knows the broad strokes of his time there, but many details are missing. Cubetus earned multiple awards and commendations, including a Bronze Star for his Army service, according to state veterans authorities. But if he kept any of them, she never saw them, she said.
Kelley remembered visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., during the 1990s, with Cubetus. There, he connected with other Vietnam vets.
It was important, she said, for him to feel “seen, recognized, that he was somebody, and these things happened.”
Being buried at the national cemetery in Bourne would have meant a lot to him, she said.
“It’s an acknowledgment from the country that he sacrificed for,” she said. “For him, it’s being with brothers. . . . He wanted to be with people who understood.”
Most of the crowd didn’t know Cubetus, and they ticked off various reasons for showing up to memorialize him: duty, honor, respect, community.
Steve Vieira, a state captain for Patriot Guard, a nonprofit that honors veterans at their funerals, said he was there to help give Cubetus a “good send-off.”
“To make sure that he knows he was loved,” said Vieira, a retired mechanic from Dartmouth and Army veteran.
Cubetus is among 84,000 veterans and their loved ones buried in the cemetery. The cemetery can hold more than 3,000 burials a year, sometimes more than 10 a day, according to those who work here.
At around 11 a.m., Cubetus’s casket was rolled along a paved path to a pavilion, flanked by people holding American flags. There was a military honor guard. Taps was played. A smattering of those in the crowd saluted. Some were in military uniform, or had clothing that denoted their service. One woman ducked out of the pavilion wiping tears from her eyes.
Art Keefe, a Roman Catholic deacon, read a Bible passage and led the crowd in prayers. He said this was the largest crowd he had seen in 15 years of memorial services at the cemetery.
“May he rest in peace,” he said.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Danny McDonald can be reached at daniel.mcdonald@globe.com. Follow him @Danny__McDonald.