Faces Bio

Stephano J. Fiducioso was born on February 11, 1947.  His home of record is Swedesboro, NJ.  He served in the US Marine Corps and attained the rank of Private (PVT).

Fiducioso was killed in action on November 2, 1967.

Steve

February 11, 1947 - November 2, 1966

PVT, Marines        Swedesboro, NJ

The attributes used by some of his relatives would go a long way in qualifying him for sainthood.  Loyal, caring, understanding, polite and considerate accurately depict the kind of person that he was, but according to his best friend, Steve Fiducioso was no saint.

It was almost Christmas and the Fiducioso family had yet to put up a tree to decorate.  David Beckett, of Bridgeport, NJ, remembers Steve coming to his front door after dark one evening, saw in hand.

"We passed this house on our way into Bridgeport every day," Beckett recalls.  "They had this huge pine tree in the yard.  One day, Steve says, 'I'm gonna get that tree for Christmas.' So a couple nights later, he shows up at my house and says, 'C'mon, let's go.  I'm going to cut the top off that tree and take it home.  It's perfect.'  I couldn't believe he was going to do it.  Well, he climbed right up as high as he could and cut it.  We took it to his house and laughed the whole way.  His family thought it was great.  They never knew where he got it from."

Steve also had a temper and was known to be hardheaded.  As teenagers, he and David would participate in neighborhood football games.  One day, an argument spawned a fight between Steve and another boy.  The others broke it up and play continued.  "And then," says David.  "The next day, the two of them had another fight during a game.  They really went at it.  I thought it was settled until the third straight day when the two had yet another fight.  I never saw him so angry."

David also remembers a misadventure that he and Steve had involving a certain car.  "Steve's dad ran a junkyard," he says.  "He had a '51 or '52 black Ford.  It was his dad's car.  He took it one night and we went riding around.  We worked for this guy who had a farm and a fuel tank in the back where he filled his tractors.  We were running low on gas and Steve said, 'I know where we can get some.'  So we drove down the lane of the farm to the tank.  I said, 'This stuff doesn't look or smell like gas.'  He says, 'We'll just put a little in.  It won't hurt anything.'  Well, it was kerosene and the car started smoking and making all kinds of noise.  He took the car home, shut it off and never said a word.  His dad goes to start it the next morning and went nuts.  We spent the whole day finding another motor and putting it in his dad's car and making it run.  His dad was really hot." 

Dot Beckett, David's wife of thirty-two years, remembers looking out a window of her Bridgeport home after a snowstorm and seeing Steve on the tractor, plowing driveways.  "It was automatic," she says.  "Steve would do anything he could for people without being asked.  He'd just wave and off he'd go.  He was just that way."

When family members recall the jokester and his constant teasing, their eyes light up.  He would drop in often on his aunts and uncles just to see how they were doing and visited his grandparents often.  He took his cousin, Verna Mulvenna, to dances at the Bridgeport Firehouse.  "He was cool," she now says.  "I had only one idol growing up and it was Steve."

His father, Tony Fiducioso, with a quiet and elegant pride simply adds, "Steve was a kid who, once he made up his mind, no matter what, he did it."

Steve was a wonderful big brother, according to Rose Grant of Swedesboro.  There were three boys in the family; Rose the only girl.  "He was very protective," she says.  "But more than that, he was looked up to by everyone he knew.  He had a great sense of humor and was handsome but not conceited.  The girls he went out with always had to have a sense of humor."

Steve had many interests including working on the family farm.  He played varsity football for Kingsway Regional High School and was a member of the Glee Club.  He loved to cook and was active in the Chef's Club.  He liked hunting and so he joined the Sportsman Club.  He lifted weights, went to drag races at Atco Speedway and was very fond of girls.  His senior yearbook caption says he looked at himself as an 'Ambassador from the Old Country'.  And if all that were not enough, he was also into ceramics and woodworking.

"The toy chest he made for me in wood shop is one of my most beloved possessions," Rose says.  "Steve was such a diverse individual.  He was always doing something.  He would do anything for a laugh."

Another good friend of Steve's recalls their future plans.  "I think of him all the time," says Joe DiBella, of Swedesboro, NJ.  "We should have grown old together.  We were going to be each other's best man at our weddings.  I would have loved my two boys getting to know him."

In the 1965 Lancer, the Kingsway High School yearbook, Steve signed DiBella's book.  He makes it clear what he thought of Joe.

My man, The coolest, bossest, baddest, meanest, toughest, roughest piazon a man could have.  I'm sure we'll be even closer friends when we graduate.  Try not to fall asleep during graduation and remember to wake me up.  And if the day should come that I get hitched, I'll expect you to be my best man.  'Cause as far as I'm concerned, you are the best man that ever lived.  Your buddy always.  Steve

His friends, like DiBella and the Becketts, characterize him as a dependable and trustworthy companion, always ready to have a good time.

"He could take care of himself," recalls DiBella.  "And he would take care of you."

"Steve always had a smile on his face," Dave Beckett says.  "He thought he was God's gift to women.  He was outgoing but not loud or boisterous.  He would just blend in.  He would like someone for the person they were.  I don't think there was a prejudiced bone in his body."

Dot remembers a weekend trip to the Jersey shore when her mother invited some of Dot's friends along.  "Steve was always all over one girl or another.  His eyes just twinkled.  My mom loved him.  Stevie comes to my house with a black whaler's jacket on and his clothes in a brown grocery bag.  He said, 'I'm going with you.'  Well, he had a blast.  He had a crush on one of my girlfriends who was Italian but didn't like Italian boys.  He followed us everywhere.  You couldn't discourage him.  I was his friend and didn't want to hurt his feelings but we did try to ditch him.  He comes running down the beach after us.  It got to be funny but we all had a good time.  Two older girls my mom also invited had a Corvair convertible.  He hitched a ride home with them.  He was so happy to be riding with them.  But the picture that stands out in my mind is him and that brown grocery bag, all smiles and ready to go."

Steve and DiBella graduated from Kingsway in June of 1965.  Dave was a year younger and still in high school.  DiBella went off to college while Steve stayed home and worked in the family business.  The war in Vietnam was heating up and Steve not only saw it as his duty to serve, he enlisted into the Marine Corps in May of 1967.

Rose adds. "He always wanted to be the best in everything he did.  That's why he joined the Marines."

"I tell my two sons that we grew up in a bad time," Joe says.  "They were killing two hundred guys a week in Vietnam.  They can't imagine how bad it was."

Steve was proud to be a Marine.  The last time DiBella saw him was just before Steve went to Vietnam.  "He didn't want to talk about fun things anymore.  He seemed hardened.  Maybe knowing he was going to war had something to do with that."

"I think he was disillusioned," says Beckett, who also saw Steve before he left.  "He told me it wasn't anything like he thought.  But he did think he was indestructible."

Rose says, "What we have going on today with the street violence and school shootings is tragic.  But when you know someone who is going to a place where bullets and mortars and everything is going on in a war, you just know what the odds are.  I knew when I held my brother in my arms for the last time that he wasn't coming back.  I just knew.  And to this day, I still don't understand why we were over there."

"Steve was the catalyst of that family," David says.  "Everything revolved around him.  There was a special bond between Steve and his mom.  The expression, 'Apple of her eye', really said it all.  And it was a two way street."

Dot adds,  "You could see that.  It was obvious that they idolized each other."

"My dad couldn't express himself the way Mom did," Rose recalls.  "But don't think just because we didn't see it or hear it, that his love for Stevie wasn't there."

By September, Steve was on his way to Vietnam.  He was assigned to Mike Company, 3^rd Battalion, 7^th Marines, 1^st Marine Division.  The unit operated in Quang Nam Province, in the northern fourth of South Vietnam.

Steve was assigned to the second platoon of Mike Company, and, barely six weeks into his thirteen month tour of duty, found himself with twenty seven other Marines on a mound of jungled acreage known only as Hill 25.  Two other platoons, the first and third, secured Hill 52, less than three miles away.  Their mission was to disrupt the southerly flow of supplies and manpower from North Vietnam.  Two notorious Viet Cong and North Vietnamese strongholds were close by.

In a written tribute to the Second platoon posted on the unit's website (www.mike37.com), Jerry Chong describes Mike Company's mission and the events leading up to November 2, 1967.  In part, it reads:

Mike Company patrolled their area of operation with vengeance and aggression...Maybe the Viet Cong ruled the night elsewhere but not in our area.  Mike Company ruled the night...We made them pay a high price for intruding into our estate, day or night.

On paper, it was a masterful plan to annihilate Mike Company.  We were located in the middle of nowhere and severely undermanned with seventy-five Marines on Hill 52 and twenty-eight on Hill 25.  The closest Marine units were seven miles away.  The Viet Cong plan was to attack Hill 25, whose reinforcement could only come from Hill 52.  They would close all approaches to Hill 25 and ambush the reinforcement force from Hill 52.

The Viet Cong also knew the Marine Corps tradition of never leaving our wounded or dead behind.  They had seen it time and time again.  This time, they were going to use it to set a trap for Mike Company with Hill 25 as the bait.

On November 2, a Viet Cong commando unit composed of one hundred men attacked Hill 25 at 2:00 in the morning.  They broke through the defenses and the fighting became individual gunfights and hand to hand combat.  Greatly outnumbering the Marines, the Viet Cong overran the defenders and surged over the top of the hill.  The Marines fought back furiously from their foxholes, trench lines and bunkers.

On Hill 52, we instantly put on our fighting equipment, slung as much ammunition we could carry and prepared to rush to the rescue of Hill 25.  We watched the crisscrossing green and red tracers and listened to the sounds of gunfire, automatic weapons, explosions and flares coming from Hill 25.

Jim Hastings of Bellingham, MA, was a member of third platoon and recalls the frustration he felt that morning.

"We were about five kilometers from Hill 25," he says.  "They wouldn't let us go to help them.  It was an awful sight watching and feeling so helpless."

Gilbert Bolton was platoon sergeant for the besieged second platoon.  He barely escaped the command bunker before the enemy destroyed it with satchel charges.  He quickly realized it was only a matter of time before the Viet Cong would completely wipe out his whole platoon.

S/Sgt Bolton decided he had only one alternative left.  The one order that haunts all commanders and is the most difficult to give.  Call an artillery strike on yourself and your men.  The signal to the Marines on Hill 25 that this would happen was two green star cluster flares.  That meant get to a foxhole, trench line or anything that will give you cover because all hell was going to break loose.  When S/Sgt Bolton gave the codeword that called for artillery on Hill 25, the artillery officer responded, "We can't do that.  We will kill all of you."  S/Sgt Bolton's reply was, "If you don't, they are going to kill us all anyway.  Fire for effect, damn it!"  The resulting barrages broke the back of the Viet Cong attack and our Marines were able to drive the enemy off the hill.

At daybreak, the rest of Mike Company made its way to Hill 25.  They found evidence that the enemy had indeed set an ambush for any reinforcements.  The approaches had been mined but the Viet Cong had vanished into the jungle.  Hill 25 had been held against tremendous odds.

Chong concludes his story:

The hill was in shambles.  There were enemy bodies everywhere.  Of the twenty-eight Marines that held Hill 25, ten were dead, nine were wounded and nine walked off the hill.  Around the body of one of our dead Marines. 

Excerpt from They Were Ours: Gloucester County's Loss in Vietnam
by John Campbell
Used with permission of author

Sources: John Campbell and NJVVMF.