MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa — When the grandfather clock in their living room chimed 10 one recent morning, both Henry and Ida Judge turned their heads to look.

Their son Darwin crafted the clock out of maple in his senior year in high school, just before he joined the Marine Corps.

The clock reminds the Judges hourly of what they have lost and of the difference that a few hours might have made.

Lance Cpl. Darwin Lee Judge, 19, had been in Vietnam less than two weeks. Still, he wasn't as raw as his new buddy, Cpl. Charles McMahon, Jr., 21, who had arrived in country just five days before.

As the new boys in the Marine Security Guard battalion at the U.S. Embassy, they drew the lousy duty of Post 1 at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, home to the U.S. Defense Attache's Office, known as "Pentagon East."

Things were going to hell.

As night fell on April 28, 1975, with Saigon nearly surrounded by the North Vietnamese Army, bombs started falling at Tan Son Nhut. For the first time in five years, citizens of Saigon were under fire.

The next day, just before 4 a.m., the NVA launched another attack, unleashing rockets and 130mm artillery shells. The attack was a message that surrender was the only option, and it sabotaged plans for Operation Frequent Wind, designed as an orderly U.S. evacuation.

Two of the first Soviet-made SA-3 rockets launched by North Vietnamese gunners slammed into the ground 10 yards from Post 1.

In the Continental Palace Hotel, Western news correspondents monitoring a radio frequency used by the U.S. mission heard a voice say, "My God, we've got two Marine KIAs."

Sgt. Kevin Maloney, who had left Judge and McMahon happily chatting a few hours before, was the first to find the pair.

Judge lay near a pile of burning Honda motorcycles parked there by Vietnamese workers before they entered the compound.

"His ammo belt was cooking off from the heat," Maloney wrote later. "Hot metal stung my hand as I attempted to drag him away.

"McMahon was dismembered by the blast, pieces of him lay strewn around the area . . . I struggled to suppress my terror."

It was less than 12 hours to the final evacuation of Americans from Saigon, a dozen chimes of the clock before helicopters streamed to safety aboard the USS Okinawa and other ships waiting in the South China Sea.

By the time South Vietnam surrendered on April 30, more than 58,000 Americans had lost their lives in the conflict. Judge and McMahon were no more or less heroic; they were simply the last.

Judge was known as "Farm Boy" to fellow Marines. His father, Henry, was a tail gunner on a B-17 during World War II who was shot down and plucked from the icy waters of the North Sea. Henry gave up farming to deliver mail in Marshalltown, while Ida Judge kept house for their three children.

Darwin's older sister, Lori, said that their parents spoiled him as the youngest but that he never showed it. He was an Eagle Scout, bagged groceries at Clifton's, shoveled snow for older people, and helped his older brother deliver the Marshalltown Times until he got a route of his own.

Early on, Darwin developed a talent for woodworking. On a dare, he made a huge wooden picture frame with 18 spaces for 8-by-10s.

"He loved a challenge," his father said.

Henry coached his son's Little League team but had to bench Darwin for playing so poorly. Darwin struggled in fourth grade, too, until someone suggested they check his eyes.

"Is this the way things are supposed to look?" Darwin asked when he got his eyeglasses. He starred at pitcher and second base for his father's team.

Later on, his passion became motorcycles. He rode an orange Yamaha 125 Enduro "fearlessly," said his friend Pat Lowry, who rode to school with him. Nobody wore a helmet in those days.

"I always figured the motorcycle would be his demise," Lowry said.

One month after graduating in May 1974, Darwin enlisted. He liked a challenge, so he joined the Marines. "He loved that uniform," Ida said.

Basic training was in California, followed by a course at the elite embassy guard school in Virginia. He was supposed to ship out around his 19th birthday on Feb. 16, but his papers were not ready, so Darwin came home for 10 days. He visited with his aunts and uncles and some of his teachers.

In mid-March, his parents and Lori drove Darwin to the airport in Des Moines. On the way, Lori told him that she was expecting her second child.

Darwin telephoned home a few days later from California. The last person to talk with him was Lori's husband's sister, who was baby-sitting.

After he got to Vietnam, Darwin sent a letter describing the people and his surroundings. "I am all right and . . . we take care of each other," he wrote.

Lori heard the news of the shelling at Tan Son Nhut, but it never crossed her mind that Darwin might be involved. "He should have been at the embassy," she said.

The next day, two Marines came up the walk at 113 Newcastle Rd. to the ranch house where the Judges lived.

"I knew what it was," Ida said.

Henry was out delivering the mail. Lori's husband, Greg, and the Marines had to go out looking for him. Henry collapsed and had to be carried to the car.

"There was an air of disbelief," Lowry said. "It was our generation's tragedy."

Charlie McMahon's picture hangs on the wall of the Boys Club in Woburn, Mass., where he was named Boy of the Year in 1971. He taught basketball, skiing and swimming at the club, and he played with two friends in a rock band called Airborne, which they agreed was pretty awful.

In high school, McMahon became friendly with some fellows from the Massachusetts State Police. He thought joining the Marines would help him become a state trooper.

After two years with the military police at Treasure Island Marine Base in San Francisco, he was transferred to the embassy guard training school.

For a time, McMahon was scheduled to work at the U.S. Embassy in Lima, Peru, but his assignment was changed to Vietnam. Then, the Marines lost his passport, and he had to wait 20 days before going to Saigon.

The foul-up allowed McMahon a quick trip back to Woburn. He looked over family snapshots with his parents, went skiing for a day in New Hampshire and to a dance at the Boys Club.

By the time he arrived in country, matters were deteriorating so fast that McMahon was immediately assigned to the air base.

On April 26, McMahon wrote to his parents. "This will be the only letter I'll be able to write for a while, so don't get all upset if you don't hear from me," he said. "After this duty, I think they may send us home for a while."

His parents, Charles Sr. and Edna, believed that if the Marines had not lost their son's passport, he would have made it out from the embassy before April 29.

They did not care that he was the last to die in the war.

"If it hadn't been my boy it would have been someone else's boy," Edna said in 1985.

A few months after McMahon's death, his younger brother, Scott, also a Marine, was involved in a car wreck near Camp Pendleton in San Diego. He was paralyzed from the waist down.

The Marines, who pride themselves on bringing out the dead, left their last behind in Vietnam.

Nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from the Defense Attache's Office compound, and almost 3,000 were airlifted from the embassy. There were numerous phone calls and checks, but, inexplicably, the bodies of Judge and McMahon were left behind at the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital near Tan Son Nhut.

"It was devastating," Judge's sister, Lori, said. "The night we found out they didn't get the bodies out, I stayed at my parents' because they were worried about me losing my baby.

"It made the grieving process last a lot longer," she said of the periodic rumors that Darwin's body was finally coming home. "We set up memorial services several times based on false alarms. People were asking all the time."

On Feb. 22, 1976, after 10 months of negotiations, the remains of McMahon and Judge were turned over to two aides to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D., Mass.) at Tan Son Nhut by an official of the new Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam.

The bodies were flown to Bangkok, Thailand, where a military honor guard saluted as the two white caskets, each draped with an American flag from the commandant of the Marine Corps, were lowered carefully from an Air France Caravelle jet. They were carried several hundred feet across the tarmac to a U.S. C-130 transport, which flew the bodies to an American base in Thailand for identification. A week later, they arrived in the United States.

On March 6, as Taps played and rifles fired a salute, McMahon was laid to rest across from Woburn High School. The former Boy of the Year was home.

Scott McMahon, sitting in full dress uniform in his wheelchair, saluted the casket as it passed.

That same afternoon, another Marine honor guard was present as Darwin Judge was buried after services at Hope United Methodist Church in Marshalltown.

Judge rests on a windswept knoll at Rose Hill Cemetery next to a plot his parents have reserved for themselves.

Less than two miles away, on 12th Street, a four-acre expanse of Marshalltown with some recently planted trees is named Darwin L. Judge Park. A sign bears his picture in his beloved dress blues, and a plaque embedded in a piece of granite reads:

"In solemn tribute to his courage and compassion in giving his life that others might escape from tyranny and enjoy the blessings of a free nation."

Darwin Judge (1956)