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out. According to Mary Anne, her husband—like so many other soldiers—had been traumatized by the war. A devout Roman Catholic (in the 1980s he would become a eucharistic minister in his local church, Lady Queen of Martyrs), he’d had serious philosophical issues with what he and the U.S. military were doing in Vietnam. He’d had especial difficulty with carrying out his assigned task of teaching the Vietnamese how to fight once he realized that they didn’t want to learn. They’d rather die.
    Captain Marvel was surprised when Pettit told him that he didn’t want to go back. “This is not going to be my career,” he said. Pettit was shipped to St. Albans Hospital, in Queens, New York, and he was there for six weeks, until the hematoma dissipated. He resigned his commission in June 1971.
    Major Peter Bouton, his commanding office, wrote:
It is extremely unfortunate that this outstanding young officer will not continue to pursue an Army career, as he has the potential of surpassing the vast majority of his contemporaries in individual professional development.

    Pettit still wanted to become a doctor. He had hoped that his outstanding high school record, his schooling at West Point, and his service in Vietnam would be enough to get him into a top medical school, but he was now 27, and couldn’t afford to pay his own way. He received rejection letter after rejection letter. According to Mary Anne, it crushed him.
    “This was a man who was always the captain of every sports team,” she said later. “President of every class. He had never lost, never failed. It was a reality check.”
    By now, Chris and Mary Anne had two daughters, Lara and Kari, and Chris needed to do whatever he could to pay the bills. The young family lived in his late grandmother’s house, which was owned by his father, a window salesman. Chris got hired to teach science and math to seventh and eighth graders at his old high school and coach the football team.
    “When he came back [from the war] he was very troubled, and I found him crying so many nights, just sobbing, trying to understand the ludicrous business of war,” Mary Anne says.
    He planned to write a book about his troubles, but didn’t get very far. He read Aristotle and Plato, and tried to make sense of his experience.
    Pettit’s childhood best friend, Tom Tucker, had heard from his mother that Pettit was home, and having trouble. Tucker hadn’t seen Pettit for years, and was eager to reconnect with his old buddy. He invited Chris to join him in Chicago, where he was working with Greg Marotz, a Colgate University fraternity brother, in sales for the Northern Screw Company, a small importer and distributor of industrial fasteners used by farm implement manufacturers in the Midwest.
    “When I called him in January 1973, he told me no—that Mary Anne was pregnant with their third child, Suzanne, and moving from Huntington was out of the question,” recalls Tucker.
    But Tucker didn’t give up, and after a week Chris relented enough to go to Chicago for an interview. He was hired, and six months later so was his brother, Rusty. The trio spent two years there, and more than tripled the productivity of the company; but they had a falling out with the owner, who they claimed cheated them on their compensation. They swore that they “would never work for a jerk again,” says Mary Anne.
    They came home to Huntington in 1975. With help from Chris’s father, they purchased Finnegan’s Restaurant and Tap Room, the oldest bar-restaurant in town. On the wall they hung a picture of Fiver, the runt rabbit in Richard Adams’s epic allegory,
Watership Down
. They incorporated a company under the same name.
    But the revenue from Finnegan’s was not enough to support three families. The Pettits were so hard up that Mary Anne was denied a Woolworth’s credit card that she needed to buy blinds for her bedroom. By 1977, the Pettits and their three children often ate whatever food Chris could