Teachers at Roxborough High School remember Cole as sweet-natured and quiet. He was selected to attend the General Motors training school in Moorestown, N.J., but instead chose to enlist in the Air Force two months after his graduation in June 1964. The airman second class, a security guard, was sent to Vietnam in July 1965 and assigned to the 377th Air Police Squadron. Cole died at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, near Saigon, on Feb. 4, 1966, at the age of 19. He was awarded the Silver Star posthumously. The flag that draped his coffin hangs in a triangular case made especially for it at Roxborough High School, which his mother said he had loved dearly. Cole was survived by his parents and three sisters.