In his final contact with his squadron after being shot down over Vietnam in 1967, Cmdr. Richard Hartman knew he was in grave danger. Armed with only a handgun, he faced a jungle crawling with North Vietnamese troops.
   Navy personnel made two rescue attempts, but after heavy losses, they made a decision: Hartman was on his own.
   Hartman, 32, died as a prisoner of war days later.
   In 1974, the Hartman family buried his remains at Arlington National Cemetery. But until this Memorial Day, there was no memorial to Hartman in Clark, the place he called home.
   On Monday, after the annual Memorial Day parade, the township added Hartman's name to the war memorial and christened a street in a new subdivision, Hartman Court, in his honor. Over 600 people, including about 50 members of Hartman's family and five of his Naval Academy classmates, attended, said Union County American Legion Commander Bill Duffy.
   ''I saw little babies in carriages, senior citizens and all in between,'' Duffy said. ''But the best part was seeing the Hartmans.''
   Richard Hartman and his brother Edward, sons of a career Army officer, grew up on Army bases around the world. Their aunt and uncle's Cape Cod on Gertrude Street in Clark was a fixed point in their peripatetic life, the address Hartman gave the Navy as his home base and the place he came home to on furloughs.
   Monday's parade traveled down Westfield Avenue, less than a mile from that Gertrude Street house. This year's parade was the biggest since the township's first parade five years ago, with township youth groups striding alongside veterans, Sponge Bob Squarepants, and marching bands, Duffy said.
   Yesterday, all of Arthur L. Johnson High School gathered on the school's front lawn to observe Memorial Day. With the American flag flying at half-staff, they heard from veterans of past wars. A few students lingered long after the ceremony was over to hear more about the ''fallen heroes,'' Duffy said.
   ''That's why I do this - so they remember,'' he said.
   Hank Miller, a Navy helicopter pilot who took part in one of the attempts to rescue Hartman, doesn't forget.
   ''The North Vietnamese have fortified the position where Hartman was shot down and they quietly and silently awaited the Air Force and Navy combined rescue attempts with an incredible barrage of weapons,'' wrote Miller, now a writer and photographer in California, about the rescue.
   ''We (lost) several aircraft in the strike . . . and last but not least, Hartman, who most likely met his demise many hours earlier at the hands of the NVN.''