A Final Mission: Facing the Wounds

Last of three articles

By Phil McCombs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 21, 1998; Page A1

Soon after arriving in Vietnam to pay a "debt of honor" to his older brother who died in the war, Rob Sutter found himself hot, tired and somewhat amazed at the emotional intensity of this journey with American veterans back to a place where they'd risked everything and given their best.

One day, as the large group was having lunch at a charming restaurant in the old imperial city of Hue – site of ferocious fighting in the 1968 Tet Offensive – one of the men made an announcement that brought a sudden hush.

In an adjoining room, he said, was a woman who'd been a Red Cross "Donut Dolly" – a humble job, to be sure, working in a recreation center for U.S. troops. Many of these men could remember a time during the war when – frightened, exhausted and lonely – their spirits had been lifted by the warm smile of just such a girl.

Now, like the Marines, Judith Hansen of Hermosa Beach, Calif., was a mere tourist in a land where she and much of her generation had lost its innocence in a war that ended in defeat.

Quietly, she came and stood before them – a little bewildered and quite moved by this unexpected meeting. It was her first time back to Vietnam, she told the men. She'd spent three days in old Saigon, then come north. "I was in Da Nang working with Marines in 1967," she continued. "Now I can't find the rec center . . . "

Her voice broke, she couldn't continue.

Silently, except for the scrape of chairs, the men instinctively rose and, standing at attention, sang "The Marines' Hymn" for her at the top of their lungs. The spontaneous, disciplined eruption of feeling was the highest tribute they could pay, their most heartfelt salute.

Some were crying.

That night, Rob – a Marine who'd just missed serving in Vietnam but who was trying to understand the life of his brother and hero, Richard, who died near Khe Sanh on July 21, 1967 – wrote in his journal:

It was one of the most awesome moments of my life. Judith Hansen will never forget it, and neither will we.

Yet Rob had displayed no emotion.

In fact, he hadn't cried about anything since that moment 31 years ago when he was 13 and his family received the news of Richard's death. Now a successful Atlanta businessman of 44, Rob told friends he'd "carried some deep mental wounds" from the Vietnam era, and had spent much of his life chasing Richard's shadow, "wanting to follow in his path."

Finally, his search led him here.

As he sang for Hansen, Rob stood with Marines like Tom Esslinger, a Washington lawyer who'd commanded his brother's unit – Mike Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines – several months after Richard's death; Carl E. Mundy Jr., Richard's battalion executive officer, who later became commandant of the Marine Corps; and Frank Johnston, who'd left active duty but, as a civilian newsman, had taken a famous photograph of Richard in the besieged country parish of Nha Tho An Hoa ("Peace Church") 25 miles from Khe Sanh.

Like most of the retired Marines – some wives and sons, U.S. Army veterans and active-duty Marines were along, too – Rob was a little vague on his reasons for being here. "Closure?" – not a word he liked. "Grieving?" – he'd done it. Yet in honoring Richard, he sought a final measure of peace with the war that had wreaked havoc in his nation, his family, his own soul.

Much of the trip – like the war itself – had a surreal quality. Rob and the others frolicked in the surf at China Beach, the storied R&R center for American troops near Da Nang; walked in a somber line past Ho Chi Minh's chilled, spotlighted corpse in a Hanoi mausoleum; played with kids at the Lewis B. Puller Jr. School, which is supported by American funds and named for the Marine who told his story in "Fortunate Son"; and shopped for their wives in bustling Saigon (now officially Ho Chi Minh City) under new skyscrapers and a red banner bearing a huge portrait of Colonel Sanders, the chicken king.

Traveling in modern air-conditioned buses, the 36 Vietnam veterans, seven family members, journalists and others visited old battlefields in what used to be called "I Corps" – the northernmost area of military operations in the former South Vietnam.

At one point during the two-week tour, Rob listened as Mundy and others who'd served with his brother stood sweating in the tropical sun not far from Peace Church south of the old DMZ, describing the battle of "Ambush Valley" there in September 1967. Nearly two-thirds of the 1,184-man battalion – outnumbered and holding off human-wave assaults by a North Vietnamese Army regiment – was killed or wounded in three days.

It was akin to walking the battlefield at Chancellorsville with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. . . . Many men displayed incredible acts of heroism. Richard was already dead by then, but this was his unit.

As he heard the men's stories, Rob learned what life and death in Vietnam had been like for his brother. As he connected with them in a series of humorous, sad, uplifting moments, he got a sense of how men come to love one another in battle – a bond that is like no other.

Pursuing his quest, Rob got a broader look at America's Vietnam saga through these glimpses of men struggling – as their country struggles – to understand and cope with what happened. In many of the stories, terrible as they are, Rob could see surprising and powerful elements of redemption, a saving grace. Each man had tried to do the right thing when his country called, going to a strange, faraway land and risking life and honor in an idealistic fight for freedom. Now, Rob saw, there was much bitterness at the political deceptions that had accompanied the crusade, at the waste and loss. Dear friends had died, horribly – and to what end?

Though this tour was not billed as a "healing" experience, the increasing popularity of such tours fits naturally into America's broad cultural effort to close the book on Vietnam: You've seen "Apocalypse Now," "Platoon" and "Coming Home;" you've read "Fields of Fire" and "Going After Cacciato"; now you can return to Khe Sanh, and walk through your memories.

"The veterans have an insatiable curiosity to go back, to find the place where they lost their youth," explained retired Col. Warren Wiedhahn of Military Historical Tours, the Alexandria agency that organized this trip. "Each guy has his moment, and you see him go off by himself."

Rob wanted to stand on the ground near Khe Sanh where Richard died.

He wanted his moment.

Honorable Men

As I get to know the others with us, I am struck by the one trait . . . possessed by them all: CHARACTER.

On Rob's bus, Tom Early sits near his old friend Dick Camp. Both were officers in Richard's battalion, both saw heavy combat. Like many on the trip, they'd been career professionals.

Now, still lean and fit in middle age, both with finely honed and somewhat sardonic senses of humor, they sit gazing out the windows at the lush countryside as a Vietnamese government tour guide talks over the speaker system.

The guide mentions the Viet Cong "hero" Nguyen Van Troi, who'd tried to assassinate Robert McNamara, "the American minister of defense."

Early, 56, who retired as a colonel and later became a graveyard administrator in Indiana, snaps his fingers.

"Too bad he missed!"

"Boy, I'll tell you," says Camp, 57, who also retired as a colonel and who is now a school system administrator in suburban Cincinnati, "we got hosed. I was trying to sort through my feelings: It's not anger, exactly, but it just makes you sick to realize they were lying to us."

"Maybe rage, Dick?" interjects Ken Sandall, a San Jose attorney who was a radioman in the battalion.

It is an arresting moment. The fierce bitterness of these men – archetypal American warriors for whom "Duty, Honor, Country" will never be mere words – springs from a deep sense of betrayal. They've been discussing H.R. McMaster's book "Dereliction of Duty." The misplaced ideals and outright lies that fueled Vietnam – not just McNamara's, who'd realized the war couldn't be won but kept on sending boys to die anyway, but also the misrepresentations of LBJ and his advisers, to say nothing of the weakness of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – afflicted men like Camp and Early directly, personally.

Now, decades later, they seem far removed from the military stereotypes into which they were once fitted by anti-war protesters. It's not that they've suddenly embraced left-wing causes, or wouldn't return to battle in a moment if their country called: Camp and Early simply think, now, that what happened was appalling – that they, too, were somehow wrong – and they're honest enough to say so.

"I detested guys like George McGovern because they didn't support the party line," Camp says. "But they were right."

"We denigrated them," Early agrees. "I hate to admit that the People's Republic of Massachusetts was right."

"Who else?" Camp asks.

"The Berrigan brothers," says Early, who once – as a Marine recruiter – had protesters dump chicken blood on his paperwork.

"They were right as rain," Camp laments. He shakes his head.

"It hurts," Early says. "Why were we here? What the hell was accomplished? . . . And the lies! – starting with the Gulf of Tonkin. It was like a little kid telling a lie, and he has to just keep lying.

"And at the time, you're just here worried about living for the next five minutes, and saving Marines.

"I mean, we were just put out there to die, without a plan."

Guts of Steel

Larry ("Horney") Harnetiaux asked me to be part of an honor guard for his lieutenant, John Slater, who was killed while Horney was away on R&R. . . . The lieutenant was apparently not a drinking man [but] would give the men $20 and tell them to buy some "Cokes." They would buy him a couple of Cokes and use the rest to buy beer for themselves.

Today, Horney bought his lieutenant a Coke.

Rob and Horney, in a red "Force Recon" cap, stand at attention saluting a dusty spot on the edge of an abandoned airfield south of Da Nang where Horney has buried the can of Coke.

"Taps" plays from a loudspeaker on the bus.

Also in the small formation stands retired Col. Bruce F. Meyers, still rugged at 72, a 28-year veteran who in the 1950s founded the first Marine Force Recon company and, in 1968 – after Richard Sutter's death – brought Richard's regiment to fight in the triple-canopy jungle west of this spot.

On the bus, Meyers enthralled Rob and the others with tales of those days – "leapfrogging" his battalions up ridge lines; using ammonia-sensitive "pisser sniffers" mounted on helicopters to detect enemy troop concentrations; greeting newly arrived lieutenant and presidential son-in-law Chuck Robb with the plea, "For chrissakes don't get waxed or you'll end my career."

The brief ceremony over, Horney, 50, a construction worker in Illinois, wipes his eyes and lights a Marlboro. Bill Stilwagen, 48, who'd been a Marine radioman and helicopter machine gunner, squeezes his hand.

"Full circle, brother," he says.

As Rob and the others spread across the airfield in search of old sandbags, C-ration cans and other mementos, Ben "Baby-san" Dunham – a 49-year-old ex-Army Ranger with a ring in his ear, a black beret and golden hair falling to his shoulders – finds the shade of a scraggly tree with his ex-Ranger buddy William "Knot" Dickey, 48.

Having served together, they've stayed pals over the years and now operate a hardwood flooring business out of Nashville and Chicago. Knot's getup is as irreverent as Baby-san's: gray shoulder-length hair, cowboy boots, a black hat festooned with beads. He was a sniper with more than 40 confirmed kills.

Even during the war, men like Baby-san and Knot were legends, daring what few would: As Ranger LRRPs (for "long-range reconnaissance patrol"), they'd moved quietly through the jungle in four- or six-man teams, playing cat-and-mouse with death as they tried to pinpoint enemy positions.

"There isn't a LRRP who hasn't walked into an enemy base camp," Knot explains, almost nonchalantly. "Often you could walk right out, because Nguyen is so comfortable out there he wouldn't see you."

"At night we'd crawl into the thickest cover we could find," Baby-san says. "You put out your Claymores" – antipersonnel mines – "and then listen. At night the jungle comes alive."

"You can feel trouble," Knot adds.

"Nguyen wasn't bashful about looking for you with flashlights," Baby-san continues. "Usually, we'd let 'em shine and move on past. That's when your nerves are at peak, and you know what's inside you."

A Marine walks up with some 30-year-old junk.

Baby-san takes a green C-ration can, turns it over in his hand.

"Pecan Cake Roll," the stenciled label reads.

"This was my favorite," he muses. "I'd take four of these on patrol, and have one each night while I was on radio watch. We observed 'noise discipline,' and it took a long time to open the can."

It took 45 minutes.

An Unpayable Debt

We hiked about 5,000 meters [in] the heat. . . . The water loss from the body is incredible, even under "no gear" conditions. It must have truly been hell with all that equipment and a hostile enemy about.

Some days were worse than others, and some you spend the rest of your life trying to come to terms with.

"We'd already had six KIA and 32 wounded during the day, and we were low on ammo," Howard A. Christy, 65, recalls. It was May 21, 1966, southwest of Da Nang. Suddenly, his battered company took small-arms fire from a hamlet.

Everyone hit the deck. Christy, in command, radioed for fire support.

"We destroyed the town with air and heavy artillery and napalm – bombs, machine gun strafing, 8-inch howitzers, 155-millimeter guns," says the retired lieutenant colonel, now a historian at Brigham Young University who has written extensively on the moral dilemmas of combat; on the trip, Rob listened with fascination as Christy gave the younger, active-duty Marines graphic lessons on the realities of war.

Out of the black smoking ruins that day had walked a family – a grandmother whose burned flesh hung in shreds, a distraught mother, a 10-year-old girl carrying her little brother, who had a chunk of shrapnel embedded in his brain.

They walked up to Christy, and the girl handed him the boy.

"He died in five seconds [in my arms]. She went berserk and she was pounding on me with her fists and crying. . . . The mother let down her hair and got on her knees and sang a wail of death.

"I stood there. I said, 'Tell her I'm sorry. Tell her we suffered a lot today, too.' What do you tell the mother of a 5-year-old boy you just killed?"

On the trip, Christy wanted to find the girl – if she's still alive – to make amends. "I was going to give her $100, and apologize."

There wasn't time.

A Happy Encounter

We stopped in Phu Loc. Ken Sandall was carrying a picture of a 10-year-old boy who befriended him in 1968, and used to run errands for him. He showed the picture to some locals and asked if the boy was still alive.

Friendly crowds of people – including squads of children – gather cheerfully around the big American visitors at every stop. They'd often done the same during the war – though you could never be sure, then, whose side they were really on.

"The Vietnamese like us!" Esslinger, the Washington lawyer, says with a delighted grin. "As I look back now, I have no animosity toward them," adds Anthony R. Shaw Jr., a New Jersey phone company executive who'd fought at Khe Sanh.

Sandall, 52, a large, bald man with a sweet smile, holds the picture of the Vietnamese boy in his hand as the buses stop along a busy two-lane road running through Phu Loc.

"He was just a good little kid," he recalls fondly. "We'd come here for a month, we'd go out on ambushes and stuff. We were right on the other side of the bridge there, living with the people."

With the help of an interpreter, he questions the villagers. "He'd be about 40 years old now, because he was about 10 then," Sandall says. "He had a tattoo, 'Ca,' on his left forearm."

"Ah, Ca!" exclaims a man. He trots off and returns with a thin middle-aged man who seems slightly embarrassed by all the attention.

"Maybe it was you?" Sandall asks as Rob looks on. "You used to come and play with the Marines? You remember Ken?"

Nguyen Hong seems to remember, though his tattoo says "Ha."

"I'm Ken!" Sandall says, sweeping Hong into a bear hug.

"Oh, my God!" Hong exclaims.

They're both laughing.

A Family Matter

Col. Meyers and his wife Jo are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary today. They have decided to have a wedding and renew their vows, [and] we are all invited. . . . The service was performed by Rev. Alan McLean, an Episcopal priest who was a young lieutenant. In his third week in Vietnam, he stepped on a land mine and lost both his legs. . . . We gave Jo flowers, and the hotel staff made them a wedding cake.

"Vows?" Jo quips, "I thought that was a military acronym."

"She has been there constantly," says Meyers, now an attorney in Washington state whose three decades of service in three wars made him "a legend in the Marine Corps," as Mundy puts it in toasting the couple during dinner at a Da Nang restaurant.

"He wasn't a legend to me," Jo declares, smiling. "He'd come home after being gone a year and try to take charge. No way!"

The difficulties faced by military families are legend, too. Rob, who'd left active duty mainly because he didn't like being away from his wife and children, raises his glass to toast Jo and Marine wives in general.

Sitting with Rob are Gene and Leslie Miller of Camarillo, Calif. Gene, a firefighter, eats and chats while his wife, a surgical nurse, quietly reflects on the difficulties the war had caused in their 25-year marriage.

"Vietnam underlies everything in his life," she says. "About 15 years ago, when he saw the Moving Wall" – a traveling version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial – "he kneeled down as if in a trance. It was like he couldn't hear me, it kind of frightened me. I took the kids, and we stayed in the car for two hours . . .

"And that's how he began reliving the past."

Later, she says, Gene was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, "and it's been hard. . . . It's like a wound that he's had for 30 years, and he's put Band-Aids on it, but he knows it has to be lanced and drained so it can heal."

The trip, she adds, is helping.

"But it hurts. Especially going down the river where he was [stationed]. The boat owner was very nice and gracious; he had a wooden leg – from the war; it was an American helmet he used to bail the boat. . . . We got off at several places Gene remembered. He looked at me and he mouthed the words, 'I was here. I stood right here.' "

The tour is good for her too, she thinks. "I told my husband the other night, 'I don't know who's gotten more out of this – me or you.' "

Then, with sudden intensity:

"Vietnam, to me, is a woman. She's a bitch, almost like a mistress! Prior to coming here, I thought I'd learn something from her, [and] I've learned that this is a beautiful place, and the people are wonderful . . ."

Tears are streaming down her cheeks.

"I can understand why vets have problems being married, and it's hard for the wives, because it takes a lot of understanding and love. It really does. . . . That's why I came.

"To face the mistress."

Heroism

The Marine security detachment [in Hanoi] presented Sgt. Maj. Len Koontz with a brick from Hoa Lo Prison, otherwise known as "The Hanoi Hilton" [where] American POWs were held. Koontz [though not a POW] was awarded the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor, for valor at Khe Sanh.

You'd never peg him for a hero.

Len's kind of short, bald, low-key. On Rob's bus he's sweet with everyone, cheerful and helpful. Retired after 30 years in the Corps, he's an internet engineer in Fairfax.

"I came back to go to one spot," Len says in a hotel dining room one night. "I lost two good buddies. It's one of the promises you make one another. You hold hands and hug each other and promise you'll come back together some day. But of course, they didn't come back."

He removes his glasses, wipes his eyes.

Len, 49, grew up working class in Pennsylvania, joined the Corps out of high school. Next thing he knew, he was at Khe Sanh. "I'd found my family. I always wanted to be a Marine."

He buddied up with Zack Taylor Addington of Georgia and Henry Earl Shelton of California. "The three of us just clicked. We fell in love with one another. It was a bond nobody could touch."

They were 19.

One day, Len drank from a well where the enemy had dumped bodies. He got diarrhea, and Zack took his place on point. "We got ambushed. Zack gets shot in the leg, and he falls. 'Lenny, come get me!' But I'm getting shot at too, and I can't move because I have the runs so bad.

"They shot him again and again, and he's calling for me to come get him, and I can't move."

He pauses, struggling.

"Consequently, Zack died of course."

Soon afterward, Shelton was on point as the platoon moved up Hill 542 "and he takes a .50-caliber round in the stomach. As he's falling, he takes another one in the head. A fierce firefight takes place, and I couldn't get him out of there. He was alone, dead."

The enemy drove the Americans down the hill. "In the morning we get reinforced and go back up with two platoons. Shelton isn't there anymore. They took his body and stripped it and mutilated him and stuck him in the middle of a bomb crater so we'd draw fire trying to get him. Two .50-caliber bunkers had the crater sighted in.

"I said, 'I'm getting Shelton out of there.' "

He did.

After destroying the bunkers and pulling his friend's body down the hill, Len went back under fire to save wounded Marines. As he picked one man up, "I pulled his left leg off. Both legs were missing. His intestines were hanging out.

"He looked at me and said, 'Lenny, why?' "

That was the day Len Koontz won the Navy Cross.

He doesn't think he did anything special – "People just saw me and wrote it up, that's all. Thousands of others did the same.

"All they got was a Purple Heart, and a garden of stone."

Return to Khe Sanh

Arriving at the site of the old airfield, people ventured out to where they had been billeted, or to the location where a good friend had been wounded or killed.

The place is serene now. It's a coffee plantation, as it has been since French colonial times.

The punishing 77-day Siege of Khe Sanh in early 1968 – along with the countrywide Tet Offensive – had helped turn America against the war and bring about Lyndon Johnson's decision not to seek reelection.

Thirty years later, the runway has fallen into disrepair – a gash of red clay lined with tufts of elephant grass, stretching across the high open plateau toward hazy mountains and the nearer hills where Koontz and Esslinger fought, where Richard died, and Zack and Shelton and many others.

Scraps of sandbags and rusty barbed wire lie about, but there's little sign of the bunkers where men once crouched under fearsome artillery barrages. In the afternoon stillness, it's hard to imagine the explosions, the screams, the chatter of automatic weapons.

Rob heads down the runway.

[Later] Gen. Mundy and his son, Maj. Sam Mundy, walked me out to the area where Richard's company was positioned. This is as close as I will get to where Richard was killed.

"This would have been where Mike 3/26 was," Mundy says. They're on a trail beside a ragged tree line half a mile from the airstrip.

Rob gazes around the area where his brother's unit was encamped at the time of his death – the summer before the great siege, a summer so quiet that Mike Company was still living above ground in tents.

Mundy tells Rob about John Manzi, a Mike Company lieutenant who used to get big food parcels from home and host an Officers' Mess Night. "His dad owned an Italian restaurant in New York, so we'd come walking out here to [company commander] Andy DeBona's tent for a spaghetti dinner."

"Manzi," Rob says quietly – drawing on his years of research into Richard's life – "got killed September 7, 1967."

The general and his son strike off in a different direction, and Rob continues walking slowly down the trail with another man, Col. Horace "Pony" Baker.

"How are you doing?" Pony asks.

"Okay," Rob replies.

Birds are chirping in the trees by the trail.

"I have something I'd like to give you," Pony says. One of the locals who'd come out when the Marines arrived was selling war mementos – old medals, dog tags. Pony, 62, who'd been a casualty notification officer after returning to the States from combat in Vietnam, had bought a faded Purple Heart.

"There's no one I'd rather give this to than you."

Taking the medal, Rob breaks down – sobbing openly, unreservedly.

He falls into Pony's arms. They hug.

Johnston – who'd taken the picture of Rob's brother in Peace Church three decades earlier – has his camera up and clicking, capturing the moment. He's crying so hard he can scarcely see through the viewfinder.

"Thank you for coming out here with me," Rob says.

"My pleasure," Pony says. He's smiling.

Later in the day, as the sun began to set, our group held a memorial service for all who served and died at Khe Sanh. Gen. Mundy spoke.

"This is hallowed ground," the general says, his voice clear and gentle. "Brave men fought here, and fought for each other here."

Behind him, a wreath – symbolizing that "we were here. There were friends here whom we love very much. Love is not a term that Marines use very often. Doesn't sound too manly. But you can't be a Marine and not be in love with the other people who are around you."

Rob and Pony listen, arm-in-arm.

The general speaks of Richard, "Rob Sutter's brother – a Marine who served beside us here on this very spot, who died near this very spot.

"I don't know whether he died a hero or not. I don't know whether many of us die heroes. But he was a hero if for no other reason than simply that he was here, and simply because he came when his country asked him."

Mundy brings Rob forward as Koontz steps up smartly, bearing two Purple Hearts Richard earned for his wounds – the last one mortal.

The general presents them to Rob "with gratitude."

"On behalf of my family," Rob says simply, "and all the Marines who died here, and all the Marines who lived here . . . I appreciate it.

"I'm proud to be a Marine."

To have Richard honored by the former commandant [at] the Khe Sanh Combat Base where he fought and where he died, brought me indescribable satisfaction.

For 30 years I have lived with a great deal of anger and guilt. . . . In a number of Richard's letters home, he asked me to write to him. I think I wrote him only twice. [I] had little, if any, idea of what Richard was going through, or how much danger he faced each day.

I let him down.

[Now] I can, for the first time . . . forgive myself. [As] I lay in my bed this evening, I could feel the anger actually draining from my body, as though a plug had been pulled from my heels. I felt the weight of a long-carried guilt lifted.

I feel at peace.

Epilogue

The next day, in the rolling hills south of the old DMZ, the men locate the ruins of Peace Church in a small banana grove. It was leveled by artillery fire, according to the local people, in 1968.

There are no other structures around – only trees, rice paddies, open country. In the hot afternoon stillness, a genuine sense of serenity seems to have fallen over the spot. As the Marines approach, the Vietnamese emerge silently out of the trees as if from nowhere – as they always had.

"Hello!" greets a smiling child.

Frank, with cameras dangling from his shoulders and Rob and Pony close behind, steps gingerly into the rubble. Pausing, the photographer gazes around at the chunks of cement wall, fragments of smashed terra cotta flooring.

"This is it," he whispers. "There's nothing here. God, they blew this beautiful church away."

Frank and Richard were here together May 16, 1967, in the midst of a terrible battle. North Vietnamese mortar rounds exploded outside as wounded Marines huddled inside for protection. It was a place of chaos then, where fearful young men bravely faced death and, in so doing, redeemed in some deeply human way the hideousness of war.

"I don't want to die," a badly wounded Marine had told Frank as he comforted him. "You're not, old buddy," the photographer had assured him. The man died in his arms.

"You couldn't walk six feet without getting shelled or shot at," Frank recalls. "Now it's so peaceful – the way it should be, really."

In the fading evening light of that terrible day, Frank had photographed Richard sitting on the steps near the altar. The next morning, under fire, they'd buddied up to help evacuate the wounded – then said goodbye.

Two months later, Richard was killed near Khe Sanh. Twenty years later, Rob had called to ask if Frank had taken that picture of his brother.

Now, Frank leads Rob through the ruins to the spot where the altar had been.

They stand for a few moments, in silence. Growing from a clump of grass at their feet is a single yellow flower.

"This is where I photographed Richard," Frank says softly.

"Rob, this is where Richard and I were."

[Editor's note: Please see the Epilogue of October 1998 to meet the former Marine who came forward as the soldier in Frank Johnston's photograph.]