After 54 years
Charlie Hill, a Marine Corps veteran of two tours of duty in Vietnam, brought a poem to the Lincoln County News office a few weeks ago to see if it could appear in the newspaper’s special Veterans Day section.
The poem was about treatment of Vietnam veterans when they returned to the States and it ran on Page 6C,where it was read by Jim Keene, another Marine Corps Vietnam veteran from Chandler.
“I thought ‘that really tells it like it was,’” Jim said. He and Charlie have been friends for more than a decade, so Jim mentioned the poem to Charlie at the annual Veterans Day lunch the next day.
It was a moment of supreme serendipity. As the two friends talked and shared their backgrounds, they realized that they had been comrades in arms as teenagers, both serving in the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines at a remote combat base an An Hoa, Vietnam in early 1968. Charlie was a 19-year-old from Wewoka and Jim was 18, born inWestVirginia but mostly reared around Harrah, Newalla and McLoud.
‘I said ‘Holy crap, Charlie. We were there at the same time, doing the same job for the same company,’” Jim said.
Even though they fought in the same company, they can’t precisely place each other in Vietnam 54 years ago - and that was partly by design, said Charlie.
“In the Marine Corps in Vietnam, it was best not to be too close to a friend because if you see him die in your hands or see him lying there, you’re going to lose it,” he said.
“It was best to just say ‘hey, how you doing?” and then I’ve got his back and he’s got mine.”
The two were together between January and July 1968 at An Hoa, which was southwest of DaNang and accessible only by helicopter or C-130.
Jim was an infantryman with India Company; Charlie was a sniper, assigned to Headquarters Company so that he could float between companies as necessary.
“We’d probably known each other for 10 years, but never talked about it,” Jim said. “We never talked about the Vietnam War until I read the poem that he put in the paper.”
Connecting 54 years after going to war as teenagers has had a visible profound effect on both men.
“It was like a brotherhood reunited when we found out,” Jim said.
For Charlie, there seemed to be evidence of a larger plan at work.
“What we did over there, and what we lost and all the people I was with who have passed on,” he said.
“Then you sit across from a man who was there with you, it’s like a ghost that came back alive and is talking and he’s not BSing you. He’s telling the truth.
“I said ‘God, of all the people who got killed and died, you sent me somebody that was there with me, letting me know he survived, came home to his family and his country.’
“And now look at us today.”