Ken Carter can't have imagined how many lives he'd touch by satisfying his curiosity about a piece of black granite and its connection to a soldier killed 39 years ago.
The Germantown, Tenn., elementary special education teacher's effort to find whose full name was on a broken off slab of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial -- reading RTLETT -- has had a ripple effect from Washington, to Alabama, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Michigan and California, binding strangers sometimes in blinding tears.
For Carter, a resident of Bartlett, Tenn., born nine months and four days after Bartlett died, "the whole thing has been amazing. I don't really believe in coincidence. But I think God was ready at this point to have the story unfold."
Carter's effort will be celebrated this week when the 7th Armored Squadron 1st Air Cavalry -- known as Blackhawks -- meets for a reunion here to remember the fragment's namesake, the late Donnie S. Bartlett, who died in 1970, along with the 80 other members of the unit killed in action in Vietnam.
About 90 of them will gather at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with a wreath on Friday morning and read off all 81 names.
Word of Carter's search for Donnie Bartlett has now reached Bartlett's 82-year-old father, Homer, and son Donnie Jr., born three months after his father's death.
"I want to be there so bad I can taste it," retired car salesman Homer Bartlett of Opelika, Ala., said of the reunion that gets under way Thursday.
By phone from Opelika, he remembered the 11 p.m. knock on the door when a soldier and Donnie's pregnant wife, Ann, delivered the news. He didn't get much information that night -- "the next couple of days were just a daze for me, really" -- but now members of his son's unit have been calling.
Donnie Jr., who works at the Michelin tire plant in Opelika and has two sons including a Donnie III, says he appreciates all the efforts that have helped him understand the life his father lived. He says he'd never ask Carter for his piece of granite bearing his father's name but hopes it will be passed to one of his sons when both he and Carter are gone.
The squadron's unofficial historian, R. William "Bill" Cromer of LaGrange, Ky., was putting together a history of the unit for this week's reunion when he came across a story about Carter's visit to the polished black Indian granite wall in May. Carter's father had been part of the Memphis crew that etched all 57,942 names onto granite slabs, including the RTLETT fragment that broke off and had to be re-done.
Cromer didn't know Bartlett in Vietnam but contacted Mike Blackburn of Delavan, Wisc., the one man who survived the roadside bombing that killed the jeep's three other occupants on March 11, 1970.
Blackburn, 58, who volunteered for the Army at 17, recalled that his and Bartlett's jeep was the lead vehicle, carrying a heavy 106-mm. machine gun on a tripod, in a column of trucks traveling through Kien Giang province in the Mekong River Delta. Bartlett had been driving but, when the convoy stopped briefly, Blackburn, the squad leader, took the wheel.
"I think about it all the time," he said last week. "If we hadn't switched seats, I'd have been the one...I had a counselor tell me, he said, I shouldn't consider myself guilty. I should consider myself damn lucky," he said.
Four guys from the 7/1 Powder Valley unit -- Lopez Jose Santos, John W. Luttrell, Lester P. Saba and Bartlett all died that day. They were part of a special air cavalry unit used to interdict Viet Cong soldiers and their supplies from entering South Vietnam.
Donnie Stephen Bartlett had graduated from high school and had done a year at Southern Union College in Wadley, Ala., when he was drafted. He did basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., came home briefly, then left for Southeast Asia. His father saw him off at the airport in mid-December 1969. Three months later, he was dead.
Ann Davis, 55, Bartlett's widow and a hairdresser in Opelika, remembered her late husband "got 'cutest' in high school and 'best looking' in college; he was very, very, very good looking -- too good looking to be a guy."
She said theirs was a love at first sight. "We kind of looked at each other and that was it," she said of their first meeting after a basketball game. "It was not easy to get over it. I always kept hoping he would come back, that maybe they'd made a mistake and he might just be missing in action and just show up on my porch one day. But that never happened."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service www.scrippsnews.com)
Post new comment