Mystery solved

Ever since the war, Alan Lee has wondered what happened to Grady Myers, the big guy with thick glasses who went through advanced infantry training with him in the fall of 1968. Every so often, he'd try to find Grady. When he went to Boise, Grady's hometown, he'd check the phone book looking for his name. He even looked for Grady's name among the dead and missing listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial when a replica of the Wall came to Lewiston, Idaho.

Lewiston is where Alan has lived all of his life. He was reading the local paper recently when he saw this photograph of Grady, just as Alan remembered him. That's when he learned Grady had survived the war. The picture illustrated an article about "Boocoo Dinky Dow" that was published before my book reading in nearby Clarkston, Wash.  Alan had to work that day, but his wife came and asked me to sign a copy of the book for him.

Alan and I chatted on the phone this week. After expressing his sadness that Grady had died last year, he told me what he remembered about Grady. One thing was that Grady was always hungry -- most of the guys were during training. The food, in Alan's words, "wasn't the best," and Grady describes in the memoir how men were never given enough time to finish what was on their plates. One time, the trainees got a rare chance to leave Fort Lewis and couldn't wait to chow down on restaurant food. "We went to get hamburgers and Grady ordered three of them," Alan said.

Unlike Grady, Alan was wasn't wounded in Vietnam. Still, he said, "It was a tough year." Looking back, he doesn't know how he handled the living conditions, including constant dampness. "Once, I wore the same clothes for 63 days."  The only thing he changed was his socks. "They would drop us clean socks from   helicopters."

That was one thing soldiers in Vietnam all had in common ... counting days and hoping to survive to 365.

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