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Monday, March 14, 2005
Ex-Marine Gets Vietnam Dog Tag Back After 39 Years
By Meredith Britt
Las Vegas Optic
LAS VEGAS, N.M.— It's been 39 years since Bob Brewin served with the Marines in Vietnam. When he got a phone call recently from someone who had found his dog tag in Vietnam, it brought back the memories.
On New Year's Eve, Brewin received a call from a man in California, saying he had bought the tag in a pawn shop in Saigon. Brewin received it in the mail a few days later.
"The dog tag resonated with me. It's a touchstone to my past, and an amulet. You touch it and it reconnects you with what happened and the fact that it came from such a long distance and a long time ago," Brewin said.
The couple who found Brewin's tag, Stacie Hanson and Bryan Marks, have made a mission of returning dog tags and have now reunited more than 400 Vietnam veterans with their tags. They found Brewin through the Internet.
Brewin said dog tags were frequently lost in Vietnam.
"You keep them on a chain with a can opener, and take them off. They had a dog tag machine in Danang, so losing them was no big deal," he said. "I'd lost them a few times."
"If I had any emotion when I heard this, I was touched with gratitude that someone would take the time and effort to reach across the mists of time. What they sent me was a time machine," he said.
"It's good to have a piece of memory that has a physical connection with a place and time that— like it or not— was the determining part of my life," he added.
Brewin landed in Danang, Vietnam, with the Second Battalion, Ninth Marine Regiment, on July 4, 1965. His company served as radio operators with the Marine infantry, he said, walking through the jungles with heavy equipment.
"We were with troops and weapons, wandering through jungles," he said.
Brewin went on to be a writer, co-authoring two books. He now writes for Federal Computer Week.
Brewin and his wife, Deborah Suess, a weaver, moved to Las Vegas in 2002.