They were young men then, brand-new soldiers dropped in the jungle less than a year removed from high-school graduation in Denver, too green to really know what was in store for them.
They had each other, though, first becoming buddies in basic training, straight through helicopter instruction at Fort Rucker, Ala., putting the birds together on the USS Iwo Jima before coming ashore in the Republic of South Vietnam.
It was April 1965, and within days they would be off-loading dozens of GIs into hot landing zones, sometimes watching stunned as soldiers were shot and killed right beside them.
Four to five times a day in those early months, it would happen like that. Helicopter crew chiefs, each of them, they would just keep firing out the door, too young and too inexperienced ever to be really scared of joining the dead and dying.
They would go on R&R together that year, each time getting drunk together. They each would stand at the base at the end of each mission, praying for the others to return too.
At the end, in May 1966, when they came home and landed at Fort Benning, Ga., each ran behind the other to a restaurant, each ordering the hamburger they had dreamed of for 12 months.
And that was it. One went to Germany, another to California, the other to Georgia.
Jim Davis, John Gallegos and Jeff Fulkerson sit crowded around a downtown Denver restaurant table and pass around photographs from those old days.
They are all 63 years old now. It is the first time the former crew chiefs of A Company of the 177th Aviation Battalion have sat down together in 44 years.
Not a day passed over those decades, each of them swears, that they did not think of one another.
Jeff, for 35 years a long-haul trucker, would stop in various cities, grab a telephone book and call every Jim Davis and John Gallegos listed. Never found them.
And then, the Internet happened. Web pages for the 117th went up. One guy would know something, pass along a name.
Jeff found John two years ago. Six months later, they reunited. John was critically ill in the hospital. Jeff caught the first plane from his home in Joplin, Mo., to Elk Grove, Calif., where John had moved 20 years earlier.
“He wasn’t leaving here without me seeing him again,” Jeff Fulkerson explained.
John recovered, and he and Jeff set out to find Jim. They found him in Littleton, where he works as a website developer and database programmer. The three agreed to reunite this summer in Denver.
They swap stories well into the night, each of them later saying it was as if 1965 was but a week ago.
The stories, like many of the photographs, are often gory. A few are funny. None of them had ever fired a weapon before or seen an M-60 machine gun before that day in Vietnam when each was issued one.
“But we became proficient in less than a week. You had to be,” Jim Davis recalls.
He found his old Huey, the only one he ever flew during the war, inside a lot in Virginia. John Gallegos, an information systems analyst, found his at a military museum in Lincoln, Neb.
“Never did find mine,” Jeff Fulkerson says. “They probably kicked it over the side of some aircraft carrier.”
When Jeff and John say they are leaving in the morning, each man shakes the other’s hand.
“We’re going to do this every year, and I mean it,” Jeff Fulkerson says, staring at his old war pals. “I don’t know where or how, but by God, somehow were going to get it done.”
Each man stares at the others and nods.
