Soldier, letter writer meet after 42 years

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Forty-two years ago, fourth-grade students at Red Bank, Tenn., near Chattanooga wrote get well cards and letters and mailed them to the wounded and recuperating U.S. soldiers on a hospital ship.
Resting aboard the USS Sanctuary and stitched up after being shot in the leg and filled with shrapnel, 19-year-old Richard Hamm received a card and letter penned by 9-year-old Cyndi Owen.
Private First Class Hamm was point man and tunnel rat for his unit of eight Marines from the 26th Regiment, and they were a long way in 1967 from Atkins and Davis Valley where he grew up. In a darkened cemetery his unit, deployed from base camp to set up a nighttime ambush, found themselves ambushed.
“They threw a satchel charge at us,” Hamm said. “They were set up in the pagoda.”
The blast “picked me up and blew me backwards,” Hamm said, and separated him from his rifle. “I found it and I was shooting and throwing grenades at the same time.”
All eight Marines were wounded, Hamm worst of all. They lay there through the night, low on ammunition. With their radio knocked out and unable to call for help, the next morning they walked the nearly three miles back to base camp.
Medics flew Hamm to Dong Ha and from there to the hospital ship Sanctuary.
“That’s when I got a card and letter from a 9-year-old girl in Chattanooga to a soldier,” Hamm said. “I wrote her back. I wrote four or five letters while I was on the hospital ship.” He spent 89 days on the Sanctuary.
“They said they were going to send me to Camp Lejune, North Carolina. I promised I would come and see her.”
It did not work out that way.
“They sent me back to Vietnam for four months. I lost her name and address.”
Combat in a war, especially a war without clear battle lines, where the enemy could be beside, above and even underfoot of the Americans, works on soldiers’ minds, changes them, often indelibly.
“You’re out there in the middle of the night and you have to get down on hands and knees and check the trail,” Ham said. And the enmity Vietnam soliders too often felt emanated from, of all places, back home.
“It was rough,” Hamm said. “Hearing all that bulls--- back in the States didn’t help either.”
Later, Hamm went to the Marine base at Quantico for 30 days “to train lieutenants how to set up ambushes and look for booby traps.” His service complete, he was discharged there on March 15, 1968.
He went to work in Fairfax and stayed 18 months. But the war left him with “bad nerves,” he said, and “there were too many people for me” in Fairfax.
That problem’s fix was a return to Smyth County were for the next four decades he forged a career of “helping with building houses and logging” working 34 years at General Shale.
While he escaped the crowds of Northern Virginia, he could not shed all the war’s effects on him. He said he can’t be in big groups or tolerate sudden loud noises to this day.
Hamm is on disability now. He blames the defoliant Agent Orange for this two heart attacks, diabetes, neuropathy and heightened susceptibility to infection.
“Agent Orange causes 50-some types of diseases,” Hamm said. “They tried to deny it at first.”
Hamm’s sense of humor, though, remains intact.
“They told me at the VA hospital if I lost a leg to diabetes, they’d get me a job at IHOP,” he said, pausing with the comedian’s gift of perfect timing. “You better write that I was just kidding, or the VA might hang me.”
Hamm said he was a comedian back in Vietnam as a way of keeping morale up among “his” men. Although only a private, it was his job as point man to keep the men alive, he said.
Although he could spot trouble in the jungles of Vietnam and find his way to a career back home, he could see no way to keep the promise the made to a little girl whose card he received when he perhaps most needed a kind gesture.
“I thought about her over the years, whatever happened to her,” he said. “I felt sorry that I didn’t go to see her.”
Four decades after their letter-writing ended with Hamm’s redeployment to Vietnam, a new communication went out from the grown and married Cyndi Childs. She used Facebook, the online social networking site, and there found 54 Richard Hamms.
She contacted two of them. Neither of them was her solider pen pal from long ago.
But one of them was the soldier’s son.
He responded to her: “It is probably my Dad you are looking for. I am Richard Hamm Jr. My Dad served in Vietnam. Would you like to get in touch with him?”
In another response, Richard Hamm Jr. wrote, “I hope he is who you are looking for.”
The date of the Facebook exchange was November 11, 2009, which Childs noted: “I guess because today was Veterans Day, I thought about him and thought I’d try Facebook. Did he ever mention a little girl who wrote to him?”
The next day came the reply that his father did remember a girl from around Memphis and that the details he recalled were similar to Childs’.
She wrote back: “I guess he’s had a nice life. I know that he has a nice son! … I’m going to send you a friend request, but tell your dad to get him a Facebook page and add me as a friend,” referring to the procedure for linking to others on the site.
Signing as Skipper later that day, Richard Hamm Jr. wrote Childs, “Reading your response made me tear up. My dad was just here telling us the story about losing your address when he went back to war. He said that he had planned to visit you after coming home but was sent to Quantico instead. I should see him again tomorrow. I’ll let him know that he is the one [you’re] looking for. Thank you so much for taking the time to think of him. He is a great person. I was dreading the thought of him not being the one. … I can’t wait to talk to him tomorrow.”
“Your response made me tear up as well, because now I know for sure,” Childs replied on Nov. 13. “I know that your dad is a great person because he didn’t blow off a little lid that really liked to talk!”
Skipper Hamm told Childs the next day his dad would write her a “real” letter. “He said he would like to meet you in person someday. He seems so excited. We both can’t get over what has happened.”
On Nov. 15, Skipper Hamm wrote Childs that this dad was sending her a token of his appreciation and hoped someone would be home to receive it.
The following day, Childs wrote that she and her husband own a vending business, but she had hurt her back cleaning out a closet the day before, and would be home recuperating. Then, she added, “Well, I heard my dog barking and my gift just arrived. The roses are so beautiful!!!!”
The roses were accompanied by a box of candy.
The gifts were followed to Childs’ Statesville home on Lake Norman on Jan. 9 by Richard Hamm Jr. and Sr.
“I was nervous and she was nervous, but it didn’t take long to feel I’d known her all my life,” Richard Hamm the elder said. “Real nice people, her and her husband.” Then, with a glint in his eye, the diehard Marine added, “He was in the Navy and I didn’t know if we’d get along.”
Hamm turned 63 in Jan. 12 and said meeting his wartime penpal “was the best birthday present I ever got. She made me a birthday cake and gave me a couple of presents.”
Since their meeting, the Marine and once-nine former fourth grader have resumed their correspondence that was a casualty of the war in Southeast Asia. He’s written four or five letters. “I’ll always keep in touch,” he said.
“I’ve been on Cloud Nine since it happened,” Hamm said. I’ve told just about everybody in Smyth County and she’s told everybody in Statesville. When we came back from Vietnam, we weren’t treated the best. Something like this makes up for it. It’s unbelievable.”

dkegley@wythenews.com