Friday, August 26, 2011
Cincinnati Enquirer
CINCINNATI
Every time she lifted the lid of her jewelry box, Susan Wilson saw a bracelet that reminded her of a man she never met.
She would wonder if he ever made it home. All she knew about the man was on the bracelet.
His name: Peter Drabic. His rank: sergeant. And the date the soldier disappeared while on patrol in the jungles of Vietnam: 9-24-68.
“I always wanted to send him that bracelet. That’s what you were supposed to do — if he came home,” said Wilson, an Anderson Township mother of two, grandmother of three and executive secretary at Procter & Gamble’s downtown Cincinnati headquarters.
“But I never knew anything more about him.”
She does now.
Forty years after she started wearing the shiny, nickel-plated brass bracelet to honor troops taken prisoner or missing in action in Vietnam, Wilson finally found Sgt. Drabic. She located him recently at his home in rural Maryland.
The 64-year-old retired telephone worker can look out his window onto a peaceful view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, far removed in time and place from the war-torn foothills of Vietnam.
Wilson mailed the bracelet to Drabic.
“I am always very humbled when I receive one of these,” he said hours after opening Wilson’s package. Over the years, he has received dozens of these presents.
Drabic marveled that people still think of him.
“That,” he said, “was a long time ago.”
He spent a long time as a prisoner of war: 1,635 days. When he was captured, he had been in Vietnam for 13 days. He was two months away from his 21st birthday.
Drabic spent the next 400 days in the jungles of Vietnam.
“I went from 162 pounds to 112. All they gave us to eat were two handfuls of rice a day and some water.”
He served his final three months as a POW in the infamous prison and torture chamber known as the Hanoi Hilton. While behind bars, he devised a secret communications system that boosted the prisoners’ morale and later earned him one of his two Bronze Stars. During his entire time as a POW, no one in the States knew, until his release in 1973, if he was alive or dead.
For a man who lost 41/2 years of his life to a brutal enemy, Drabic — who goes by his middle name (“my dad was Peter, so I became Ed”) — has a remarkably positive outlook on life.
“Eddie is not bitter,” said Debbie Drabic, his wife of 34 years. “He just views this as part of his past, just like people go to college for four years.”
Her husband has “a great appreciation for life. The most mundane things are very precious to him,” she said.
“That happens,” he said, “when you don’t see the moon and the stars for 41/2 years.”
He paused. There was something he had to get off his chest.
“This story is not about me,” he said. “I’ve already broken my own rule and said more than I should have about myself.”
He politely declined a request for a photo. “Not for any newspaper,” he said laughing. “I don’t like attention.”
He firmly insisted that this story “is about Susan and the men and women serving our country now.”
Ironically, today’s soldiers are the reason Wilson caught up with Drabic. She was helped by a man who knows the anguish of not knowing whether a loved one at war is alive or dead.
Wilson volunteered in July to go with some P&Gers to the Yellow Ribbon Support Center in Clermont County and assemble care packages for soldiers overseas.
At the center, she saw a box of bracelets. They were returned to the family of Sgt. Matt Maupin when his remains were found four years after he was captured in Iraq.
“That reminded me of my bracelet,” she said. She told her story to Keith Maupin, the center’s administrator and Matt’s dad.
He told Wilson to search for Drabic’s name on a website dedicated to fallen heroes. She did. No luck.
“I felt relieved,” she said. “That gave me hope he made it back home.”
After her stint at the center, Wilson kept searching. She finally found him in late July after Googling his name on her home computer.
Google and home computers, she noted, “are two things we didn’t have when I started wearing the bracelet.”
That was in the summer of 1971. She was 13, going into ninth grade at Anderson Middle School.
She talked about the war with her mom, Zella Goin. She ordered the bracelet for her daughter. It cost $3.
The money went to Voices In Vital America, a nonprofit dedicated to keeping those GIs’ names before the public. The organization’s initials faintly appear on the inner surface of Wilson’s bracelet.
“You did not get to pick a name,” Wilson said. “The idea was, you wore the bracelet to remember this person. I prayed every night for God to keep him safe.”
In the summer of 1971, Drabic was in his third year of captivity. Wilson stopped wearing the bracelet in 1973. That’s when Operation Homecoming brought 591 American POWs home.
“I never saw his name on any list,” she said. “But I never forgot him.”
Drabic came home “to a wonderful homecoming parade in my town in Maryland; everyone turned out.”
He noted that many returning Vietnam veterans had “lots of issues. But I didn’t.”
He found a job with the phone company, got married and had a son.
He paused again. He prefers to talk about today.
“This stuff is all in the past,” he said. “I’ve lived my dream life. I’ve met the woman of my dreams and married her. I’ve had a very nice job.
“Since I missed almost five years of my life being locked up, I thought it would be nice if I could retire a bit early. I was able to do that. So, I’ve been blessed.”
Getting a bracelet in the mail from a woman he never met is another one of life’s blessings.
“Things like that,” he said, “make me a lucky man.”