I’ve learned to accept that I could have died, perhaps even should have died, on Nov. 21, 1967.

That day I was a fire team leader for the 173rd Airborne Brigade attached to Alpha Company in the central highlands of Vietnam. This was a tortuous, violent, hellish area of triple canopy jungle just a few miles from the Cambodian border.

Back in the “world,” folks were stocking up for their Thanksgivings. Me? I’d just logged my sixth-month “incountry,” had just enjoyed a five-day R & R in Japan and had been hospitalized, quite unexpectedly, with a high fever the second day after returning to Saigon.

The Rev. Charles Watters, 32, from New Jersey, was almost bald, and he disliked wearing his steel pot. He wore glasses that were always dirty. “The airborne priest,” as we called him, tried to make this young Baptist understand that, “his God” was “everyone’s God” in that godless place.

My men in Alpha, in my absence, were assigned to “clear” a no-name jungle ridge called Hill 875, and had stumbled upon an entrenched battalion of North Vietnamese regulars. They soon found themselves locked in a life-or-death struggle that would last four days. Alpha had made the first contact the first day, had sustained heavy casualties, had pulled back to evacuate wounded and, in a horrible twist of fate, was devoured in the blast of a 500-pound bomb. Friendly fire!

Bobbie Blye, 19, from Ohio, was blond headed, blue eyes, not quite 6 feet tall. We would joke he was “too cute” to be a paratrooper. Mere months earlier, Bobbie had yanked me from a swirling stream, keeping me from drowning.

“You owe me, Connors,” was his favorite expression.

My luckless Alpha became one of the first American units identified in the American press as “decimated” in hand-to-hand combat. Back here in Brunswick, Times Record editor John Cole, who was a good friend, saw the UPI reports, recognized my unit name, assumed the worst and wrote a wonderful eulogy.

“Frank first became a friend when he filled in for a sister as a baby sitter,” Cole wrote. “One summer he helped us paint our house … he wrote a little for the old Brunswick Record. … The official casualty count for the battle was 277 Americans killed, 946 wounded. We can only keep our fingers crossed, but we need to remember, those aren’t just numbers dying on those hills, they are all someone’s Frank.”

I recovered from my malaria in time to return to the boonies and help rebuild Alpha Company. I became a squad leader, then platoon sergeant — promoted not because of my military skills, but because luck seemed to keep me alive.

I finished my time, came home and, like so many veterans often do, tried to make my way in what seemed an uncaring, unsympathetic and often cruel civilian world.

I have my family, my circle of friends in Bowdoinham and my Jane, my wonderful Jane, to thank for bringing me from those days to these.

Over the years, John Cole and I would cross paths and often joke about the “one time” he should have checked his facts just a little better.

He actually came to the Center one day to participate in a Library of Congress sponsored Veteran’s History Project. Cole joked about his short career in the Air Corps, as a belly gunner in a heavy bomber.

“Used to ride to work backwards,” he quipped, “imagine that.” But he stopped short of taping his story that day, and to my knowledge, never wrote the details down.

“You keep doing what you’re doing here,” he said of the Center. “You do good work. I used to think 55 Plus was just a place for old poops to play cards…but these veteran’s stories, they are important stuff.”

Important stuff ?

Most vets get through life by ignoring, or at least trying to get past who they were, and what they did in the military. But now I find I’m the old vet, and there’s a new crop of kids coming home from other wars needing so much help.

I can only tell you, if you know one, hug him or her tight and keep him right. They will be worth the investment.

FRANK CONNORS is membership coordinator at People Plus. The article is a reprint from the November 2012 People Plus News.