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Subject: 24 Years Later, Two Finally Are Linked by Loss;Database Helps Bring Together
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 04:42:06 EST
Message-ID: <9.1992Nov12.044207@AmeriCast.com>

24 Years Later, Two Finally Are Linked by Loss;Database Helps
Bring Together Two Who Share a Tale of Loss in Vietnam<By Andrew
Brownstein=Washington Post Staff Writer=

He is 60 now, a retired Air Force colonel from Alexandria who
laughs and cries easily. She is 48, a child therapist from Des
Moines. Her profession taught her to control her emotions, but
now she hugs people she has just met as if they were lifelong
friends.

These two lives that had never crossed came together this week,
connected by an electronic database to a day 24 years ago and to
the man they both loved and lost.

On Sept. 6, 1968, a cargo plane crashed a mile from a narrow run-
way in a South Vietnamese jungle, killing 26-year-old Capt. Leo-
nard Selanikio - his buddy, her fiance.  Navigator Victor Peck
should have been on that plane, but he had been sent to Thailand
the day before. The years since have been fraught with guilt and
a question: Why me? For Victoria Bruner, those years have brought
failed relationships and blocked memories of a happier, more
hopeful time - a time she now calls "the Dark Ages."

Yesterday, Bruner and Peck held hands at the Wall, staring at
Selanikio's name, tears on their cheeks. But it hasn't been all
tears this week. They laughed plenty, remembering Lenny's endless
needling. They traded stories, drank, prayed, even escorted each
other to a "Delta to the DMZ" dance at the Arlington Sheraton.

"It brings a lump to your throat when that happens," said Dean
Stanley, coordinator of "Reunion

Created for the 10th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
by Electronic Data Systems at a cost of more than $1 million, the
program allows those who lost loved ones to find people who
served in the same unit. "ReUnion" has collected 9,000 names and
united 2,200 people.

"The healing process seems to have moved along," said Stanley,
who served two tours in Vietnam.

For Bruner and Peck, healing has come hard. But they have learned
to talk about it - and now they have each other.

"I need a cigarette," Peck said as he began Lenny's story.

In Vietnam, Peck was the veteran crewman on the C-130 - "trash
haulers," they were called, cargo planes that carried supplies.
Once a week, they carried the screaming wounded and the body bags
to Air Force hospitals.

There was also Capt. David Risher, a pilot from the District who
was then the youngest graduate of the Air Force Academy. And
there was Lenny, the copilot, the joker, the son of Orthodox Jew-
ish immigrants. Lenny and Victor had a "perpetual gin rummy game"
between flights.

The three were a team from July 1968 to that September day when
Peck was sent to U Dorn, Thailand, to replace a navigator who had
gone home. U Dorn was a C-130 base that supported bombing raids
in North Vietnam and Laos.

"Goodbye. I'll see you at U Dorn," Peck remembers saying to his
friends.

The next day, both of his friends were dead. Their plane went
down in the dense jungle near Camp Smith, where the C-130 was to
resupply a special forces unit with ammunition. Peck heard about
the crash a few days later.

On Monday, he met the woman who was Lenny's fiancee. She showed
Peck a picture taken when she and Lenny got engaged. Lenny had
just bought one of those new cameras with a timer and placed it
on his car.

"Boy, you could tell they were in love," Peck said.

Bruner was a 24-year-old nurse in Topeka, Kan., a civil rights
activist who already had seen Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert
F. Kennedy die that year.

"I lost all of my heroes in 1968," she said.

Bruner said she still has not received a complete account of
Lenny's death from the Air Force. First, she heard the plane was
downed by a single rifle shot. Then, it was a barrage of gunfire.
Finally, a friend at the Pentagon told her the crash was the
result of pilot error.

Today, she hopes the office of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa),
a member of the POW-MIA committee, will provide answers. What she
needs, she said, is closure.

Bruner said she didn't realize the depth of her grief until she
saw Lenny's name on a traveling version of the Wall in Des Moines
in 1985 - and she didn't begin dealing with it until recently.
When she went to New York as a delegate to last summer's Demo-
cratic National Convention, she visited Lenny's family in Long
Island and scrubbed his tombstone.

Peck said it was 1985 when he finally stopped carrying Lenny and
David's yellowed death notice from the Air Force Times in his
wallet. Time to move on, he told himself. But he still visits the
Wall to see their names. He tells David he misses him. He tells
Lenny he misses the card games.

Monday, Peck and Bruner spoke to them together.

At the Wall, below Lenny's name, they said kaddish, the Jewish
prayer for the dead. Bruner left a copy of Wordsworth's "Splendor
in the Grass," and the last care package she had made for him be-
fore he died: a bottle of Scotch, a yarmulke, some halvah and a
dreidel. Bruner and Peck each took a sip of Scotch and left the
rest for Lenny.

Bruner told Peck about the last letters Lenny mailed on consecu-
tive days before he died. He wrote about gin rummy and being
grounded with his two buddies at a Hong Kong airport. He said a
monsoon at their barracks meant they had to stay two days at Tuy
Hoa in South Vietnam - spending two days there was like spending
two weeks anywhere else, he said. He missed her.

"I'm thinking of you now and always," he wrote. "Wherever I am,
you are with me." Bruner wants to leave all of their letters at
the Wall when she dies.

Yesterday, she and Peck went back to the Wall and stayed most of
the day. "All these years," Peck sobbed, "I thought I was the
only one that cared."

Bruner hugged him. "The skies open up and put people in our path
to help us," she said. "God is a puppeteer."<02:10 11-12C9999---
--

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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