Mike Franks, Jim Minor and John Hand all started out in life together and today they still get together about once a month. That is a pretty tall order for any friendship in any time and place. What was an even greater hurdle was that as graduates of Thomas Jefferson High School’s class of ‘69, each one was destined to end up in Vietnam. They were all lucky to have made it back. Some luckier than others.

Franks read a lot of books about the Marines when he was a child. He bought into the notion of blood, guts and glory and when it came time to sign up, he wanted to be a Marine.

“A lot of people can’t fathom what went on over there,” Franks said. “I saw it all. I was in the jungle in a combined actions platoon. We ran missions out of a ville. Whatever they needed at the time, we would do.”

Of all the old friends, Franks was in for the shortest tour. He was in-country for about three months when he was severely injured during a fire fight. A mortar round hit him in the right arm. Picking up his rifle with his left hand, he continued to fire until a grenade landed in his foxhole.

“I picked up the grenade figuring the only thing I could do was hold it close,” Franks said.

The other two men in his foxhole made it out uninjured, but Franks himself was blown out of the hole, his left arm was gone, his legs and left foot were cut to the bone. He managed to walk during the battle to find a corpsman to wrap his wounds. He still managed to call out enemy positions while he was being bandaged by the corpsman who returned fire in between bandages.

Hand said that when it came time for him to join up, he wanted to be in the Army. He specialized in driving the supplies soldiers needed to get the job done from one end of the country to the other.

“We were a mobile PX,” Hand said. “Everything they needed from ammunition to toilet paper we delivered to them at the front. Our company would transport everything to the fireteams and bring back anything that needed to come back. “

Minor joined the Army as well and specialized in building the bridges that kept the trucks moving. It was steady work as well.

“As soon as we’d build them, it didn’t take more than a week for the VC to come along and blow them up,” Minor said. “Just before I got there, two-thirds of my company got wiped out. I was just over there two weeks; I was supposed to be on the guard roster and they took my name off. The guy who replaced me was no older than I was, but he had three kids. The night he took my place, they hit us. A mortar round came through the guardhouse. It should have been me. That’s the only bad thing I feel about the whole thing.”

On the subject of what happened after the Vietnam War, all three men concurred that Vietnam vets got a raw deal from a government that was prepared to use them as expendable parts.

“The reason a lot of Vietnam vets don’t like to talk about what happened over there is because it was a politician’s war,” Franks said. “When we came back, we were called all kinds of names like ‘baby killer.’ When you were there, you had to make decisions about what you were gonna do to stay alive and protect your buddies. I probably killed about one of everything while I was over there.”

Minor stayed in the Army for seven and a half years, but as always, he is with his friends on the subject of Vietnam. He much preferred Germany for its night life.

Franks, Minor and Hand are clearly a trio bound together by a shared history. It is a rarity to see friends who got each other in trouble in high school who still have dinner “about once a month” in whatever restaurants will still have them. There is always something unspoken among old friends. In fact, Franks said the occasion of this interview was the first time the group had spoken about some of their feelings about the war, the politicians involved, their “expendability” and their reception.

They are fortunate.