(From the sacbee.com) For more than 40 years, Mario L. Lopez wondered about the men he had served with in Vietnam, about his buddy Jimmie Salazar from Texas, about where they had ended up in their lives.
But he never talked about the war until his 15-year-old grandson asked him about it two years ago during a camping trip.
Within days, curiosity overwhelmed Mario Lopez III, and he began surfing the Internet for information on the Army’s 9th Infantry Division.
“He’s on there and he says, ‘Come over here, you’re on the computer,’ “the elder Lopez recalled last week at his Rancho Cordova home. “I said, ‘Yeah, right.’ “
His grandson had stumbled across a website an old Army buddy had set up to help honor veterans of the 4th Battalion, 47th Infantry, an outfit that saw heavy action on patrols in the Mekong Delta.
The site, www.9thinfantrydivision.com, had been set up by Bill Reynolds, a friend from the Los Angeles County suburb of Valencia who had been looking for Lopez for years.
Within days, Lopez, 64, had reconnected with his friends, was visited by his friend Salazar and would soon head off to a reunion in Las Vegas.
“Think about all that time that went by, 42 years,” Lopez said.
Reynolds credits the idea for the website to his son, who helped him set it up and got an associate from a Spokane, Wash., website business, Larry Johnson of WAASI Inc., to host the site for free. (Johnson’s father served in Vietnam.)
Read more here: Vietnam veterans rescue history on the Web
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