By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

After more than three decades, Ted St. Pierre had forgotten the names of his Vietnam buddies. He could recall their faces and remember their jobs. In two cases, he remembered where they were from: Lewiston and Auburn.

“I wish I had more details,” said St. Pierre, a former Aroostook County sheriff from the tiny town of Woodland, outside Caribou. “But it’s been so long.”

It was enough information, though.

After months of combing for clues on the Internet, he placed a newspaper ad looking for the local men. He published the name of his unit, the 138th Aviation Company, and hoped it would be noticed.

On Wednesday night, the phone rang. On the other end was Lewiston native Dick Begin.

“I couldn’t believe it,” St. Pierre said. “I was delighted and overjoyed.”

Begin’s brother, who still lives in Lewiston, saw the ad and called Dick, who now lives in Portland.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” said Begin, who works as a senior program officer for the Westbrook Housing Authority.

“After I talked with him for a second, I knew he was there, too,” Begin said. More slowly he began to recall St. Pierre, whom everybody once knew as “Saint.” The two plan to get together within the next two weeks.

St. Pierre is depending on Begin’s memory. The former sheriff wants to document his job in Vietnam for the Veterans Administration. And few records exist.

In 1971 and 1972, the pair were assigned to an Army Security Agency airfield just south of the demilitarized zone in Phu Bai. About half of the 500 people there were pilots, flying missions that the Pentagon still considers classified.

Begin was a supply clerk. St. Pierre was trained as an aviation mechanic, but when he arrived there, he was assigned to watch over the airfield’s security.

“It was a matter of somebody’s got to do it,'” St. Pierre said. The work led him off the base, exposing him to the stress of battle and, potentially, to chemicals such as Agent Orange.

Unfortunately, there’s no official record of the job change.

“I just want the records to reflect what I did,” St. Pierre said. So he’s doing something that more and more vets have been forced to do: re-create their files.

To prove what he did, he needs his old buddies to make a statement about what they knew of him and his job.

“This happens quite a bit,” said Jerry DeWitt, who commands Post 31 of the Franco-American Veterans in Lewiston. “The paperwork doesn’t always follow them, especially when they’re in some form of intelligence work.”

Often, the Pentagon says the files were lost or damaged.

“I’ve heard that 10,000 times,” said DeWitt, an active volunteer for veterans’ health care.

The back of the national newspaper Army Times is filled with ads of people wanting to find soldiers they fought beside. Some want nostalgia. Many need the papers for their VA treatment.

“The VA has to have a paper trail that documents what you did,” DeWitt said.

However, it’s getting tougher to re-create that trail, he said. People move away or die. Memories fade.

“For the World War II guys, it’s next to impossible,” DeWitt said.

For the Vietnam vets like St. Pierre, it’s a little better.

The 54-year-old Woodland man is still looking for the veteran he vaguely remembers from Auburn. Perhaps he’ll get lucky again, as he did with Begin.

“At first I didn’t recall him,” St. Pierre said. “There were a couple hundred guys. But eventually it came back.”