Some things you keep inside. For Ted Miller, a retired tractor plant supervisor from Wisconsin, the emotion he’s cloistered away for 40 years is something few could understand.

It’s involves Sgt. Mike McGonagle, his Army buddy from Lewiston, who was killed Oct. 17, 1966, while leading a search-and-destroy mission through the Vietnamese jungle. From back in the line, Miller heard the horror of the Claymore mine that Mike, up ahead, had stumbled upon with his squad.

They had started together as green recruits stationed in Alaska, and became fast friends. “If I had 50 cents, he had 25 cents,” Miller remembers. “If I had a clean shirt, he had a clean shirt.” They trained and shipped together to Hawaii, where they went from “Arctic troops to jungle fighters in eight weeks.”

Then it was off to Vietnam, where McGonagle and Miller shed all labels save one: soldier.

“In the infantry, it was all patrols. We’d go out on search-and-destroy missions to find the enemy, and we’d go out on ambushes,” says Miller, speaking recently from Watton, Mich., where he lives now.

His quest for retirement peace – “I counted 100 cars go by in 20 minutes,” he says about his old home in Kenosha, Wisc. – led him to rural Watton, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where his house is 20 miles from town.

Yet the solitude did little to tame his personal unrest, with October always making his misery worsen. “My wife knew of it,” he says. “She saw tears.”

“I think of Mike a lot,” Miller adds, his Wisconsin twang stretching out his ‘o’ in “lot.”

“I wonder if we would still be friends.” Sometimes, in the quiet, Miller knows Mike is sitting next to him, just as before. “I see him in my mind a lot,” he says. “And I get the feeling he’s with me.”

Miller grieved for 40 years, until this Oct. 17, when his feelings overwhelmed him. So while online, Miller found Mike’s hometown newspaper in Lewiston and sent a short note.

“I look at Mike as a brother,” he wrote. “He is gone but not forgotten, and never will be. I grieve for myself, but also the residents of Lewiston who lost a fine young man.”

“You carry it with you,” Miller says about writing the note. “I had to do something.”

Boy named ‘Mickey’

Before becoming Sgt. Michael McGonagle, “Mickey” McGonagle was a skinny, dark-eyed, cleft-chinned Lewiston teen. “He was an easy-going guy, liked by most everybody,” says his older brother, Bill McGonagle, a city native who now lives in the coastal village of South Thomaston.

Mike McGonagle attended St. Patrick’s School and Lewiston High School, where the future squadron leader played catcher on the varsity baseball team – the diamond’s most intellectual position. “He loved baseball,” his brother remembers, his own memories flooding back. Like most Maine kids, he loved to hunt and fish too.

He left love behind when he shipped out in December 1963. “He had a girlfriend he was very close to, and was planning on getting married,” says Bill McGonagle. The family eagerly awaited his return, which was set for fall 1966.

McGonagle was on one of his final missions when he led his squad into the jungle on Oct. 17, 1966. “He was ready to rotate home,” says Bill McGonagle, who remembers the party plans for his brother’s homecoming. Most everything was ready when the tragic news arrived: Mike wasn’t coming home.

He and four others had been killed in the ambush. McGonagle was the first soldier from Lewiston to die in combat in Vietnam. His country awarded him the Bronze Star, Vietnam Service Medal, Vietnam Campaign Medal and the National Defense Service Medal, posthumously.

His parents received a tightly folded flag, which they displayed at their summer camp on Chicoine Avenue in Auburn. It was later stolen.

Ted’s journey

“We were out on a night ambush. We had left at twilight, a new lieutenant was leading the platoon. (Mike) went up on the trail, and they had an ambush set up,” Miller remembers. Instead of surprising the enemy, the enemy surprised them; the vicious circle of life, and death, in Vietnam.

“They had gotten there first,” says Miller. “I didn’t even go up and look.”

Two days later, Spc. Miller had his turn. He struck a booby trap while on patrol, and landed in the hospital until March 1967. Once discharged, the wounded soldier was sent stateside.

Since then, Miller has neither spoken about McGonagle’s death nor attended a reunion of his unit. He lacks a photograph of his friend; pictures from Alaska and Hawaii most often had McGonagle behind the lens, not in front. His ability to describe his friend has also faded slightly, with detail replaced by impression.

“There are some people you meet, and you like them,” he says simply. “Mike and me just hit it off.”

Miller’s anguished letter was his first manifestation of his misery, a condition psychologists have come to call “survivor’s guilt.” For most combat veterans, the only ones who understand their experiences are other veterans.

Like McGonagle’s brother – retired U.S. Army Capt. William McGonagle – a veteran of three combat missions in Vietnam. When his kid brother was killed, Bill McGonagle was in southeast Asia with U.S. special forces.

Reunion, of sorts

“It’s opened up a box that’s been closed for a long time,” says Bill, after talking with Miller recently.

Thinking about Mike has awoken powerful emotions in both men, but it’s served a purpose. Bill, the career soldier, has insight into his brother from someone who served with him. Miller, the long-silent former soldier, has some of the closure for which he’s yearned.

“It was rough for both of us,” says Miller. “He knows now that I knew Mike.”

And as Miller promised in his note, Sgt. Mike McGonagle might be gone, but he is not forgotten.

In Lewiston today, Lt. Mike McGonagle – second cousin to his namesake – patrols for the Lewiston Police Department. In Green Bay, Wisc., Mike Miller – Ted Miller’s son – is named for a soldier he’ll never meet. And in Pownal, a young couple – Bill McGonagle’s son and daughter-in-law – has just brought a baby boy into the world.

His name? Michael McGonagle.

For Miller this experience has relieved him, and may have found him a new friend with a familiar last name: McGonagle. “October was never a good month for me, I was hiding it,” Miller says. “I feel much better. I just wanted to make sure people didn’t forget Mike.”

For Bill, remembering his brother has stirred introspection. Upon the passing of his parents, he received his brother’s things, including photographs and his burial flag, which had been recovered. “I told my kids and family all about (this),” he says. “I hadn’t thought about the anniversary. Forty years … we were just kids back then.”

“It’s boys who fight wars.”

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