BANGOR (AP) – At a time when thousands of young Americans fled to Canada to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam, Canadian-born Bill Braniff headed the other way, crossing into the U.S. to join the Army and fight in the war.

“I was brought up in a period of great patriotism,” he recalled, saying he agreed with the “domino theory” that the spread of communism must be contained. “We thought (Vietnam) was a Canadian problem” as well as a U.S. problem, said Braniff, who grew up in Kitchener, Ontario.

His views have changed over the years. Now 62, and carrying the emotional and physical scars of combat, he believes the war was a mistake.

Braniff, who has lived in Bucksport for the past eight years, suffers from post traumatic stress disorder. He has drawn solace from returning to the land where he witnessed the horrors of war. Since 1996, he has made 17 trips to Vietnam with other combat veterans.

Braniff said he organizes the trips but receives no financial gain, making the effort because of the peace it brings. He and veterans from Skowhegan, Sangerville, Rockwood and Toronto leave May 8 for another tour of Vietnam.

“I guarantee, a combat vet goes back, he’s going to come home a better person,” he said.

Braniff arrived in Vietnam in late January 1968, just as the bloody Tet Offensive erupted. Assigned to the 25th Infantry Division, he saw action patrolling the jungle as an ammunition bearer, assistant machine gunner and radio operator.

Braniff also became his company’s “tunnel rat,” arming himself with a .45 pistol and a few cigarette lighters before crawling into tunnels dug by the Viet Cong. “It was horrible,” he said.

In the summer of that year, Braniff was diagnosed with ulcers and sent to Japan for surgery, then back to the U.S., where he married and started a family. Like many veterans, he was numb from his combat experience for years, he said.

After his return to Canada, he kept quiet about his war experience. Work led him back to the U.S. 25 years ago.

He later learned that 42 of the nearly 100 troops in his company were killed. His survivor guilt deepened in recent years when he found out that nearly his entire squad was wiped out the day after he had been taken out of the war.

“It just cracked me up. I just went off the deep end,” said Braniff.

, who sees a counselor weekly and is being treated for PTSD.

More than 10 years ago, he met a young man who had come to the U.S. as a child refugee from Vietnam. The man persuaded Braniff to return to the country, an idea that intrigued him.

He was especially taken with the idea of revisiting the site of a night stakeout near a pagoda where he and his platoon leader killed two North Vietnamese soldiers. The gunfire alerted hundreds of other enemy troops nearby, but Braniff’s squad holed up in the pagoda and survived the night.

“I wanted to go back to see where I killed that guy. I wanted to find that pagoda. Finding that pagoda was the biggest thing,” he said.

During his first return visit, in 1996, he found the pagoda.

“I just felt like a load was lifted off me,” he said.

Though he remembers no Vietnamese being in the pagoda that night, a man there claimed to have remembered seeing Braniff and the others there. The man was warm and friendly, a response he found over and over again.

“We had a lot of disdain for them” during the war, Braniff said, but now he is taken by the Vietnamese friendliness and their ambition to build a prosperous country.

“It’s one of the most American-friendly countries in the world,” he said.

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Information from: Bangor Daily News, http://www.bangornews.com

AP-ES-04-30-07 1030EDT

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