GREENE – Charlie Manchester turned the tarnished Army dog tag over and over in his fingers. His eyes turned watery. He tried to speak but nothing came out.

The memento of his brother – killed in Vietnam on Christmas day in 1969 – still bore the shrapnel mark of the rocket that exploded in his boat near Da Nang.

“It just crashes over you,” Charlie, 61, said a few minutes later.

Memories of his brother, Gary, had been flooding his mind for the past day. That’s when a friend of his brother’s called.

“You better sit down,” the voice had told him.

“It was pretty shocking,” Charlie said.

On Wednesday, he sat with his mother, 92-year-old Aleta Manchester, as the ID tag was returned.

Bob Straton, a friend of Gary’s, took out a plain, brown envelope, opened it and dropped the metal tag in the elderly woman’s hand.

“I didn’t know it would be this small,” she said.

The dog tag was discovered four years ago on the streets of Saigon and purchased by a Hancock, N.H., couple, Bob and Ann McMahon.

It was one of thousands the pair have bought since 2001, when they discovered that dog tags of American GIs are sold from Vietnamese shops as tourist souvenirs.

It appalled them.

“It was like a kick in the guts,” said Bob McMahon, a Vietnam veteran. “It turned out to be a blessing. Without them, we’d never be able to recover these.”

The McMahons started a Web site, www.canamission.com, and began returning the tags to their rightful owners.

To date, they have returned about 1,600 of the 7,000 tags they have collected, recovered from every part of Vietnam.

They’re always researching, trying to find out the names on the tags or their families.

They learned about Gary Manchester from people at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, who collect the artifacts left at the Washington, D.C., wall. One of those artifacts, a note left by Stratton in the 1980s, mentioned Gary by name.

Stratton and Gary were friends together at the University of Maine at Farmington.

“He was a good friend, and I don’t have that many good friends,” Stratton said Wednesday. The note was neither long nor sentimental.

“It was something like, ‘We miss the hell out of you,'” Stratton said.

But it was enough for the McMahons to find Stratton, who lives in Dover, N.H. They called him Monday. By Tuesday, Stratton had found Aleta and Charlie.

On Wednesday morning, Stratton, 65, drove the 100 miles from his New Hampshire home to Greene, where Aleta lives in a nursing home. Charlie, who lives in Litchfield, was waiting with his mother.

Three-and-a-half years younger, Gary was Charlie’s only brother. He was a skier, a decent kid who was bored with college after two years. When his break with school began, the Army drafted him.

Charlie hated the draft. To earn his brother an exemption, he considered shooting him in the foot, he said. He didn’t, though.

Gary went to basic and advanced training, then overseas. He had been in Vietnam for three weeks when he was killed during a patrol.

Officially, the Army listed his death as occurring on Dec. 26. But a buddy, who was there, later told Charlie it had been Christmas.

Had he survived, Gary would probably have become a history teacher, his brother said. Instead, Charlie became a teacher and a school principal.

Holding the small metal tag in his hand, Charlie wept again.

“I wish I could say more,” he said. “I can’t.”