Old Army buddies reunite after 50 years

FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. (AP) — "Yeah, that's him," Mark Smithwick said as he spied Pete Fengl walking around the corner to the front door of the Magnolia Grill on Oct. 1.

As Fengl made his way up the few steps to the door, Smithwick extended his hand, pulling Fengl toward him with a hearty, "Hey, brother!"

They embraced, and with that gesture the 50 years that had passed since the two Army buddies had last seen each other evaporated into the mists of time.

"It's weird," both would say a few minutes later, reacting to seeing each other after five decades. Weird or not, the two men quickly launched into stories from the eight months they spent together in Germany in the late 1960s, recalling the Volkswagens they painted and fixed up, the other buddies of whom they'd lost track and some of their decidedly unofficial work activities.

In 1969, Fengl and Smithwick, both of whom had been drafted, were working as sheet metal specialists with the 703rd Maintenance Battalion in Kitzingen, Germany, keeping aircraft and other equipment in working order. But when Fengl got orders for Vietnam after just eight months in Germany, they lost touch.

Fengl candidly admits that then, headed into the uncertainties of Vietnam, he had more on his mind than Smithwick and the other guys he left behind in Germany.

"That was something you put back into the little spaces of your brain," Fengl, now 75 years old, said in a telephone interview the day before the reunion. "You move on, but you remember with fondness the friends you have made."

Fengl's departure for Vietnam had weighed on Smithwick over the years.

"I didn't know whether he made it back or not," Smithwick said.

That question, at least, was answered in a brief telephone conversation about 40 years ago after Smithwick contacted the...