Numbers Don't Diminish Bracelet's Worth
GORDON DILLOW
Register columnist
A couple of years back I wrote a column about a Garden Grove woman and an old "POW/MIA bracelet," one of those simple metal bands that many people wore to show their support for American prisoners of war and missing in action in the Vietnam War.
The woman was trying to find out what happened to the American soldier whose name was inscribed on the bracelet that she had kept in a drawer for decades after the war ended. Sadly, after I checked on the name I had to report to her that the soldier never came home.
But perhaps now it's time to balance that tragic POW bracelet story with an uplifting one.
The story comes to me from Rick and Vicki Adams of Yorba Linda. Rick, 54, an Air Force veteran, is a Los Angeles Sheriff's Department captain, and Vicki, 53, is a real estate agent.
In 1970, when she was a teenager, Vicki was one of millions of Americans who wore a POW/MIA bracelet, an idea that was launched by two Los Angeles college students who wanted to help the families of POWs focus attention on the prisoners. Vicki's bracelet was inscribed with the name of Air Force F-4 pilot Capt. Lauren Lengyel, and the date August 9, 1967, the day he was shot down over North Vietnam.
In 1973, Vicki learned that Capt. Lengyel was among almost 600 U.S. POWs who finally returned from Vietnam. (About 1,700 Americans remain missing in Southeast Asia; efforts are continuing to recover their remains.) Happy that he was alive, Vicki tucked the bracelet away in her jewelry box Ð and as the years passed, she often wondered what had happened to that man she never met, and how his life had gone after his release.
Finally, last fall, she got Rick to get on the Internet and see if he could find any information. Rick learned that Capt. Lengyel is now retired Lt. Col. Lengyel and is living with his wife, Margaret, in a little town near San Antonio, Texas.
Vicki wrote him a letter, saying she didn't want to impose, but she wondered if he would like to have the bracelet back. He called back and said yes, so on a previously scheduled trip to Texas last month the Adams' stopped by the Lengyels' home.
For the Adams' it was an emotional event, an opportunity to meet the man with whom Vicki's life had distantly combined. They talked about their families Ð the Lengyels have two sons who are Air Force officers, one currently serving in Iraq Ð and Lt. Col. Lengyel, now 72, spoke in a modest and matter-of-fact way about a few details of his 5-1/2 years of often brutal imprisonment.
Rick and Vicki were in awe. They both choked up as she handed him the bracelet.
"He hugged me for wearing it," Vicki told me. "It just meant so much to us."
What Lt. Col. Lengyel didn't mention to them Ð he only told me because I'm a pushy reporter Ð is that over the years a number of people who wore POW bracelets with his name on them have returned the bracelets to him, more than 50 of them in fact, most of them by mail but some in person.
It only stands to reason. With millions of the bracelets in circulation, the names of most POWs or MIAs appeared on thousands of individual bracelets. Some of the POWs who returned have received hundreds of them.
But Lt. Col. Lengyel didn't want the Adams' to think that him having dozens of the bracelets tucked away in an honored spot in his desk in any way diminished his gratitude to them for wearing that bracelet so long ago, and for taking the trouble to return it to him now. Because it didn't.
"It was emotional for me," he told me by phone. "Just the thought that, with all that's going on in this country, there are still people who support the military, and who would take the time to return this to me, it means a lot. I'm very grateful."
The Adams' could hardly believe it when I told them that. A man who suffered and sacrificed so much in this nation's service is grateful to them?
"What a hero," Vicki said.
And she's right.
In addition to being a kind and gracious man, a hero is exactly what he is.