Brothers reunited, a good friend lost and a new family found

Editor's note: This is the second part of a two-part feature about the Ozark County Historium's Veterans Day program, a live-remote broadcast by radio station KUKU featuring "Cowboy Rick" Hamby interviewing three local-area veterans: Larry Warrick and Don Luna of Gainesville, and Terry Wyrick of Clarkridge, Arkansas. Last week's Times included Warrick's personal Vietnam story as well as a story he and radio program co-host Robert Klineline told during the broadcast about incidents in their 30 years of working together for the local telephone company. The broadcast promoted Hamby's new KUKU radio program, "High Noon in American History with Cowboy Rick," which features Hamby and guests discussing interesting moments in history. The program is broadcast from 12:15 to 12:45 p.m. weekdays and can be heard on KUKU 100.3 FM or streamed at kukuradio.com.

Don Luna: A surprise 

encounter in Cu Chi

Gainesville resident (and former mayor) Don Luna hadn't intended to be part of Hamby's Veterans Day live-remote radio broadcast from the Historium. He just came to the event with his wife, Historium volunteer Barbara Luna, to listen and be part of the audience. But when Hamby saw his ball cap with the Vietnam insignia (a gift to Don from his son Jason), Hamby invited Don to join him and the other two veterans at the table. 

Don grew up in Gainesville. After graduating from Gainesville High School in 1963, he moved to Kansas City to work at Hallmark Cards. A few months later, he went to work for his cousin, Charles Luna, in a surveying business in the KC area. 

"Then Uncle Sam said, 'Greetings,'" Don said, a line that brought knowing laughter from his fellow veterans. It was the way the government letter began, telling the recipient he was being drafted into the military. "I knew it was coming because it was just a matter of time," Don said. "If you weren't married or in college, you were going to get drafted."

He went through basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in the winter of 1965-66, "and nearly froze to death," he said. He was happy to learn he would undergo Advanced Infantry Training in Fort Gordon, Georgia, because he thought it would be warmer. "But I got down there, and it was worse," he said. 

Next, he was sent to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. "They were building up a battalion to go over to Vietnam, so we sat there a month or two until they got enough men to go," he said.

In November 1966, when the battalion was big enough, "they flew us to San Francisco, bused us to the harbor and put us on a boat that same night," he said. 

In a story written by Don's wife, the former Barbara Rackley, for the November 2023 issue of the Old Mill Run, Don said some of his fellow soldiers were seasick even before they sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge. "Don was luckier," she wrote. "Perhaps summer nights spent sleeping in his family's houseboat on Bull Shoals Lake helped. The sleeping arrangements on the troop ship were bunks stacked five high. Not great conditions, . . . but no one was shooting at them." 

They were on the ship 27 days, and when they disembarked in Vung Tau, South Vietnam, Don was broke. "The poker games [on the ship] and all that. I didn't have a dime on me," he said. Next, "they put us on an old Caribou plane [a propeller-powered airplane that can take off and land on short runways] and flew us to Saigon."

From there, Don and his fellow recruits were hauled in six-wheeled military cargo trucks to Cu Chi. "We came in on deuce-and-a-half's and had to set up tents and all that," he said. Don was assigned to the 36th Signal Corps Battalion. An infantry company had come into the area a few months earlier and set up operations across the road from where Don and the signal corps soldiers were located.

"A couple of days after we got there, my sergeant went over there to their outfit – the infantry. They called them Wolfhounds," he said. 

Amid the Wolfhounds, the sergeant ran into a man who looked like Don and had "Luna" on his uniform nametag. He assumed Don had left his assigned area without permission. What the sergeant didn't know was that Don had an identical twin brother, Ron Luna.

"The sergeant thought it was me, and he just got all over his case," Don said, laughing.

After Ron convinced the sergeant he wasn't Don, the sergeant brought Ron back across the road. "He brought him over there to meet me," Don said, "brought us together right there. On Dec. 6, we celebrated our 21st birthdays together in Vietnam." 

Don had known Ron was in Cu Chi, but he and his fellow soldiers on the ship weren't told where they were going in Vietnam until they were halfway across the Pacific. "When they said, 'You're going to Cu Chi,' I knew my brother was there," he said. 

But when Don arrived at Cu Chi, he had no easy way to reach out to the infantry's big installation there to ask for Ron's whereabouts. And Ron, serving with the Wolfhounds of the 25th Infantry Division of the 27th Infantry, hadn't known where Don would end up when he got to Vietnam. 

The twins hadn't been together for more than a year, so finding each other in Vietnam was a happy surprise. But in remembering that time, Don's thoughts turned toward home. "My mother had both her boys in Nam at the same time," he said. "Think about that."

Although the twin brothers had been drafted and gone through basic training at the same time, Ron was sent to Vietnam six months earlier than Don. While Ron was in-country, Don was still posted back at Fort Bragg, waiting for more men to build up the battalion. 

The twins were both in Vietnam at the same time for longer than they had to be. Because he had arrived six months before Don, Ron left Vietnam six months earlier than Don, but "he could have come home when I got there because they didn't put brothers in combat," Don said. "But Ron chose to stay. He stuck out the whole deal."  

After the war, the brothers had a variety of jobs, including several years working together in Luna Truck Line, the business their grandfather, Rufus Luna, had started and their dad, Joe Luna, had carried on. Most recently, Don has worked as a Gainesville school bus driver. He and Barbara, his wife of 57 years and a retired teacher, now live in her parents' former home in Gainesville. 

 Ron, who lived in West Plains with his wife, Dian, died in 2021 from complications related to an intestinal blockage. 

Terry Wyrick: Jerry Corp's friend

Terry Wyrick had a plan. He had grown up in Willow Springs always wanting to be a highway patrolman; but candidates for the patrol academy had to be 21 when they enrolled or turn 21 during the training. He was 18 when he graduated from Willow Springs High School in 1969. He decided to volunteer, spend three years in the Army and then turn 21 while he was at the patrol academy. That was his plan. 

But three years of Army life later, including a year of combat in Vietnam, the highway patrol rejected him when he applied. "When I went to talk to them at the Troop G headquarters, they said, 'No. You've seen too much action. We don't think you'd make a very good patrolman,'" Terry recalled in his radio interview. 

Terry might have argued that he hadn't "seen too much" to be a good patrolman, but certainly he did see some hard times during his months of combat in Vietnam, including witnessing the violent death of his friend and fellow soldier Jerry Corp of Gainesville.

He arrived in South Vietnam in late 1969 and was assigned to the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal), 198th Light Infantry Brigade attached to the First Corps. He landed in Da Nang and from there was taken to Chu Lai. The next day, he was delivered by helicopter to "the middle of nowhere" to join Charlie Company, which would be his family for nine months. They welcomed him, Terry said. "You just become brothers automatically. They give you a hug," he said. 

Terry was issued an M-60 machine gun to carry. It weighed 23 pounds with its accompanying 100-round ammo belt. "It was heavy and a piece of junk, as far as I was concerned," he told Hamby.

Terry was assigned to Charlie Company's 3rd Platoon, 3rd Squad, which was sent out on patrol and got into a firefight on Terry's first night there. He admits to having had a "pretty good pucker factor" as they headed out. "It was so dark. You couldn't see nothing. You could put your hand in front of your face and couldn't see it," he said. 

There were no tents. Charlie Company operated around Vietnam communities where "people had grass huts with bamboo roofs. They were all rice farmers," he said. The men slept in two-man "hooches" made with poncho liners and sticks. 

The company was divided into three platoons, with three squads each. The platoons were assigned to different areas, and within each platoon, two squads were sent out on ambushes two or three times a week while one squad "always stayed behind to guard the company commander and the men around him, like the radioman," he said. 

In the squad that stayed behind, "One man was always on guard, and one was sleeping – an hour at a time," he said. "You couldn't see nothing. You relied on sound," he said. "If you heard someone coming, you opened up on them."

On patrols, when an attack came, "you couldn't get close enough to the ground," he said. "Most of the time, you were in the middle of a rice paddy, and it was full of water, and you just had to bury up in it or stand up and do the best you could." The enemy "would hide in the hedge line and catch us out in the open. They would open up on us, and the next thing you know, you had your face in the mud," he said.

Jerry Corp arrived at Charlie Company a couple of months after Terry got there; like Terry, Jerry was assigned to 3rd Platoon, 3rd Squad. The two men became good friends when they learned they'd grown up so close to each other – Terry in Willow Springs, Jerry in Tecumseh. Terry was 18; Jerry turned 20 a week before he died on April 21, 1970. 

That day, the troops had gathered at the landing zone to meet a helicopter that was bringing them a hot meal and mail. As the chopper came in, "a sniper opened up on it, and the company commander yelled, 'Third Platoon, go get him!'" Terry said. 

Terry had come to the LZ with his .45 sidearm but without the M-60. The men headed out over a rice paddy dike with Terry walking point. Jerry, the radio operator, was "four people behind me," he said. 

Terry spotted a booby trap on the dike and successfully led the platoon around it. But then, "the sniper opened up on us," he said.

In the midst of the frantic fighting, the company commander got on the radio and "was screaming at Jerry, wanting to know what was going on," Terry said. Jerry was trying to respond to the commander, but in the confusion of the firefight, "he got turned around and ran right back down the rice paddy dike and stepped on the booby trap," Terry said. "One minute he was there, and the next he wasn't."

In his memory, Terry can still see Jerry's helmet flying into the sky. "It went up 250 feet in the air and did a slow roll coming back down," he said. 

The men loaded Jerry's mangled body into the medevac helicopter that was called in. 

Terry blames the company commander for Jerry's death. "He shouldn't have been talking on the radio when we were where we was at, doing what we was doing," he said. 

Jerry was one of 84 men in Charlie Company that were killed between October 1967 and October 1971, Terry said. 

He left Vietnam in October 1970 and was discharged in January 1972. After the Army, he continued to live in Willow Springs and eventually joined what is now the Dairy Farmers of America plant in Cabool. In 2004, he retired at age 54. 

During those years after Vietnam, Terry enjoyed fishing on Norfork Lake at Udall, where he owns a cabin. His drive to the cabin from Willow Springs took him by Irene Corp's house on Highway 160 near Tecumseh. He saw her name on the mailbox and knew she was Jerry's mother. He also knew he should stop and talk to her about Jerry. But for more than 20 years, he couldn't do it.  

Then, one day in 1996, he found himself parked in her driveway. Irene's son-in-law Charlie Cameron greeted him and told him Irene wasn't home but would be back soon. Terry left and returned a few hours later. Charlie had told Irene he was coming. 

"When she opened the door, we just kinda melted into each other's arms," Terry said. He stayed several hours, talking with her. "After about 30 minutes, it was like we'd known each other forever," he said. 

Irene, a widow, welcomed Terry into her family, which included her oldest son, Ivan, and her daughter, Cecelia. From that day on, she thought of Terry as her son and wore his birthstone in her motherhood ring. He called her Mom. They spent many happy times together before Irene died in November 2024 at age 98.

 Meeting Irene prompted Terry to reach out to his fellow Charlie Company soldiers. He organized a reunion that has met every year since 1999, except for one year's cancellation due to covid. "It's been a life-changing experience for the guys to have a reunion to rejoin the ones they wondered about for years," he said. After moving to Clarkridge, Terry also started inviting veteran friends to fish and hunt with him near his Udall cabin. 

Also, with Jerry England, Terry started a local chapter of the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association, which holds fund-raising and memorial events in the area.  

Most importantly, in 2006 he met Sandy Toner, a Springfield nurse, through Match.com, an online dating platform. They were married in 2009. She had worked at Mercy Hospital for 34 years and retired in September after a total of 46 years in nursing. 

Looking back on his good life now, Terry acknowledges that, for many years after he came home from Vietnam, he "was still fighting the war in my head" and was heavily "self-medicating" with alcohol. He credits his relationships with Irene Corp and his wife, Sandy, for helping him recover from his negative Vietnam experiences. But ironically, he really turned the corner, he said, when he reached out to his former brothers-in-arms who had served with him in combat. 

"Finally, God just reached down and put his hands on my shoulders and said, 'I've got a project for you,'" Terry said. 

That was in 1999, when he organized the first Charlie Company reunion in St. Louis. The men still gather each year, but with most of them in their 70s or older now, the numbers have decreased. "The most we've had at a reunion was 32," he said. "Now everybody's getting older. Last year, there were 14 of us."