Separated in Vietnam War, Army Buddies Were Neighbors for 18 Years

Dave Brown and Roger Watson are pictured here in Vietnam, before they lost track of one another. (Screenshot: WJBK-TV video)

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It was a relief when one of Dave Brown’s searches for an old Army buddy proved futile:

Brown of the Oakland County suburb of Berkley scoured the 58,000 names engraved in the gleaming black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, for Roger Watson’s.

“I didn’t see his name, praise the Lord,” Brown told WJBK-TV.

That was something – everything – but it didn’t bring him any closer to solving a mystery that had haunted him for more than 40 years: Did Roger Watson make it home?

The two men walked similar paths as young men, the Detroit Free Press reports.

They grew up in the same northwest Detroit neighborhood. They were drafted on the same day in 1966 and they trained together at Fort Hood, TX. They both volunteered to serve in Vietnam.

But the last Brown heard of Watson was in 1968, when he learned his friend had been shot seven months into his tour in Vietnam. Watson lost a kidney and 3 feet of his small intestine. For 46 years, Brown has feared he lost his life as well.

But Watson was not only very much alive, the two Oakland County men have lived kitty-cornered from one another in a Berkley neighborhood for the last 18 years.

They met because of a common interest in birds shared by Watson and Brown’s wife, Peggy.

The two often chatted over the back-yard fence. As their friendship grew, she inquired about the Purple Heart license plate, discovered that he served in the same 9th Infantry division as her husband, and eventually unraveled a mystery that has haunted both men for decades.

“I was almost shaken,” Watson said after the two men walked a few paces from their back doors and met over a chain-link fence. “This is almost too wild.”

“It’s just great to see him alive,” Brown said. “It makes me happy.”

Peggy Brown says the reunion “has to be the coincidence of the century”

“Dave cannot believe all this and we’ve been here for 18 years in Berkley,” she said. “ What are the odds?”

Brown, 68, is a retired surveyor. Watson, 67, is a retired supervisor for the Michigan Department of Corrections. They’re husbands, fathers and grandfathers – filling in the blanks between the day when they were drafted until their meeting decades later over a backyard fence.

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