Southern Indiana woman mourns loss of brother every Memorial Day. And every day.

PRINCETON, Ind. – It was 1968, and Carolyn Wolfe was sitting in the breakfast nook playing with her Barbie doll.

Things had been strange recently. A photo of her brother, Dick – a soldier serving with the Army in Vietnam – kept falling off the wall for seemingly no reason. And the day before, she’d heard a knock at both the back and front doors, only to find no one standing outside.

Suddenly, there was the knock again. Her mother, Rosemary, walked from the kitchen to answer it. This time, there was someone outside: a military man in full uniform.

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Dick Wolfe, the man said, had been killed in action.

Even after all these years, Carolyn Wolfe is haunted by the loss of her brother. Not just on Memorial Day, but every day. She said her life has never gotten back to a semblance of normalcy.

“I still remember the (funeral) ceremony (at St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery in Princeton),” Carolyn, now 65, said. “When I heard the 21-gun salute, I thought I died right there.”

Wolfe, a PFC in a U.S. Army infantry rifle company, died in Vietnam on Jan. 6, 1968, in the now-forgotten battle of Xom Bung. Carolyn was 10 years old.

Dick Wolfe and the Battle of Xom Bung

Dick didn’t live on to tell his story. But in 2017, a book by two Oakland City University professors did it for him.

Randy Mills and his wife, Roxanne, co-wrote “Summer Wind: A Soldier’s Road from Indiana to Vietnam.” It chronicles Wolfe’s time in the war.

Dick arrived in Vietnam in July 1967, shortly after his 23rd birthday, Randy said.

“He served all but a week of his time in South Vietnam at primitive fire support base camps,” Randy Mills said. “In late November, his company, Alpha, (roughly 120 men) was sent to … a small camp northwest of Saigon and not far for the notorious Iron Triangle that was thick with enemy soldiers.”

From there, American patrols were sent out by foot or by helicopter to fight the Viet Cong.

“The Americans went into a defense position and called down artillery and aircraft firepower,” said Randy, 70. “These were called search-and-destroy patrols.”

The enemy rarely engaged. Instead, they were happy to harass the Americans in small firefights, disappearing into the jungles before American troops could respond.

Alpha Company was on another search-and-destroy mission on Jan. 6, in what became the battle of Xom Bung. When they walked into a well-hidden and large enemy base of trenches and bunkers, they found Viet Cong outnumbered them by a 3-to-1 ratio.

“The enemy came swarming from their bunkers to flank and surround the Americans,” Randy said.

Dick’s commanding officer ordered a retreat to the rice paddies. Dick laid down fire so his fellow soldiers could escape. But he never made it out. For his bravery that day, Dick posthumously received the Bronze Star for Valor.

When they found Dick, his rifle and helmet were missing. They had apparently been taken by the Vietnamese soldier who killed him. And when the Americans found that man, they discovered he had been killed, too.

“He put his life on the line for our country,” Carolyn said about Dick. “It was not a popular war. (Some soldiers) were treated badly by our own people.”

'He was my best friend'

After Dick died, his brother Joe – now 79 and then an intelligence officer stationed in Germany – was brought home because he was the lone male member of the family left. Dick's son, Brian, had died of pneumonia and complications from leukemia at age 6.

A fellow soldier and "motorhead" named Butch Davis was in charge of bringing Dick’s body back to Princeton for a military funeral. Carolyn said a photo from the ceremony was almost surreal.

“The light from the clouds above shone brightly down on the rifles and helmets” of the soldiers present, she said. “It was as if the heavens opened up to shine on this directly. … The photo is strangely eerie.”

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All these years later, she still thinks about the circumstances surrounding the death of her brother, who often went by "Ace" — and who called her "Zero" because she was small.

The picture falling. Her sitting with her sister-in-law, Sue, as the ominous knock on the door sounded through the house. How she was sent to a friend’s house for two weeks while her family made funeral arrangements.

But there are still pieces of her brother around. Just this month, she was rummaging through her closet when she found a trove of letters Dick had written to their mother.

“He was my best friend,” she said.

Contact Gordon Engelhardt by email at gordon.engelhardt@courierpress.com and follow him on Twitter @EngGordon.

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Indiana woman still mourns the loss of her Vietnam vet brother