Constable: Letter from Vietnam rekindles suburban veterans' past

An old pro when it comes to sharing his Vietnam War experience with school kids on Veterans Day, former infantry squad leader Chuck Derer was talking to a class at a suburban school last year. He pulled out a letter he had mailed in 1968 to his parents in Hinsdale, when it hit him.

“I read this letter and I got weepy for the first time,” says Derer, 69, who lives in Downers Grove.

That letter also made him cry on the day he wrote it. He calls it a “snapshot” of his war experience that reminds him of his strongest feelings about his service in Vietnam: He's glad he survived, when so many others did not.

His letter tells of a fellow soldier in search of a shortcut across a creek in the Binh Duong province of South Vietnam.

“He was about 60 feet from me when he cut between two bushes. All of a sudden, bang and a cloud of smoke,” Derer's letter reads. “Nobody moved, but we all knew what happened. He was a mess but still alive when they put him on the chopper. My eyes were watery all morning.”

The official record for the Vietnam Wall says Jimmy Charles Bower, 22, of Antioch died from small-arms fire.

“I was there. It was a grenade, booby trap, at head level, that killed Jim Bower,” Derer wrote in an online comments section for the Vietnam Wall. “It was not small-arms fire.”

Nearly a half-century later, Derer says he feels compelled to let people know about the soldier in his letter. Derer had never attempted to find Bower's family but was willing to share the letter when we found Bower's younger brother, Lee, and Lee's wife, Melissa, living in Tennessee.

In return, the Bowers shared some photos with Derer.

“I was 2 years old when that happened. I never knew him,” Lee Bower says of his brother's death. “My mom would bring it up, but not very much.”

Jimmy Bower had been living with a sister in Antioch before he left for Vietnam, but he grew up in Abingdon, Virginia, and that's where a simple metal plaque marked with a cross on Bower's grave notes his service in the war.

If Bower's death lingered in Derer's memory, it certainly never left that of Bower's mother. When she died, Lee and Melissa inherited a box of Jimmy's letters from Vietnam.

“She had a little pair of his swim trunks from when he was little and had those in this box with his letters,” says Melissa Bower, the mother of a 28-year-old son. “That really just broke my heart.”

The Vietnam War was fought by young people in a foreign land so alien from the comfortable life of a college kid or young working man in the United States. A few years before he was drafted, Derer was a kid using his BB gun to shoot toy soldiers on the mounds of dirt in construction zones near his backyard.

Bower and Derer just happened to be thrown together in platoons working the same combat areas. Most nights on patrol were like camping trips with buddies, Derer says, except for the possibility of sudden death.

“No enemy ever shot at me. I can't say that about our own people,” Derer says, explaining how “friendly fire” was always a concern in a dark, muddy jungle with no defined battle lines. “The danger was booby traps. That was the supreme danger.”

Knowing the risks, Derer and a fellow squad leader from Bower's platoon had a friendly rivalry to lead the way on the day a booby trap changed both their lives. “We had found grenade booby traps. One of our lieutenants lost a foot that day,” Derer says of the area where the two squad-leader sergeants boldly led the way. “You're young and stupid. Nothing more than that. Nothing less.”

Derer stepped over a hidden wire purely by chance, but the sergeant behind him tripped it.

“I went flying,” Derer says. “I still have shrapnel from it.”

Derer never saw the other sergeant again, “but he's not on The Wall,” he says.

After stays in hospitals in Vietnam, Japan and Tennessee, Derer was honorably discharged on May 5, 1969. He and his wife, Penny, have a 31-year-old daughter, Sarah. He produces a very popular YouTube channel called RideswithChuck that includes videos about classic cars, tractors, trucks and even World War II aircraft.

Derer had a rich and rewarding life after Vietnam. Bower did not. “My letter is a snapshot of that time, simple and direct,” Derer says. “I can't say I'm glad I served. I can't say I'm sad to have served. I'm glad I survived.”