Brothers work to put a face to every NC name on Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Brothers work to put a face to every NC name on Vietnam Veterans Memorial
The (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer
By MARTHA QUILLIN
Published: December 1, 2013

RALEIGH, N.C. — After the Army drafted him and got him ready to work as a combat medic, Charles Allen Collins must have looked like a lot of the other 2.5 million troops who served in Vietnam: a lanky young man in a uniform.

But what did he look like up close — before he left his hometown of Holly Springs, N.C. — sitting across the dinner table from his family or at a desk in a classroom? Did he have dark hair? Glasses? Did he look handsome in a half-smile and a suit, like the Charles Allen Collins on Page 362 of the 1963 Agromeck, the N.C. State yearbook?

Could that be Charlie, who spent just a year in service before he was killed by small-arms fire during a major battle in November 1965, when he was 23?

"I'm betting it is," said Jim Reece, of Wilmington, who wants to put the faces of people such as Collins in a place where relatives and the world at large can see, and perhaps remember them. That place would be in an addition to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C..
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