Dog Tag Return (continued)
And then, in a twist of fate, something Brown-Bey left behind in Vietnam finally came home to his family: the dog tags he was wearing in the DMZ the day he fell.
Fellow mortarman and friend Lance Corporal Pedro Marquez recalls the moment Lanny Brown-Bey fell:
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"They put their last round right in the middle of the trail on top of five guys...
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"I cried over Brown-Bey's body because he only had 19 days to end his tour.
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"Brown-Bey used to talk to me a lot. He's been with me for fifty years."
LCpl Lancaster Brown-Bey, 81s, BLT 2/26.
His dog tags, lost in the DMZ when he fell.
Somehow those tags were found, perhaps by scavengers. Who knows how long they lay in the dirt before they were picked up, and how they ended up with other remnants of the war in a souvenir stall in Hue?
