Every day, in the insufferable heat of those South Carolina mornings, I looked at acting platoon Sgt. Cecil Payton, saluted and reported that my third squad was present and accounted for, securing once more the nation's frontiers from the likes of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung and Leonid Brezhnev.

After the squad leaders of Company A, 3rd Battalion, 1st Training Brigade (A-3-1) concluded their soldierly audit, we went on a little morning run -- three to five miles in the sand, up hills and around trees, with drill instructors screaming in our ears.

"You boys can fool around if you want," howled our wiry platoon sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Lee Brittle. "Come Christmas, all y'all gonna be in Vietnam."

As the barracks lights were mercifully doused those nights at Fort Jackson in the summer of 1965, I turned to Cecil Payton lying on the bunk above me. We had endured the rope climbs, the frightening crawl under heavy machine gun fire, the gassings, the dressing of make-believe head wounds and the learning to kill.

"Hey Cecil, you think Brittle's right?" I asked. "Are all of us going to Vietnam?"

"Who knows?" Payton replied. "Anyway, it's out of our hands now."

Many months later in the darkness of the abyss, Sergeant Brittle's words would stand prophetic.

*

The name rocketed off the page of the state telephone directory.

Cecil Payton. After nearly 30 years, in the same town? Impossible.

While working a deadline story on Morgan State University, I discovered this Dr. Cecil Payton was the chairman of Morgan's biology department, recently promoted to executive assistant to university President Earl S. Richardson.

We finally talked and established that yes, we two -- the once-skinny guy from Baltimore and the quiet, thoughtful platoon leader from Orangeburg, S.C. -- had shared the same bunk, the same fears and leadership responsibilities through those memorable eight weeks, long ago.

And like most others in our company, we shared another common thread -- the Republic of Vietnam.

Earlier this month -- appropriate in the month of Memorial Day -- Cecil and I met with another one of our basic training mates, John Fowler. John is an East Baltimore native, graduate of Morgan and rehabilitation coordinator with the city Department of Housing and Community Development.

It was the first time we had seen each other in nearly three decades, and I approached seeing them with a decided wonderment, a certain dread. Since we had been to Vietnam, I wondered if they would be physically intact, whole as I remembered them smiling in a group shot in front of white-washed barracks. Both had hearty, infectious laughs, but were those laughs still a part of them or casualties of the war? As it turned out, the three of us had the same concern, but time and good luck had been ours.

In Cecil's office at Morgan, we thumbed through our basic training yearbook containing pictures of the men in our infantry recruit class. With our hats cocked at various, unmilitary angles, we looked more like a collection of confused cab drivers on convention than young soldiers.

A slogan on one of the pages also brought chuckles: "Wherever brave men fight . . . and die, for freedom, you will find me. I am the bulwark of our Nation's defense. I am always ready . . . now, and forever. I am the Infantry -- Queen of Battle! Follow Me!"

To those of us who eventually learned that the light at the end of the tunnel was actually an oncoming freight train, this type of cheerleading rang hollow. We wondered if previous generations who were at places like Bastogne, the Chosin Reservoir and folks from our time at Dak To and Ia Drang Valley memorized this before engaging the enemy.

The yearbook's black and white head shots revealed a guy in our company we called "Pops," the oldest recruit, in his late 30s, whose breath smelled consistently like Aqua Velva . . . the guy in my squad from the Tennessee hills who didn't know how to tie his boots . . . the chap from Kentucky who was a body double for Stan Laurel. And, of course, there was the company commander, Capt. Charles McClendon. His carotid artery would nearly explode from his neck when he became angry, which all of us gave him ample opportunity to do.

Over those first days, I learned about Payton, and he about me. He grew up on a farm with eight brothers and sisters and picked cotton and plowed behind a mule. His father was a Baptist minister and schoolteacher, and when Payton graduated from Morris College in South Carolina, he enlisted in the Army.

Because of his ROTC experience and athletic endurance built on the farm, he was appointed acting platoon sergeant in third platoon. And since nearly every Army outfit seemed like the personification of a John Ford movie, the cadre of A-3-1 decided they needed a "Ski" as a squad leader. Aldo Ray wasn't available, so they volunteered me.

Cecil and I got the same double bunk. There wasn't much time to complain those first days in A-3-1, yet it seemed nearly everyone voiced their strong displeasure with the Army of the United States.

"I hated it with a passion, from the first day," Payton said. "But I, all of us, seemed to develop a new perspective after the initiation of terror. We could either mope around and be run over, or be part of the team.

"Down there, I quickly learned life wasn't as simple as it seemed," he said. "We were going to be soldiers, and it made me grow up real fast. I couldn't fight it, that constant pounding on us. Our sergeants and officers were dead serious, because they knew better than we did where most of us were going.

"It was really amazing, the group dynamics that took over," he said. "It was all very basic, what unity itself meant."

Fowler remembered a soldier in our company from the Deep South who had never walked on the same side of the street with an African-American. He and Fowler would sometimes talk into the night after training, and they departed South Carolina as good friends.

"The guys in our company were from diverse backgrounds, mostly rural and blue-collar neighborhoods of the cities, and we pulled together," Fowler said. "There was this realization that any one of us could save each other's life. A person's color didn't matter. We reached a higher human elevation."

At the time of graduation, Captain McClendon and his cadre had done well. The recruits of A-3-1 came out best in the brigade, with top scores in physical training, marksmanship and other infantry skills.

At our final morning formation, a bedsheet with giant "A-3-1" neatly inscribed in black shoe polish flapped on the massive silver water tank atop the hill. The very irregular Pvt. Cleveland Sessoms had climbed the tank in the darkness of night and planted our makeshift banner.

It was the only time we can remember Captain McClendon smiled. And I thought it was the last day I'd ever see Cecil Payton.

We all went to Vietnam, Cecil, John and me, all of us doing the Ain't Gonna Die Rag, serenaded by Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones, Wilson Pickett. Little did we know, give thought to, our becoming unwitting bit players in what Neil Sheehan would later call "A Bright Shining Lie."

I recall seeing only one other guy in our company, a squinty-eyed soldier nicknamed "Stoney" one afternoon along the Cambodian border. But how many of A-3-1 probably wound up there, and how many made it back home we dared not guess. We already bear enough pain knowing the ones who did not. I see it today in the weary eyes of people like Adele Duff and Katherine Mannion, tremendously courageous Gold Star Mothers who still want to know why the family name ended in battles forgotten, their sons' Navy Cross and Bronze Star all that remains.

Payton had it the worst. He was a medic with the 1st Infantry Division and tucked many young American soldiers into body bags. He also was a savior. John was a rifleman for four months with the same division, during a separate tour from Payton, and later became a clerk.

"They called me 'Magazine John' because if I heard something move I'd let every round go and ask questions later," Fowler said.

I was a military information specialist, a position made far more romantic with the tab on my uniform sleeve that identified me as a "U.S. Army Correspondent." I covered many aspects of the war -- from grinding out "home town" news releases at remote bases in the Central Highlands to covering combat operations of the Republic of Korea Tiger Division. I also did civic action work in tiny hamlets outside Phu My and Bong Son, "winning the hearts and minds" of Vietnamese civilians.

"It was the most unbelievable year of my life," Payton said. "I can't forget the extraordinary beauty of Vietnam . . . the breathtaking sunsets, seeing a storm coming at you with the rain flying sideways. And how the Vietnamese were so committed to their land and ancestors.

"But I had to say goodbye to a lot of young guys -- blown to pieces by Claymores, booby traps -- who left this earth too early. One soldier I tried to save was hit by a mortar returning from the PX. They believed what our country told us.

"I often wonder what kind of person I would be if I hadn't gone to Vietnam," Payton said.

Fowler spoke up quickly.

"Look at where we came from man, our roots. If we ran to Canada, we would have disgraced our parents and families," John said. "And we didn't have the social status, our parent's money, to hide out in college or get a doctor's excuse from serving in the military. The guys who did that said they were scared, morally opposed to killing anybody. You want to talk about scared? What we eventually did was for each other, for our very survival. We showed up."

"I saw young soldiers I blew their last breath into," Payton explained, speaking in softer tones now. "I mean they were so young they should have been back home in the back seat of a car with their sweetheart. The first time I lost someone I was close to, I cried for three days. After that, I never got close to anyone again."

Fowler, too, recalled an incident that revisits him even today.

"I was watching a Vietnamese woman in the mess tent. She was getting ready to wash some food trays when a sergeant came running up behind her with a .45 automatic and shot her in the back of the head," Fowler said.

"I couldn't stop shaking, it was done so quickly, in such a cold-blooded fashion," he said. "But they lifted up her peasant's blouse, and she was strapped with C-4 explosives. She was in there to blow all of us up, in a damn mess tent. How heroic would that have been, huh?"

I recounted some experiences during which I was so scared, my bones rattled. I also shared the heroic tale of my climbing up a ladder to the roof of an old French villa during a Viet Cong attack, dressed only in jungle boots and a grenade launcher. Such a gripping story belongs in Soldier of Fortune, not on these pages.

But without a doubt, my most difficult moment was at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. I was back in the United States two days, nursing the greatest hangover in Western civilization and catching a connecting flight to Baltimore from Seattle. I was heading home!

A young woman in a paisley print dress approached me, unsmiling. She looked at my two rows of ribbons and then looked me straight in the eyes. "Were you in Vietnam?" she asked.

I said yes, somewhat proudly. Without another word, she spit on my chest and walked away, disappeared. For the longest time, I stood stunned in the middle of that mass of moving humanity, a blurred, Technicolor kaleidoscope. I heard no sound.

When my plane landed at Friendship Airport that summer day in 1967, I knelt and kissed the ground. But to the very core of me, I wasn't certain it was home anymore. And I surely didn't know who I was anymore.

At our reunion lunch the other day, Payton, Fowler and I agreed that our loss of innocence, which started at Fort Jackson, was consummated in Southeast Asia and beyond. And events a half world away changed us completely, forever.

We talked and thought about others who went: Craig Franz, a repairman for the Mass Transit Administration; Bob Kerrey, Medal of Honor recipient, senator and presidential candidate; Ray Keefer, Chesapeake Bay fisherman wounded five times; David DeChant, ex-Marine now international marketing specialist for the state; Jim Burtnett, former paratrooper now a human relations manager; the homeless, the hustlers, all of the blessed nurses, those who carried on in spite of the Vietnam curse.

Cecil, John and I decided that it was as simple as embracing the fact we all showed up for each other. And it is in that special unity -- after the passage of time, all the broken hearts and shattered promises -- that we can cherish a day of recollection that belongs as much to the living as it does to the dear, dear dead.

Joe Nawrozki is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.