THINK OF THIS as a love story. It's about a Harford County woman's tender muted feelings for her brother, and how they finally found a voice and became a love call to a thousand other brothers who went to Vietnam and never came back. But now, so many years later, their faces emerge from the dark.

Charlie Walsh was 19 when he was cut down in March 1968. It was four months after he arrived in Vietnam. On patrol, he and a few Marine buddies took sniper fire and called in friendly mortar. But the mortar fell short and Charlie took a blast that nearly cut him in half.

In Philadelphia, where his family lived, there was no fallen hero's return. The news out of Vietnam was bad, and the country's mood had turned surly. When his funeral story ran in the local newspapers, Charlie's family received mindless hate mail. The letters called Charlie a baby killer.

His sister, Mary Jane, was in Catholic school back then. One of the nuns made a remark. It was about the war, about the terrible things being reported about some American troops. Mary Jane stopped talking about her brother for the next 25 years.

When she started dating Jim Gerity, she knew he was a veteran of the Vietnam era. Gerity served on a U.S. Navy troop transport in the Mediterranean. The two of them went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and found Charlie's name on the wall.

"Hi, Charlie, it's Mary Jane," his sister whispered.

When she and Gerity married, they moved to Harford County and settled in Joppa. Jim wanted to put Charlie's photograph on a wall. Mary Jane resisted. The pain had never subsided.

Gerity had his own issues. "Survivor's guilt," he says. "No matter what they say, there's survivor's guilt. You look at that wall and see 58,000 names and think, 'Why did they get killed, and I'm still here?' They were all around my age. We were kids. You think, 'There, but for the grace of God ... '"

Mary Jane wouldn't talk about her brother. The family held on to the hate mail that arrived after his funeral. Mary Jane remembered the nun's remark. She was still angry with the government for its lies about the war, angry with the Marines for letting Charlie die. And angry with Charlie. How dare he let himself get killed?

"I said to my wife, 'Look at his picture,'" Gerity said last week. "He was a good-looking kid, and he was proud to be a Marine. She finally said, 'All right, let's put his picture on the wall.' That's when things began to turn around. She lost some of her anger. She started to celebrate his life."

And she wanted to know more about his death. She knew he hadn't died right away. He lay on the ground while a helicopter tried to get to him. She wanted to know if someone had comforted Charlie at the end. On the Internet, she found some names from his old platoon. One of them was Harvey Strode. She contacted him in Los Angeles.

"And the two of them are crying on the phone," Gerity related. "Harvey's apologizing, he's crying that he couldn't do anything. He says, 'All I could do was hold him in my arms and wait for a helicopter.' And Mary Jane says, 'Thank you, thank you for holding him. For years, I didn't know he was in the arms of another Marine. He wasn't alone.' It was closure."

Then came a photograph from Strode. He'd been holding it for 30 years. It was Charlie and two other guys standing atop a bunker. The other two are nicknamed Ski and Mac. Mary Jane remembered letters from Charlie where he talked about the two of them. In Vietnam, he said, Mac had given Charlie packets of Kool-Aid to sweeten the taste of the acrid water there. Mary Jane found Mac in Boston. He told her he'd gone to Washington, to the Vietnam Memorial. When he found Charlie's name on the wall, he left packets of Kool-Aid there.

Mary Jane felt her brother was coming alive again. And she and her husband realized something profound: the power of a photograph. They started thinking: What about all the others who never came home? There were memorials in Washington, and in Maryland, but why limit remembrances to names on a wall?

In Maryland, 1,046 kids never made it back. Three years ago, Gerity put together a group, out of the Baltimore chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America. They started a project called Operation Remember, to obtain photographs of all Marylanders who died in Vietnam and make the photos part of a new memorial.

By the end of 1999, they had 78 photos. A year later, 138. A year after that, 301. Now, says Gerity, they have roughly 700. They are now displayed at the Vietnam Veterans of America chapter here, on the grounds of the old Fort Holabird. But they want all 1,046 by the end of next year. (To reach Gerity, call 410-633-0857 or log on to www.vva451.org.)

"These 700 photos we've got," Gerity said, "I never knew any of these people. But I feel like I know them now. I look in their eyes, I see their smiles, I've talked with their families. They're real people, they're not just names on a wall. And my wife - well, Charlie was her only brother. But now she has hundreds of brothers because the Marines have scooped her up as a sister. She's filled the void with his comrades."

Charlie Walsh has finally come home. And his sister's love has found its voice.