A Soldier’s 2 Worlds Meet at His Grave

It was a routine convoy through the Vietnamese jungle that sweltering day. Sept. 12, 1968. A handful of young soldiers were riding a transport vehicle through the brush, one of them was 21-year-old Dave Dahlin.

He was a smiling, blond-haired young man from the San Fernando Valley. A guy who attracted almost everyone around him by his sweet nature.

At 4:20 p.m. the ambush came.

Dahlin, in charge and sitting high in his truck, died first. One rifle shot and he was gone.

It has been 30 Septembers since that day, but Dave Dahlin still has a special hold on those who knew him.

On this Memorial Day morning, under a skinny pine tree at Dahlin’s Chatsworth grave site, his 83-year-old father, Cliff, a man still struggling with his son’s death, will stop for a few silent moments soon after sunrise.

Then two sets of men who knew Dave Dahlin in two separate worlds will meet there. Ryan Khoury and Roy Morris were Dave Dahlin’s best friends from Cleveland High School in Reseda; Gene Novak and Bill Doyle knew him in ‘Nam.

The pairs of men met by chance three years ago, while visiting the grave on Memorial Day. Khoury and Morris, who call their devotion to Dahlin a “love story,” have been coming to the grave every Memorial Day since 1970.

But it was Novak and Doyle’s first time there--a gesture meant as much to honor Dahlin, whom Novak calls “the kid who brought out goodness in us,” as it was to heal their own emotional wounds from the war.

Since that day, the men have kept in touch, writing letters, trading phone calls and reminiscing about Dahlin.

Aside from memories, what Morris and Khoury have left of Dahlin are letters and photographs.

The two are both 51 and live in Simi Valley. Today, they have receding hairlines and responsibilities. But in photos from their youth, they appear mop-topped and lighthearted. Almost always, the pictures show them with a lanky Dave Dahlin.

Dahlin, his friends say, was not the smartest kid around, or the best athlete, or the most handsome. He wasn’t a saint. But he was selfless, which made him dependable.

Imagine the shock, says Morris, on that day in 1967 when Dahlin’s draft letter came. None of their other friends had been called up. The war in Vietnam seemed like something “not real.”

For all of their surprise, his pals never really considered the worst that could happen. Dahlin, just 19 when he left, was the safe one, the guy who always did what was right. Nothing bad could happen to him. It wouldn’t make sense.

But the fall of 1967 was the last time all the boys would be together. The last time they’d all hop in Dahlin’s Mustang, the Beach Boys cranked up, and cruise Van Nuys Boulevard.

Today, Khoury still has the letter he received from Dahlin’s mother telling him what happened when her son died and thanking him for being friends with Dave. Morris, too, keeps the letter he got announcing Dahlin’s death. At the time, Morris was also stationed in Vietnam. Still, they never saw each other after leaving Los Angeles.

“I’ve got all the letters and all the pictures,” says Morris. “When I look at them and think back to when I read that Dave had died . . . well, it makes it seem like it was just yesterday. The worst day of my life. My only question now is, Why? For what?”

Bill Doyle and Gene Novak were among the last people to know Dahlin in Vietnam. Two guys from L.A. who in 1968 found themselves in the same Army company as Dahlin, stationed near the Michelin Rubber plantation, about 50 miles north of Saigon.

The two didn’t know Dahlin well. Still, the ex-soldiers say, they were close enough to him to be forever touched. “Oh my, he was extraordinary,” says Doyle. “He was the nicest guy you’d ever meet in combat.”

Novak, who lives in Echo Park, remembers the odd sensation he would have whenever he saw the blue-eyed Dahlin gathering up his gear in the mud and sweaty heat. Even more than most of the soldiers, Dahlin was out of place in Vietnam, Novak says.

“Everyone else would be p----- as hell, hot and agitated,” he says. “You’d walk by and see Dave, no flak jacket on, thinking nothing would hit him, smiling like he was on some beach.”

Doyle, 51, who lives in San Francisco, remembers listening to Motown tunes with Dahlin.

He speaks of Dahlin being filled with pain when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. “What were we gonna go home to?” Doyle remembers discussing with Dahlin.

Doyle and Novak left Vietnam on the same day, flying on a commercial jet to Los Angeles. Dahlin was due to finish up his fighting stint in three months and said he’d call them when he got home for Christmas.

Instead, about a month later, they found out Dahlin was dead.

It was a devastating hit in a series of painful blows the two would suffer for decades. Doyle braved years of depression. Novak, 52, lived a life of denial, the war a bad dream that never happened, something not talked about. “I kept it all inside,” he says. “All of it, until it felt like I had to find a way to let it out.”

Inspired by a trip to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, the two decided to find Dahlin’s grave.

When they made it there on Memorial Day 1996, they happened upon Dahlin’s old high school pals. Khoury and Morris wanted to know everything about their friend’s life in Vietnam. Novak and Doyle wanted to know how Dahlin came of age in the Valley.

“The emotions were extreme,” recalls Novak, who calls that day the most special he’s ever had. “And the fact that we were still carrying him in all our hearts, and that he was bringing people who didn’t know each other together said about him, ‘No, you didn’t die in vain Dave Dahlin . . . no my friend, you did not.’ ”

Cliff Dahlin, a gentle man who survived combat in World War II only to see his son die in Vietnam, is astonished at this devotion.

The elder Dahlin saw his family roil under the burden of losing Dave, their second child. The pain was so great it caused Cliff Dahlin and his wife to divorce a few years later.

His son’s death still sits on him, as heavy as bricks, just as it did in 1968. The two were as close as a father and a son could be. When Cliff Dahlin recalls this, he chokes back tears and looks out a window in his tidy Winnetka home.

What brings him some peace, he says, is the fact that grown men show such love for one another.

“It’s the ultimate tribute,” he says. “I can’t express to them enough how warm it makes my heart to think of how they’ve held Dave so close to them. I know through those men the worth of Dave’s life. That he has meant something good to the world.”