Edwards said. “They had tunnels ….

Edwards said. “They had tunnels underneath our company.”

Edwards said the day-to-day grind was not something soldiers thought much about.

“You don’t know any better. You don’t have any choice,” he said.

Loos said he took the advice of the men who had been there before him, and didn’t take his malaria pills for the first six months. Getting sick, he said, could’ve been his ticket home. After getting closer to his release date, he said his outlook started to improve.

“After six months, it was like, ‘Well, maybe I am gonna’live,” he said.

Loos and Edwards did have a choice after their year in Vietnam was up, but both men decided to sign on for an extra 58 days. That way, they said, they would be sent straight home instead of having to spend time at a base back in the States.

“Everybody said,’You crazy?’” Edwards recalls. “Well, yeah, I guess so.”

Both men had earned Bronze Stars for their actions, and Edwards was wounded once. It came when a fellow soldier set off a booby trap on patrol.

“I was far enough away so all I got was a piece of shrapnel in my chin,” he said.

While Edwards said there was no luck on his side when he was drawn for infantry duty, some fortune followed him through the many missions.

“I was shot at with a rifle, machine guns, RPGs, rockets,” he said. Once, a squad of South Vietnamese soldiers -- who were on America’s side -- mistakenly opened up on Edwards’ unit with 105-mm shells, the same ones he had helped build before being drafted.

It wasn’t any physical wounds that Loos and Edwards found followed them after their tours, and still do now. Loos said he noticed it right away, the mental anguish, when he came home and went back to hauling feed.

“It was kind of hard there for a while,” Loos said, “from shooting people to visiting with people ...right off the battlefield and back to work.”

“I’d done my best to stay drunk for a year,” Edwards said. “Or was it two?”

Edwards went back to his old job, too, for a time, then went on to work at Uniroyal in Eau Claire and later as a manure hauler. He and his wife, Wanda, had two kids and five grandkids.

Loos met and married his wife, Jackie, and they had two girls and seven grandkids. He worked at Grassland for a time and retired from Land O’Lakes.

Through all those life experiences, the friends said they have never been able to leave their years in ‘Nam behind.

“You always get flashbacks, I do anyway,” Loos said. Edwards nods. The Honor Flight did help, though, they agree. At the airport in Mosinee, after they boarded the flight early on the morning of Oct. 3, water canons sent a cascade over the plane, as a symbolic cleansing. In Washington, they saw all the landmarks, the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The Vietnam Wall. Edwards knew some of the men whose names are etched there. He found as many as he could.

“That one guy that was killed, we just called him Frenchie, and I didn’t know what his name was,” Edwards said.

Another name he found, but it was high on the monument wall. He got down on his hands and knees and his guardian for the day climbed on his back so he could reach the name to get a copy of the etching.

Loos and Edwards were among 104 veterans on their Honor Flight -- all but one of them from Vietnam. Many of the guys, they said, still carry severe physical wounds with them, a reminder that some sacrificed more than others.

“We ain’t half as bad as those guys,” Loos said. Edwards said the day was so busy, he didn’t have time to process what it meant to him. Afterwards, in his hotel room, he read letters written by little kids to thank the veterans for their service.

One letter read, in part, “Dear Veteran: We might not have been here right now if it wasn’t for you guys. Please rest now.”

“I had no idea I had that many tears,” Edwards said.