Tomorrow, Valentine's Day, would have been Jeffrey L. Junkins' 55th birthday. But on May 14, 1999, Junkins killed himself with an overdose of Veterans Administration-prescribed painkillers, for reasons only he knows.

You won't find Junkins' name on the wall in Washington, D.C., where more than 58,000 American names are etched in dark granite. But it should be, because although he didn't die in Vietnam, his five tours of duty in Southeast Asia, including several with the Special Forces in top-secret operations, haunted Jeff until that May day when his mother found his lifeless body on the floor of their La Jolla condominium, face-down where he had landed.

In his hastily scrawled suicide note, Junkins wrote, "My (green) beret goes with me. Anything else, toss it. ... My ass is in the USA, but my soul is in Nam." An only child, Junkins ended the note: "Thank you mom. Really do love you. Just running on empty."

Three days earlier, during a counseling session, on a form titled "What I Want for Myself," Junkins wrote, under Immediate Goals: "Better understanding of myself, i.e., I am not in Vietnam!" Under Dreams, he wrote: "Keep playing baseball" ---- he was a catcher in an over-30 baseball league ---- and "Get married (happily)" and "to be a good father and husband and a sober one."

On that cloudy Friday when she found him, his mother, Maggie Junkins, told me, "Vietnam had a grip on him. It haunted him. I never understood what it was about Vietnam, but he couldn't escape it. And now it's killed him."

Junkins flew with me when I returned to Vietnam in October 1969 for my second tour of duty; Junkins was going back for his fifth; it would be his last. His duty with America's Green Berets came to an abrupt end in the middle of 1970 when an explosion blew him from a helicopter that was extracting him and his reconnaissance team from Laos under heavy enemy fire.

For years afterward, injuries sustained that day would hurt him to varying degrees ---- from crippling back and thigh pains to embarrassing immobility. Often in recent years, Junkins couldn't move his legs in the morning. His mother would have to pick up his thick legs and place his feet on the floor, helping him to rise to a new day of pain and wrestling with the demons that haunted his mind.

Junkins was a fearless warrior who prided himself on being Special Forces-qualified and for having served under the elite command of Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group ---- a harmless-sounding name for the special operations detachments in Vietnam, including several top-secret Green Beret, Navy SEALs, Marine Force Reconnaissance and CIA programs and missions into North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Virtually every conversation I had with Junkins since 1970 eventually meandered back to Vietnam and his abiding love for the local people who worked on the Special Forces recon teams, fighting side by side with the Green Berets.

Those of us who served with Junkins knew him as an intense, brilliant and sometimes tormented soul. However, when it was time to run a mission, regardless of how dangerous, Junkins always prepared rigorously for it before strapping on his web gear, backpack, weapons and hand grenades and boarding the helicopters that took him and his recon teams deep into enemy territory. The adrenaline rush from surviving those missions was second to none. It was a natural high fraught with deadly danger. His comrades in arms remember Junkins as a fearless recon man, a surfer from La Jolla's famed Windansea beach and a man of incredible strength.

Thus, when a handful of us gathered at Eternal Hills Mortuary in Oceanside the day before Junkins' body was cremated, we looked at him with disbelief, finding it hard to believe that such a once-mighty warrior had fallen by his own hand.

Afterward, I talked to a former Green Beret who had run a mission into North Vietnam with Junkins. As we discussed him, our thoughts turned to Vietnam, our missions, and the men we served with during those tumultuous years.

We talked about how Vietnam haunted Junkins, and that former trooper said, "Vietnam impacted all of us. ... It haunts me to this day, like it does others we have served with. But for the grace of God, there go I," he said, nodding toward the mortuary.

Maggie Junkins and Elena Meyers  (Photo By Mark Frapwell.)

Maggie Junkins was devastated by her visit to Eternal Hills that day. She said she wanted to "be brave for Jeff." She cried a few times and then kissed her boy good-bye.  Six months later, on Nov. 20, she died alone in her sleep in the condo she had bought and shared with her son. Her ashes were placed in the same crypt as Jeff's, at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, on Jan. 21. At last, mother and son were at peace, lying among more than 70,000 souls at Fort Rosecrans.

As the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon approaches, one wonders: How many have been haunted as Junkins was by that faraway war? How many silent casualties of that war will pass quietly into anonymity, their valor and demons never mentioned, nor acknowledged, as America collectively tries to forget?

J. Stryker Meyer, a North County Times staff writer, served in the Special

Forces in

Vietnam in 1968-70.

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