https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/you-don-t-forget-columbia-couple-recounts-service-as-air/article_803640b8-e436-11e8-896b-13223040844c.html
TOM KNAPP | Staff Writer | November 11, 2018
Bill Daley and his best friend, Joe Chatburn, got their draft notices on the same day in the summer of '68.
The Germantown natives grew up together, went to school and church together and, in 1968, worked together. They parted ways at their local recruitment office, where Daley joined the Air Force and Chatburn joined the Marines.
Daley's voice cracks as he describes the memory last week at his Columbia home. He wipes an eye before continuing.
"On my first leave, in March 1969, I attended Joe's funeral," he says.
Each year on Veterans Day, he and his wife visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Every time, Daley says, "I go to panel 29 west of that wall, and I say 'hi' to Joe."
Daley, 69, and his wife Debbie, 63, of Columbia, have a lot of stories from their service during the Vietnam War.
Daley, though drafted into service, found a home in the Air Force and served 26 years, retiring in 1994 as a senior master sergeant.
During a 12-month tour in Southeast Asia, he was a crew chief on the F-4 Phantom and F-111. That means he kept the warbirds flying.
"We tore them apart. We put them back together. We refueled them. We inspected them before and after every flight," he says.
"You get very attached to your aircraft."
Daley pauses a moment before recounting a flight that ran into trouble after a bombing run over Cambodia.
The plane was hit by small arms fire and was leaking hydraulic fluid, he says. The pilot and weapons system officer were told to bail out, Daley says, but they thought they could make it back.
The plane made a hard landing and bounced twice on the landing strip, he recalls. On the third bounce, it exploded.
Daley was on the crash recovery team but says "there wasn't much left" of the two men in the wreckage.
The day still haunts him. Some nights, he says, he sits up in bed screaming, "Eject! Eject!"
It's gotten worse since he retired in 2015 after 18 years as a machine operator for the U.S. Post Office. He has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and is getting counseling.
"That kind of stuff, you don't forget," he says.
He remembers flying into Philadelphia after returning from Southeast Asia.
"They told us to change into civvies, but my duffle bag didn't make it, so I was in my uniform," he says. "There were protesters. One of them spit on me ... but my dad was there, with his arms wide. He gave me a hug like he never had before."
Daley settled in 1994 in Lancaster County, where he had family and fond memories from childhood visits. He married and raised two sons, one of whom followed him into the Air Force.
After his divorce, he was sitting at the bar at AmVets Post 153, Columbia, when he met his future wife.
Debbie Daley, from Willow Street, didn't plan to enter the service in 1973.
"I had a date," she says. "He invited me to a Christmas party."
She has no memory of the party, she says. She woke the next day to a phone call from her date, who confessed it was an enlistment party -- and she had signed up for the Army Reserves.
"I never talked to him again after that phone call," she says.
But the Lancaster Catholic High School graduate had just lost her job when the old Willow Street Diner closed, so she started training in Alabama, then was sent to Texas to be certified as a combat medic -- "the last thing I wanted to do," she says.
She served five years at the 99th Combat Support Hospital, based on Ranck Mill Road, drilling on weekends at Fort Indiantown Gap and assisting her doctor at the former Lancaster Osteopathic Hospital.
She never went overseas, although she was nearly deployed a few times, she says.
She later held various jobs, including 16 years at Armstrong and 12 at AMP in Elizabethtown. She married and had a son and two daughters.
Then, nearly 25 years after retiring as an Army medic, she went back into medicine.
She worked as a certified nursing assistant at Lancaster General Hospital while learning to be a licensed practical nurse, she says. She worked at Masonic Homes in Elizabethtown, Conestoga View and, for 12 years, the dementia wing of Pleasant Acres in York.
She retired on disability in 2015 after breaking her shoulder in a fall.
She joined AmVets after her husband died, she says, serving as its secretary, treasurer and chaplain.
It was there, she says, that she came to view herself as a veteran.
The "real veterans" who served in combat, she says, convinced her that service at home was also important.
She was working at the post one day in 2010 when she went to the bar for a soda. She saw Daley sitting alone.
"We started talking," he says. "Things progressed, and here we are."
Now retired -- and living in a home filled with clocks and birdhouses -- the Daleys volunteer with the veterans program at Hospice & Community Carein Lancaster and York counties.
"We always go out as a team," he says. "Man, some of the stories these guys and gals tell...."
They're active with the Lancaster County chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America and speak at high schools about their service.
For them, the military is a family tradition.
Bill Daley's father, an Army Air Corps veteran, was a belly gunner in a B-17during World War II. His brother, a Marine, was the only survivor when an armored personnel carrier exploded in North Vietnam in 1965. His daughter-in-law's brother, Sgt. Keith Bennett of Holtwood, was killed in 2005 in Iraq.
Debbie Daley's father survived the battle of Chosin Reservoir in Korea.
It's important to them, she says, that veterans today come home to a hero's welcome.
"Not just on Veterans Day. Every day," she insists. "If you see a veteran, show your appreciation."