“I am writing in a hurry. I see death coming up the hill.”

— A GI’s last letter home, 1969

Occasionally, now, Norde Wilson wakes up in the night and realizes he was yelling.

“My wife still asks me, ‘Were you dreaming about Vietnam?’ ”

No, he tells her, he wasn’t dreaming about Vietnam.

“I don’t know when I quit,” he says. “Only on rare occasions do I get back to Vietnam now in my dreams. I used to do it quite often.”

And only on rare occasions does he get back to Vietnam now when he’s awake, but reminders are never far from the corner where he lives.

Only Wiltshire Road separates him from John Stegall, as it deadends into East Colonial Drive.

Stegall was a “groundpounder,” Wilson explains, Vietnam lingo for a soldier who fought on the ground. Wilson fought in the air, flying in a Phantom jet.

“Stegall took a round,” he adds, “and that’s lingo for getting hit.”

So did Rowan County’s district attorney, Bill Kenerly, who lives across East Colonial from both of them.

It’s a coincidence, of course, that the three, all veterans of Vietnam, now live on the same street corner and, more than 25 years after they came home, have stopped, now and again, to share their memories, their feelings about that war.

They watched with interest as Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, himself a decorated prisoner of war, returned to Vietnam in April to meet some of the people who held him prisoner for six years. They — along with the rest of the world — watched as Vietnamese leaders observed the 25th anniversary of their victory.

Thirty-eight others from Rowan County can’t do that. They didn’t come back.

Robert M. Brown Jr. died in Vietnam.

“He was the first serviceman from Rowan County to be killed in the Viet Nam theatre,” the Post reported on Dec. 14, 1965, two days after his death, before the country turned Viet Nam into one word.

A year and a half later, Mitchell and Fair Funeral Service reported Samuel Holman of Baltimore, Md., a native of Rowan County, was killed almost a month earlier, on Nov. 17, 1965.

The Post had no story at all in 1966 when Edwin Everton Morgan of Granite Quarry was reported missing in action. That didn’t come until nearly 12 years later when the Air Force changed his status from missing to dead. He was survived by his wife, a daughter and a son he never saw.

He had been in Vietnam about six weeks when the AC 47 on which he was a target spotter was reported missing over South Vietnam. No trace of the plane was ever found.

Scott T. Welborne died on April 5, 1966, of wounds received in combat. He had enlisted right after he graduated from Price High School in 1965.

But the pace picked up in 1967.

Those killed that year were Ronald Wayne Lyerly, on March 6; John Cornelius Dunlap, April 9; Clarence Luther Morris, May 22; Kay William Wright, July 4; Francis Edward Howe, July 16; Douglas Ray Noel, July 31; George Franklin Antonitis, Dec. 3; Hugh Grey Willard, Dec. 23 ...

In 1968, Edgar Lee Bowers, Walter Alexander Williams, Jimmy Richard Cox, Daniel Guest, John Terry McInnis and James Delano Robinson.

In 1969, James Calvin Cockerl, Jimmy Dewayne Sells, Steven Wayne Wilson, Raymond Ervin Baumgarner, Robert Ervin Gilmore, Robert Lee Hager Jr., Jerry Lawrence Moore, John Leroy Partee, Harold Reed Richardson and Larry Wayne Watkins.

In 1970, Forest Hughy Hollifield, Ricky Norman Lowder, Richard Hugh Propst, Joe Hearne Rufty, Herman Victor Sturm Jr. and Roger Lynn Teeter.

In 1971, Carl Wayne Thompson died, and in 1972, Stanley George Pilot Jr.

The first one reported missing was Donald Vance Davis, on July 25, 1967. Then, Frederick Lewis Cristman, on Nov. 26, 1971, and Donald Monroe Shue, who was reported missing in action but no date was given. He was declared dead Jan. 15, 1979.

Their lives were gone, snuffed out almost before they started. And their families’ lives were inevitably and permanently scarred.

That war first made the cover of Life magazine in January 1963. Inside, it promised, was a story on “The Vicious Fighting in Vietnam.”

But back then it was happening so imperceptibly that people — busy washing their children’s faces, mowing the lawn, rushing to work, watching “Gilligan’s Island,” learning new math — scarcely realized they were going to war.

But Americans were there and they stayed more than 10 years in a war unlike any other America had ever fought. The longest and most unpopular in their history. Their first and only defeat.

And from the beginning, they were suspicious that their country, which had always been on the side of right, might, this time, be wrong.

The war in Vietnam had its roots in the communist takeover in China in 1949 and the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

Vietnam was then part of the French colony of Indochina. But Ho Chi Minh — for whom the city of Saigon is now named — was leading a communist uprising supported by China and the Soviet Union. Truman sent military aid and a few soldier-advisers to help the French in 1950.

Eisenhower continued the move — and introduced the term “domino theory” into America’s vocabulary. Time-Life’s book “The Turbulent Years,” about the ’60s, quotes Eisenhower: “You have a few dominoes set up. You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is a certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound consequences.”

The most profound consequences ...

A month after Eisenhower’s warning, the communist rebels threw out the French, and Indochina became Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam. Vietnam split at the 17th parallel between North Vietnam, held by the Communists, and South Vietnam, backed by the United States and less than 1,000 soldier-advisers.

Until 1962.

Then President John F. Kennedy sent 11,000 soldiers who not only advised and trained the South Vietnamese but also picked up arms.

When Kennedy was killed, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, used a skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 to push a resolution through Congress giving the president authority to take “all necessary measures” to repel any armed attack against the United States.

His aides called it the “functional equivalent of a declaration of war.”

He compared it to “grandma’s nightshirt — you could fit everything under it.”

Six months later the Viet Cong attacked a U.S. base. Eight Americans died. And Johnson sent two battalions of 3,500 Marines to Vietnam. In three years, that force would grow to more than half a million soldiers. The war swelled to claim the lives of 58,000 Americans and more than 3 million Vietnamese and leave hundreds of thousands more wounded or missing.

But stop anyone on the street and ask when the Vietnam War began and when it ended — and they stutter.

Slowly, imperceptibly it started.

They read a headline.

Or saw pictures of helicopters taking troops into action or bringing the wounded and the dead out.

Or ripped open a letter from the draft board.

Or watched the evening television news where they saw young soldiers — the average age was 19, eight years younger than those in World War II and Korea — fight a war.

Watched, argued, demonstrated.

Tried to turn away.

But spent the next decade of their lives learning about new words like napalm and Agent Orange, new places like the Ho Chi Minh Trail and My Lai, new weapons like mud and jungle leeches and punji stakes, and new concepts like body counts and kill ratios and an enemy you couldn’t recognize.

Americans — at home and on the battlefield — also learned about new attitudes, about demonstrations and civil disobedience and national mental pain.

Before Vietnam who could ever have believed that any American would spit on a soldier coming home from an American war?

And when did that long war really end?

Was it the night that the nation’s unofficial father, Walter Cronkite, looked into the cameras on the CBS Evening News and told the country:

“We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and in Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in darkest clouds. ... It seems more certain than ever that the bloody experience in Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”

Was it at 7 p.m. January 27, 1973, when the sides declared a cease fire and Salisbury Mayor E.L. “Sonny” Allen urged Rowan Countians to come to the National Cemetery for a brief program, arranged “hastily today.”

Or was it the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, when the city erupted in a cacophony of turmoil and Marine helicopters clattered above the embassy, drowning out the screams of South Vietnamese pleading for seats.

Was it the official beginning and ending dates set by the American Legion — Feb. 28, 1961 to May 7, 1975 — that determines whether or not a soldier served during war time and is eligible to be a member?

Or was it Jan. 23, 1977, a Sunday, when still another American president, Jimmy Carter, issued his amnesty declaration for those who had left the country to avoid the war?

When did it start?

When did it end?

And how did the Vietnam War shape the lives of those young people on center stage, who became middle-aged Americans as the final quarter of the 20th Century played itself out?

Is that tumultuous, ear-splitting deadly war over? Or are they still trying to find out what happened and why?