We Meet Again From Westminster to Vietnam and Back Again By VALENTINE BRKICH ’97
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n the spring of 1971, Jim Church ’68 was in Vietnam serving as a pilot in the Navy’s Helicopter Attack (Light) Squadron 3 (HA(L)-3), aka the “Seawolves,” when the call came in. A small Naval Special Warfare Group had been involved in a firefight somewhere in the swampy Mekong Delta. One of them had been shot and was in need of urgent medical attention.
Rik Wilkinson ’68, D.M.D., was one of those men. After making the call, he and the two other men with him used dead reckoning to head toward the rendezvous point. Not long afterward they saw the low-flying Bell UH-1 Iroquois (or “Huey”) appear over the horizon. As the chopper came in for a landing, the three men climbed aboard. Wilkinson thought there was something familiar about the pilot’s name—“CHURCH”—which was stamped on the back of his helmet. Safely back at Binh Thuy Air Base, Wilkinson was exiting the helicopter when he noticed the pilot had taken his helmet off. “There was just something about that name and his familiar face,” says Wilkinson, now 72. “So I said to him, ‘Hey! You didn’t happen to go to Westminster by chance?’” Turning around to look at Wilkinson, Church replied, “Yeah!”
Jim Church (top) and Rik Wilkinson (bottom) while stationed in Vietnam. At top right: Church, left, and Wilkinson reunite during Homecoming 2018.
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Church, now 73, says he remembers turning back to look at Wilkinson and thinking, “Holy cow, this guy looks scared out of his mind. You could tell he’d been through a lot.” That brief encounter was the last time the two would see each other until 48 years later at Homecoming 2018 during the Class of 1968 50th reunion.
