"As the Oriental sun sets gently over the snipers and touches its last golden rays to the olive claymore mines, we bid adieu to Vietnam, land of mystery and mangled civilians." — Loring M. Bailey Jr.

I spent a good part of Thursday, National Vietnam War Veterans Day, learning about Bailey, a smart young man from Stonington who died, at the age of 24, after the detonation of a hidden booby trap in the Quang Ngai Province in March 1970.

Bailey, a graduate of Pine Point School, Pomfret School and Trinity College, was the only child of Loring and Dorothy Bailey. He had enlisted in the Army under the threat of the draft and, newly married, was sent off to the jungles of Vietnam in the infantry.

I should begin, actually, with a confession. I found my way to a memorial for Bailey and four other young men from the region who lost their lives in Vietnam after listening to Stonington First Selectman Rob Simmons on the Lee Elci radio show, where he is a regular Thursdays. (After all, you have to keep up with the crazy things they are saying on right-wing radio.)

Simmons mentioned on the air that there is a Vietnam memorial, probably among the oldest in the country, in Old Mystic, alongside Whitford Brook. He said he was going to go visit as soon as he left the radio studio.

Well, my curiosity was aroused. I never knew there was a memorial there. I was driving nearby anyway and headed over to check it out. I indeed found Simmons there, alone, beginning to pay his respects.

Simmons knows a lot of the story of the small memorial park, which is on state property and tended by town highway crews. There is a flagpole, lit 24 hours, and a granite stone with a bronze plaque with the names of the "five brave men" from the Mystic River Valley: Bailey, William Paul Cohn Jr., Richard Gill Desillier, Peter Dean Hesford and Howard Clinton Robinson.

It was erected, Simmons told me, in 1975, after the fall of Saigon. Evidently some of the parents, including the Baileys, spearheaded the effort.

A Vietnam veteran, Simmons earned two Bronze Star Medals. He announced his 1985 run for Stonington selectman at the memorial park in Old Mystic.

I felt especially sad for the Bailey family when I later found on Thursday the 2010 obituary for Bailey's father, who had a long career in ship design at Electric Boat. At 96, Loring Mackenzie Bailey died one year after his wife of 66 years. He had no survivors.

The talents and memory of the Baileys' son, though, do live on with a book, "Calm Frenzy: One Man's Vietnam War," a collection of his letters home, in which he wrote about the war, sometimes by the light of flashlight and candles as bombs burst around him.

The book started out as a play, performed in 2013 by students, faculty and staff of Bailey's alma mater, Pomfret School. The book was published in 2015.

Bailey also is featured in a 2015 movie, "My Father's Vietnam," by Soren Sorensen, whose father was friends with Bailey and in Vietnam at the same time. Peter Sorensen made it home.

The movie, which is available on iTunes and Amazon, is fascinating.

But it is Bailey's own words that are so especially evocative, read even these many years later, on National Vietnam War Veterans Day.

Bailey, who had taken a job as a technical writer after finishing school at Trinity, won a number of writing awards in school and was an avid reader. He loved Ernest Hemingway. He also loved cars and worked on them, drew them and raced them, a hobby Peter Sorensen recalls in the film having enjoyed with him, even though there was a "cloud" over their heads, a distant war that was going to draw them in.

Bailey had a warm sense of humor.

"Just a dreary way to spend a hot, moist night, sitting, listening to your rifle rust," he wrote.

"I have a new fantasy — I pretend that I'm a Belgian mercenary and this isn't my war. I just work here."

He kept the grim scenes of battle out of letters to his family. Friends got more vivid descriptions. He showed great concern for civilian casualties, particularly women and children.

"Three of our third platoon people were killed by a booby trap while setting up for an ambush," he once wrote, seeming to foreshadow his own death.

"One lived nearly a whole, precious, peaceful day, afterwards."

"More booby traps and such in evidence now."

Simmons seemed unusually quiet when I ran into him Thursday. I attributed it at the time to the occasion. I think I interrupted him, on bended knee, mid-prayer.

I later learned, though, that it was his daughter's difficult but successful birth Wednesday that had robbed him of sleep.

Levi Adams Meiser weighed in Wednesday at nine pounds, eight ounces. Mother and child are doing well.

Congratulations to all.

And may Levi grow up never knowing what it is like to worry about having to go to war. May there never be the cloud of a draft over his head.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com