Typically, Barb McIntosh doesn’t work the front counter.

But on that summer day, no one else was available to check in
patients at the VA’s outpatient clinic over the noon hour.

So there sat Barb.

And here came a patient.

A rancher from the Sandhills, at the Lincoln clinic for the
first time.

She asked for his insurance card.

She asked for his name.

Rowan Ballagh, he answered.

She looked up.

Rowan Ballagh?

In 1966, Barb was a 15-year-old living on
Dudley Street.

She and her friends went to Lincoln Northeast. They cheered in
pep club. They kept diaries. They had pen pals far away in
Vietnam.

She can’t remember exactly how they got started writing, the
curly-headed grandmother of two said Thursday.

Maybe they read about a need for pen pals for Nebraska soldiers
in the newspaper.

She knows she picked out three or four names. She knows she
started writing to a young man from a ranch near Burwell.

He wrote back.

Dear Barb,

Well, I always like to get mail, but as it is now it’s hard
to get mail out …

She found that letter – and two pages of another – tucked in a
jewelry box a few weeks before Rowan Ballagh showed up at her
counter.

We’ve been in the field since Sept. 14 and won’t go in until
the first of Jan., it isn’t very pleasant out here …

The handwriting was neat on still-crisp stationery, sent from
the central highlands of Vietnam.

I like rodeoing … I have 2 brothers and 2 sisters … I
have angus cattle and 2 registered horses of my own …

I was drafted …

I didn’t get to see Bob Hope they didn’t bring us out of the
field in time … I got in here just in time to see Nancy Sinatra,
boy she’s quite a looker …

Be careful. Thanks for writing,

Your friend, Rowan

The war ended, and Barb finished high school and went to college
and got married and had three children and eventually divorced and
never heard from any of her soldier pen pals again.

“I always wondered what happened to them,” she said at the VA,
where she’s worked for more than 30 years.

“If they made it home.”

The man at the counter stared back at Barb when
she repeated his name.

She was babbling.

She had goosebumps.

“He looked at me like I was crazy.”

She kept talking, and he started to remember a young woman from
Lincoln who wrote him letters when he was a scared infantryman a
world away from his family’s 5,000 acres.She kept talking, and he
started to remember a young woman from Lincoln who wrote him
letters when he was a scared infantryman a world away from his
family’s 5,000 acres.

“It was great to hear from people,” Rowan said by phone last
week, taking a break from checking on fall calves to talk to a
reporter from Lincoln.

His unit was search and destroy. A band of young men who didn’t
all make it home.

“It was always encouraging to know there were people at home
thinking of us.”

Rowan and his wife, Phyllis, graze cattle on 3,000 acres, six
miles from where he grew up.

They have a grown son and daughter. One granddaughter.

His tour in Vietnam ended a few months early. He was wounded in
a gun battle and spent six weeks in Japan and then in Denver for
more rehab.

He’s 64, and he doesn’t have full use of his right arm.

But he’s happy to have it.

“I can get along.”

And he was as surprised as Barb to see the face behind those
long-ago letters.

Copies of his letters arrived at the ranch last week.

“I read them last night,” he said Friday. “It was quite a
deal.”

He doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about Vietnam.

“Certain things are still hard. We lost some of our guys, that
part you never get over.”

Barb didn’t really understand war back then, she says.

She does now.

She sees it every day, in the faces and the worn-out bodies at
the VA clinic.

In the early days, there were the WWI guys, she says. Now the
old WWII soldiers are disappearing.

The Vietnam vets are going gray.

Her rancher is too.

She got so excited the day Rowan came to her counter, she went
around telling everyone.

She figures they’ll stay in touch now, even if they just
exchange Christmas cards.

And she can quit wondering whatever happened to the soldier who
wrote to Miss Barbie McIntosh, 6842 Dudley St., Lincoln, Ne.
U.S.A.

Thanks a lot for writing, write again if you wish
…

“It’s really nice to know he’s still alive.”

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 402-473-7218 or
clangekubick@journalstar.com