Bangor -
A medal for a Maine man killed in Vietnam in 1966 has made it's way back to family in Orono.
For much of the last decade it wasn't very far away.
His brother is just happy it's back where it belongs.
Allen Nadeau was just 8 or 9 years old when his brother Larry Nadeau was killed in Vietnam in January of 1966. "I just kind of remember the car coming in the dooryard, and you know, that type of thing, government car and see my parents, you know, that was the hard thing."
The family of the 18-year-old Army Private was given a Purple Heart for his ultimate sacrifice to the country. In 1999, that medal was loaned to Vietnam Veterans of America to be used for educational purposes, said Allen Nadeau. "It was supposed to educate the kids and people into the Vietnam War that people wouldn't be forgotten that lost their lives."
But it was never returned.
"I tried to get them back and they said, 'Well they were in storage,' or what not, but we don't know," said Nadeau. "We just didn't know what happened to them."
While Allen thought his brother's medal and belongings were gone, they wound up just a few miles down the road in a collectibles store in Bangor for about ten years, Maritime International owned by Paul Zabiek. "I recognized that this may be a casualty involved because the Purple Heart was engraved on the reverse."
So Zebiak held on to it and started doing research. "Over the course of the last ten years or so, I gathered information about Larry Nadeau, know about his career what he had done, kept a file on him, and would continually add new details to that."
In June, the Vice President of a local Vietnam Veterans Organization came into the store and said he was searching for a medal of Larry Nadeau and the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
"It wasn't just the Purple Heart, there was other memorabilia there too that was with that, my brother's bracelet that my parents had bought him when he went to Vietnam was there, we had it, oh I got it," said Allen Nadeau. "I'm the last one, both my parents are gone, so I have children too, so these things will be handed down and that's the way it should be."
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