WAUKON, Iowa — The brutal, divisive war ended long ago. But it returned this fall to Gwen Brainard’s living room.

She scanned the photographs of the faces of fallen soldiers that flashed on the screen during Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” documentary, looking for the love of her life.

He was killed nearly five decades ago, but she still has his yellowed Army envelopes taped to scrapbook pages and letters with drawings of her, pregnant with their cat at her feet, and his hopeful words:

“… Eternity,” he wrote, “as in the time we will spend together.”

Terry Miller was 23 and an artist when he died. Their son was just 3 months old.

Brainard, now 72, goes to country western concerts where the performer will tell all the veterans to rise. Everyone claps, paying their respects, as so many will do this Veterans Day.

But they don’t ask the widows to rise.

“I sit there and think, ‘Those guys got to come home. They have grandchildren. They got to grow old.’ My husband didn’t have any of that.”

On that TV screen she recognized the thin, handsome face among the photographs of 242 men who died in one week in Vietnam, May 28 to June 3, 1969. She thought of him and all the other mothers, girlfriends and wives left behind by those fallen soldiers.

What 50-year trail was left by veterans who never came home?

Professing his love

Gwen Cheatum and Terry Miller, whose fathers both worked at the John Deere factory in Ottumwa, went to the same high school.

But their paths hadn't crossed until they met in the spring of 1967 while attending Northeast Missouri State Teachers College.

They talked all night. She thought he was funny.

They were both art majors, and he painted a portrait of them at a park. He wore a goatee on his thin face; she had a scarf holding back her blond hair.

He proposed by standing in a friend’s convertible outside her dorm room and yelling for her — on the wrong side of the dorm. Girls rushed to her room, telling her this might be for her.

She saw him then, loudly “professing his love for me.”

They married in the fall. By the summer of 1968, he needed just one more class, a student teaching semester, but it wasn’t offered that summer.

Instead, he was drafted. She told him to go to Canada, but he left to serve. She quietly marched down the streets with anti-war protesters, not telling her family.

“I thought the war was foolish,” she said. “We weren’t against the men; we were against the war.”

He volunteered to go to Vietnam because those who were shipped out could get leave before they deployed, and he wanted to see his pregnant wife.

One day, he surprised her. The cat scratched under the door. She opened it.

“I’m nine months pregnant, and I jumped up and down,” she said.

She said the military tried to train Terry how to kill in training, but when he was home she saw it didn't work.

"He was a pacifist. He was a hunter all his life, but now he couldn't kill a deer."

A few days later he held his newborn boy, Christian Miller, but what Gwen remembers now is the woman she roomed with that day in the hospital. She was the mother of six children.

Neither her husband nor any visitors came to the hospital, so Terry bought her flowers.

A fateful knock

Terry left from the Ottumwa airport and told his wife he didn’t want her to say goodbye.

He joined the 4th Battalion, 21st Infantry, near the northern border by Dak To, Vietnam. He saw lush forests and pristine beaches on the way in and read a sign, “Vietnam — the vacation capital of the world.”

“I have been in Vietnam three months now and seen none of those niceties,” he wrote.

Instead, he saw ragged, begging children and old women. “They exist in a constant, frightening way,” he wrote.

He looked for “Charlie” on night patrol.

On May 29, 1969, he was positioned on the perimeter, on a hill too rocky to dig a deep foxhole, when his unit was ambushed by North Vietnamese.

Later came a knock on Gwen's door in Ottumwa. She answered it and saw a uniform.

“I was holding Christian. As soon as I saw him, I knew. I almost dropped Christian, but my father-in-law grabbed him,” she said.

She vented a torrent of rage at the officer. “What a waste of men!”

Gwen rushed to the bathroom and buried her head in the sink. She didn’t think she was crying but felt tears.

She splashed water on her face as her father-in-law charged in, thinking she was going to harm herself.

He was wrong. She was angry. She has stayed angry.

'We must know who'

There is a war and it never ends, not for some.

Gwen sat alone by her husband’s casket in the funeral home and saw the chest of the thin man bulging outward. He must have been hit there, she figured.

Gwen turned and saw someone enter the parlor. It was the same woman to whom her husband had given flowers when she was pregnant in the hospital, and she remembered his kindness.

A month later, Gwen was handed the June 27, 1969, edition of Life magazine. On the cover was a soldier’s face. Inside were the photographs of the 242 Americans who died in Vietnam that one week, one of the bloodiest periods of the war.

On page 31, near fellow Iowans Thomas Nebel, 20, of Keota, and Jim Walters, 20, of Sioux City, was the high school graduation photograph of her husband, Terry Miller.

"… We must pause to look into the faces,” wrote Life. “More than we must know how many, we must know who."

Gwen had once been in the shadow of her outgoing husband, whose art she thought was better than hers, his jokes funnier. But now she had to step up and raise a child on her own.

“I didn’t have time to wallow in it.”

She finished her school, took up teaching art, remarried too quickly and had another child. But that marriage ended after 14 years.

In later years, she married again, this time to a gentle farmer outside Waukon, but he died at age 53.

“I’m not timid anymore. I am a survivor,” she said. “You are shaped by what happens to you. I got a lot stronger.”

In 1979, she wrote to the local paper, sharing the condolences of letters sent by politicians who said her husband died to keep us free.

She firmly believes he died in vain and wrote to ask people to remember Vietnam and not let it happen again: “Then his life will have purpose.”

In 1984, she went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C., and searched for panel W23, Line 16. The bus driver had to hold her up when her legs gave out at the sight of Terry's name.

Her son, Christian, learned to grow up without a father he never knew, but she gave him stories, and those are his memories now.

“I have spent time in my life reflecting on how things could have been different,” said Christian Miller, of Cresco. “What would have changed?”

He named his daughter Teri, after his father.

In 2004, at age 15, Teri wanted to know the history of her grandfather. She wrote a message on a Vietnam memorial online forum.

A man responded. He was on the hill that night, and he cried when he got her message.

“It haunted me all that time,” Carl Zarzyski of Michigan wrote to her then. He told her that he didn’t know why Terry was put on guard that night instead of him.

“I wish at times I could have been there myself, and you would have your grandpa. I am sorry.”

Faces of young men

For almost 50 years, Gwen has worn the stones of Terry's wedding ring on a band on her finger, twisting it as she thinks of what her husband could have done with his life.

"I don’t know if I ever got over it,” Gwen said.

And Terry's photograph kept bringing it up. Author James Wright interviewed her for his 2017 book “Enduring Vietnam,” as she started to share more of her feelings, Christian said.

Christian didn’t agree with his mother’s opinion for a long time, thinking that Vietnam was a worthy attempt to stop communism.

But after watching the Burns documentary, which aired in 10 parts on PBS this fall, he said it showed “egos meddling in places they shouldn’t be meddling.”

Now he feels conflicted.

His mother has retired as a teacher, then a social worker, but keeps busy in art groups, taking adult education classes and painting. Her late husband’s art fills her condo.

But the war grew fresh in her mind again this fall while watching the Burns documentary.

American leaders lied to an apathetic population, she said, and she doesn’t understand why we were there.

In the Vietnam War, 58,220 Americans died, including 853 Iowans.

She studied the faces of the young men and asked that people today thank veterans.

But also thinks about those families of the dead.

They are left with photographs and memories.