For the past 45 years, Anchorage resident Bruce Pozzi has owned a bracelet with the name Arvin Chauncey inscribed on it. He bought it to show solidarity for Chauncey, who spent 6 years as a Prisoner of War (POW) during the Vietnam War.
Pozzi never met Chauncey, never even talked to him, until an early morning phone call on Saturday.
"I was so excited to talk to him and know that he was there, he was so outgoing, so friendly," Pozzi said of Chauncey, "He said thank you for all you did, I didn't do anything, he did it in my book."
What he did was endure years of beatings and torture from the North Vietnamese.
"Either two things are going to happen when you're over there," said Pozzi "You're going to escape or you're going to die."
But Chauncey did neither, arriving home in 1973 with a group of fellow freed POW's that included future presidential candidate John McCain. Pozzi saw that report on TV, but he didn't think to contact him until almost 40 years later when an article was written about Chauncey in the magazine "On Patrol."
"I've often wondered," asked Pozzi. "If I had a name on here of a guy who never came home, would I still be wearing it?, or would I finally have given up and said: I can't wear this anymore."
Pozzi, an Air Force veteran himself, wore that bracelet every day for 6 years and the wear and tear shows. Now it sits on his dresser in his bedroom as a reminder of the sacrifice thousands of Americans made during a war that wasn't very popular at home.
"I see it. I respect what it stands for and what he did," adds Pozzi. "I don't have any flashbacks by it, but I probably think of him more than I think of my own deceased father who was in World War II."
Lt. Commander Chauncey is now living in Minnesota. The organization, Voices in Vital America, started selling these bracelets on Veterans Day in 1970. At the time they were getting 12,000 requests a day for the bracelets each inscribed with a serviceman's name.
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