It was the first time war entered our living rooms through television sets. The conflict, however, was on the other side of the world being fought against an enemy too vague to conquer. In the end, more than 50,000 U.S. troops would never come back home alive.

Etched with the names of those fallen soldiers, a replica of the Vietnam Memorial Wall coming to South Portland this weekend will offer many local people who experienced the war a chance for contemplation, understanding and healing.

Two of those people are women living in Cape Elizabeth, whose lives were changed by the war when they were just teenagers, even though, at the time, they lived thousands of miles away from one another – one in Vietnam and the other in Cape Elizabeth.

Xanh “Lilly” Pyle

Xanh “Lilly” Pyle was barely a teenager living in a Vietnam village when she became a soldier.

As a child she added four years onto her age so she could fill sand bags and endure military training to protect her village.

Xanh “Lilly” Pyle was born in 1957 in the village of Dong Ha outside Quang Tri. She would be the oldest of ten siblings. At the outset of the Vietnam conflict, Dong Ha became a key port for the United States to dock vessels and distribute troops and supplies throughout Vietnam, Pyle said. She remembers many Army bunkers in her village.

“Every night for years and years we would stand outside the barrack fences and entertain the soldiers with song and dance,” she said.

Dong Ha is located in Southern Vietnam, and the U.S. soldiers were fighting with the village against the Viet Cong. Pyle said the village trained adolescents for combat, and the United States gave them guns for fighting.

“I said I was four years older than I was so I could help fill sand bags,” said Pyle, referring to the walls the villagers built for protection. The kids who were old enough built walls, trained in karate and dug pits to protect Dong Ha.

“Those U.S. soldiers were being loved there. They were fighting side-by-side with the Vietnamese,” said Pyle.

In 1971 the United States pulled out of Dong Ha. Pyle said the villagers fled south in front of the invading Viet Cong. South Vietnamese soldiers scattered to neighboring countries.

“I want American families to know that even though our country fell apart, we are still thankful to American soldiers who were there to help us to try to win the war and try to keep us alive,” said Pyle. “We appreciate the soldiers who lived and died and sacrificed for our people.”

Pyle said she came to the United States in December of 1972 at the age of 15 at the request of a GI she had known. The couple married and had two children, Lisa and Steven Pyle, but divorced eight years later, after which, Pyle worked at obtaining her U.S. citizenship.

Pyle said she spent seven years in adult education while working and raising her two children. She then went on to cosmetology school and opened a salon in 1991 on Fore Street in Portland.

Lilly Pyle now rents a studio at the Head Shed hair salon on 58 Market Street in Portland and lives on Roundabout Lane in Cape Elizabeth. Her two children have achieved master’s degrees in their fields and she has a fiancA?© of eight years.

Pyle explained that the people of Vietnam still live with the devastation the war brought to her native country. When she returned to her village in 1995 to visit her dying father, the bamboo that once surrounded Dong Ha had still not grown back.

Some villages have had to build homes in and around bomb craters, she said. When Pyle’s pregnant mother returned to Dong Ha after the war she was struck by shrapnel from a bomb that had not yet exploded.

Pyle said the people of Vietnam live in a mourning county where good jobs have to be bought, money is scarce, healthcare does not exist and a corrupt government is in control.

Pyle has returned to Vietnam twice since 1995. She plans go back again in March of 2007 to distribute aid through her Vietnamese Hope Foundation (vietnamesehopefoundations.org), which she started three years ago.

“I wish people in this country would reach out to people alive and still mourning their loss. Give gratitude to the soldiers for what they did, it was the right thing to do,” said Pyle.

Carol Lombard Clark

Carol Lombard Clark was just 17 when she said goodbye to John Roberts as he left for the Vietnam War.

Roberts, who shared a youthful, five-year courtship with Clark would never get a chance to propose. She was informed of his death before she turned 18, but he never left her mind.

“It was a terrible time in my life,” said Clark. Two days before her 18th birthday Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, and a few months later Robert Kennedy was assassinated, a man she had met through her involvement with the Democratic Party during high school.

“I just couldn’t understand why so many people wanted to hurt each other,” she said.

Clark said she never thought she would see a conflict worse than Vietnam but finds it comparable to the current violence in the Middle East. “I’m 100 percent behind our troops but not the government that sends them,” she said.

She said she has always felt a strong connection with John Roberts throughout her life and anytime she needs help she visits his grave. She related several events that have an almost supernatural connection with Roberts.

One of these events occurred when she visited the Vietnam Memorial Wall in D.C. several years back with John’s brother Steve. They found that the books with the soldiers’ names in them were all closed except for one. She said that the open book not only contained John’s name, but was already open to the page with his name on it.

John Roberts and Carol Lombard Clark met in 1962 when Roberts was delivering newspapers at the age of 13 in South Portland. Carol was 12.

“Johnny was always appearing in my life after I first met him,” said Clark. “I would go baby-sitting and he would be hiding behind a couch or something,” she said.

The two started dating in 1967 after Roberts had joined the military. “He looked so good in his military uniform,” said Clark as she recalled their last day together. She recalled having a long strand of her hair cut so Roberts could have a piece of her to take with him.

“That last day we went swimming together, and I was sure he was coming back,” she said. Roberts would not look her in the eyes as he left, and Clark believes he had a sort of precognition about his death.

Clark said a few weeks after Roberts left she came down with mono and was hospitalized for a month during which she mostly slept. She said she had only been back in school for two days when her mother came into her classroom and told her Johnny had been killed. “I went right over to his parents house,” she said.

Clark currently lives on Oakwood Road in Cape Elizabeth. She married in 1971 and had three children. She split with and divorced her husband 20 years later.

Carol Lombard Clark is a singer, writer and producer. She will be singing the National Anthem at the opening ceremonies for the Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall Experience on Friday, Aug. 11, at Southern Maine Community College and again at the burying of a time capsule on Monday, Aug. 14, at 11 a.m. in Evergreen Cemetery on Stevens Avenue in Portland to commemorate the wall traveling to Southern Maine.

Clark is currently finishing an autobiography on her life titled, “Wounded Angels.” She has started working on a screenplay called, “Goodbye Caroline,” which she said is about her relationship with Roberts.

She said she always felt a need to tell the story about her high school sweetheart, and now the timing seems right. She thinks it is important to tell a woman’s side of a war story and that a lot of women will have similar stories concerning the conflict continuing in the Middle East.