Four Marine veterans reunited over the weekend to recreate a photo they took just before deploying to Vietnam 50 years ago.
According to USA Today, Bob Falk, Dennis Puleo, Tom Hanks and Bob DeVenezia all trained together at Camp Pendleton outside San Diego.
After the war, the four lifelong friends went their separate ways and eventually lost touch until five years ago when “Falk stumbled across an online memorial that Hanks created for a fallen comrade they all knew. That started a chain of events that put the four back in touch.”
For a while, the four would reunite in fits and starts, a few gathering at a time, but never all at once.
Then, when Hanks was flipping through an old photo album, he spotted a picture of the four together on a beach as young Marines. It had been nearly 50 years since the photograph was taken.
He got an idea…
As the noon hour approached, they took the longboard — borrowed from a stranger in St. Augustine, Scott Miller, who’d overheard their story in a surf shop the day before — and ambled down to the beach for the photograph. Each played their part, contorting their bodies and faces as best they could, trying to recapture that long-ago moment.
They got their photo.
Mission accomplished.
The meaning of #SemperFi 50 years later https://t.co/fxG9bpv6v3 via @usatoday pic.twitter.com/RKV4hodGDH
— Rick Erickson (@RGrayE24) April 25, 2016