She urged him to come to Denver and meet her best friend, Jeanette. They were married a year later in 1971, a few months after he'd shown her an old newspaper clipping about a bloody operation he'd been part of in the Delta on Dec. 18, 1968.

"He and his unit were ordered to go in and shoot anything that moved - man, woman or child," she said.

For awhile things went well. Wiggins was a reserve Denver police officer and sold life insurance, a job he hated because he knew many of his customers couldn't afford the policies he pitched them.

But early in 1973, for no apparent reason, he began to lose sleep and act despondent, drinking more and more and staying in bed.

On the night of Dec. 18, 1973, as Jeanette made Christmas presents, her husband "hugged me and told me that he was going to do something where I wouldn't have to be burdened the rest of my life. But he wouldn't explain what he meant by that."

He went back into their darkened bedroom until she, alarmed at his silence, entered to find him holding a gun. She tried to take it away but he pushed her to the hallway floor and, without a word, shot himself in the head.

A chance occurrence later that night revealed a motive.

"I found the newspaper clipping going through his wallet for identification for the authorities," she said. "And that's when I knew it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with Vietnam."

Within two years Wiggins' grief-stricken father was dead. "He wouldn't be comforted. He just drank himself to death. He just cried and sobbed," said Wiggins' mother, who suffered a nervous breakdown.

Jeanette Wiggins, 40, plans a return to nursing school. She has never remarried and doesn't expect to. "I still love him," she said.

Nedra Riley works at a detoxification center and sees many veterans not unlike her brother.

"That guy had everything in the world to live for and he just wasn't the same person when he got back," she said. "I'd like to see his name some day up on some wall.

"I think he's earned it."