He lost it in Vietnam. Facebook and kindness from strangers got it back to Fort Mill.

Lose a personal item in Vietnam, during wartime, and odds are you won’t live to see it returned. Gene Crump didn’t. But a couple of strangers on Facebook made sure his widow and daughters would.

It all started back in a Da Nang naval hospital in 1970, but it’s easier picking up the story two years ago. When John Schnitker from Neola, Iowa, logged onto Facebook. He posted a photo of a cigarette lighter inscribed with a name he only barely recalled. He asked friends if anyone could help locate the fellow Marine.

No luck.

Two years later, on Nov. 8, Schnitker re-posted the lighter photo and made it public. It’s been shared more than 9,100 times since.

“His original post was on my birthday,” said Ginger Crump, a Clover resident and daughter of Fort Mill lifer Gene.

Glenda Crump Black also came across the post. Problem was, she isn’t related to the Fort Mill Crumps. Which didn’t stop her from doing enough research to find a Gene Crump —and his remaining family. Black called and the sisters, Ginger and Wendy, confirmed it was their father who’d lost the lighter. They connected the same day Gene appeared in Chip Heemsoth’s popular “This Week in History” column in the Fort Mill Times.

After his time in Vietnam, Gene became a police officer in his hometown. In 1977, he lost his left eye after a bottle was thrown at his patrol car while patrolling in the Paradise community of Fort Mill.

“He was raised in Fort Mill,” Ginger said. “He served as a police officer in Fort Mill. He was injured in the line of duty in Fort Mill.”

Within a week, the Crumps had the lighter, along with a letter from Schnitker explaining what happened.

“I have had this lighter for over 47 years,” he wrote. “I found it in a box of memorabilia two years ago. I remember finding the lighter when we were closing the hospital ward, which I was assigned to, at the Naval Hospital in Danang (sic).”

Gene, or George as inscribed on the lighter, was a patient and Schnitker a corpsman taking care of injured Marines. Gene ended up with shrapnel in his legs before returning to California, then home to Fort Mill. Gene knew the lighter was missing when he left the hospital in Vietnam.

“When he was checking out of the hospital he asked if any of us had seen his lighter,” Schnitker wrote. “No one had at the time. Several months later I came across it in a cabinet on the ward.”

Schnitker asked about the owner, but couldn’t find any details of where he had gone to, so Schnitker figured he’d find the Marine when he returned stateside. The lighter got lost, and wasn’t rediscovered until two years ago.

Ginger said several parties cried several times in the past month, including her mother seeing the “Sonny loves Ann” etched into the back of the lighter. Ginger and her sister never heard anyone call their father “Sonny.”

“We never knew that,” she said. “My mother did, but I never did.”

Gene spent two tours in Vietnam. He and Ann Patterson, who lives in Rock Hill now, were married in between them. Gene came back the first time with the lighter, but it didn’t have anything on the reverse side. The family figures he must have had it done when he went back the second time.

Just one of the many mysteries Gene left his family. He’d just turned 18 before becoming a Marine and shipping off to Vietnam in 1967. It wasn’t entirely his choice, but it wasn’t the draft either. Gene brought a gun to the high school he was attending.

“He wasn’t fighting anybody,” Ginger said. “He just had it, and he got caught. He wanted to show it off.”

A judge gave Gene a choice — jail or join.

“He chose the service,” Ginger said.

Service changed Gene. Part of why a man sent to war by a judge comes back to become a police officer. In later years he spent time at the veterans hospital in Columbia even when he wasn’t sick. Long before he died there in 2009, Gene would take regular trips just to visit.

“That’s where he loved to be, because he was with his people,” Ginger said.

It did him good. Gene never spoke about his time in Vietnam. Except at the hospital. Most years, about the time the seasons changed, Gene would get antsy and his wife would send him down for his week’s “vacation.”

“He’d come back and she said he’d be a changed man — for a while,” Ginger said.

Veterans services weren’t then what they are now, and the only talk his family ever heard of Vietnam was how veterans were treated once they got back.

“He wasn’t treated as a hero,” Ginger said. “He was treated as if they didn’t care. He did talk about that part. Loudly.”

Whatever trauma Gene may have suffered from his service, it didn’t phase his sense of humor. After he lost the eye on patrol, he had it replaced with a artificial one. If folks started looking too closely at it, Gene would pop it out and put it in his mouth before returning it. The sense of humor proved hereditary. Gene loved bowling. He had Ginger in more leagues than she could count. His girls asked the folks at Fort Mill Funeral Home if they could hollow out a bowling ball to use as an urn when he died.

“They wouldn’t do it,” Ginger recalls.

Instead, the family buried a bowling pin with him, right there at the plot toward the front of Unity Cemetery downtown.

“I know that funeral director thought we were crazy, but that’s what you do when you were his daughter,” Ginger said. “You laugh.”

What wasn’t a laughing matter for Gene, something he learned in Vietnam and held close to back home, was a sense of service. It mattered to him.

“And so did this town,” Ginger said. “He was raised here. I was raised here. We all were.”

The recently returned lighter lists Gene’s formal name, his rank as corporal, his service branch and his years in Vietnam. It declares his love for a woman. One odd part of it, his last mystery perhaps, is the lighter itself is hollow. No lighting mechanism, no broken pieces, no fuel. It’s absolutely empty.

But now, in the hands three women whose hearts aren’t.

This story was originally published November 27, 2017 at 12:31 PM with the headline "He lost it in Vietnam. Facebook and kindness from strangers got it back to Fort Mill.."