For more than two years in the 1950s, Don Hansche and Don Conwell were the quintessential Army buddies. After meeting up at an enlistment center in Milwaukee, they went to boot camp together, took road trips home to Wisconsin from camp, were deployed to Europe together, and spent two years serving side-by-side in Germany.

Strangers when they met in Milwaukee, they built a friendship based on both the common experience of the military and common experience at home. Hansche grew up in Kenosha, Conwell in Racine. They both decided at the age of 18, not long after leaving high school, that it would be a good idea to volunteer for the U.S. Army rather than wait to see if their numbers came up for the draft. Both had joined up with childhood friends from home.

When their stint was over, they returned home on the same day.

“We came back to Kenosha and we were dropped off at my house, and I remember my dad drove Don home,” Hansche said.

And then, without really planning it, they went back to their old lives.

“We went our separate ways,” Conwell said.

Over the next half century, Hansche and Conwell each built lives that followed a traditional path in their blue collar hometowns. They each worked in factories, Hansche at American Motors and then Chrysler in Kenosha, Conwell at Johnson Wax and then Case in Racine, both working at the plants until retirement. Each got married, had children, and then grandchildren. They never saw each other again.

They never forgot, though, their old friendship.

And as they would think back from time to time to their days in the military, each never realized that their old Army buddy was close at hand.

Hansche married his childhood sweetheart, Judy, after he returned from Germany. The family moved to Bristol, and for the last eight years the now-retired couple have lived in a ranch house in what passes for Bristol’s downtown. Over the years, the Hansches became close friends with a younger family in the neighborhood — the Millers — that family’s children calling the Hansches “grandma and grandpa.” They were like extended family, and last year became even closer when one of the Hansche’s grandchildren married one of the Miller “grandchildren.”

Piecing it together

This fall Julie Miller, the mother of the Miller family, was visiting Hansche when he started reminiscing about his Army days.

“My dad was in the Army from 1955 to 1957, too,” Miller told him.

When Hansche said he was stationed in Germany, Miller answered, “My dad was stationed in Germany, too.”

Where was he stationed? Hansche asked, and Miller replied with the name of the same city where Hansche had served.

Wait a second, Hansche asked her, what’s your maiden name?

Conwell, she answered.

“I almost fell over,” Hansche said.

It didn’t take long for Julie Miller to organize a reunion between the two Dons.

“It was like they had never been apart,” Conwell’s wife Ann said. “They never stopped talking the whole time.”

Sorting through memories

On a recent afternoon, the two Dons were still talking.

Sitting at the Hansche’s kitchen table, they leaned over a collection of black and white photos Conwell had brought along. Pictures of them out on maneuvers, relaxing in bunks, hanging out with friends in the unit. In one photo, the two of them are sitting side by side at a table, grinning, a bottle in an ice bucket between them.

“That was 52 years and 100 pounds ago,” Hansche says with a laugh.

They talked about strict commanding officers, about middle-of-the-night drills, about parties in the enlisted men’s club, and about sleeping in tents in the snow. There was a story about a near-miss with a tank, and another about a crash into a ditch during a late-night drive home while on leave.

They talked, too, about their plans for the future. “We both like fishing,” Hansche said, and with the approach of winter, they made plans for getting out on the ice. They don’t plan on losing touch again.

As they talked, their wives sat at the other end of the table over cups of coffee, talking about the wonder of it all. “After all these years, so close and not knowing it,” Judy said.

“For years our grandkids have been talking about grandma and grandpa Hansche, and we never put it together,” Ann said. The two couples had even attended the same wedding when their grandchildren married each other, but never crossed paths.

The women watch their husbands laugh and trade jokes. There are jokes about the Army, cracks about the passing of time, about the changes the years have made on those young men grinning up from the old photos, to the two old men sitting grinning over the table.

Hansche jokes about his weight. “You’ve held up a lot better than I have,” he tells the trim Conwell. “But I don’t hear too well anymore,” Conwell answers, indicating his hearing aids.

Doesn’t matter, Hansche said. “If I had seen you, I would have known you anywhere.”