By MIKE BARBER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Bill Hunt, an Atlanta real estate broker, arrived in Seattle and returned to the past.

It is a past filled with fear and carnage. And the bravery of one soldier: 2nd Lt. Robert R. Leisy, a Seattle boy and University of Washington graduate.

Leisy, then only 24, died in Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

Last Saturday, Hunt stepped into Leisy's world again. It was a personal quest that brought him full circle to a man he is linked with through war and whose heroism still touches him.

Thirty-four years ago this fall, Hunt was an Army first lieutenant in a combat firebase in the triple-canopy jungles of southwest Vietnam. He was executive officer of Company B, 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division. In December 1969, he was pouring his heart into words he prayed would honor Leisy, who had died exhibiting the character by which he lived.

"Despite his mortal wounds," Hunt wrote, "2nd Lt. Leisy calmly and confidently continued to direct the platoon's fire. When medical aid arrived, (he) valiantly refused attention until the others seriously wounded were treated."

It was a recommendation for the Medal of Honor. "I just wanted to do him justice," Hunt said.

In Seattle that fall, Leisy's many close friends from Queen Anne High School and the University of Washington -- such as Tom Weingarten, Shari Barnhardt, Curtis Nelson and Eric Greenwood -- were missing his antics and worrying about him. The women among his childhood friends had premonitions of his death.

In a world that seemed to be going mad -- it was the year of Woodstock, the Manson murders, Chappaquiddick and the first moon landing -- Leisy's infectious, sometimes devilish energy and quick Jonathan Winters-like wit was source of direction and relief to which they gravitated.

"That's why our grief is still so fresh," Barnhardt said. "It's amazing, the ripple effect, how many lives are touched by the loss of someone so young."

Leisy entered the Army in 1968 and flew off for Vietnam in September 1969, the same month North Vietnamese leader Ho Chih Minh died while his forces were launching fall offensives.

After three months in Vietnam, Leisy's letters home to his parents were upbeat. He didn't want to worry them.

With his friends, however, he was blunt. He worried about "the kids" in his platoon. And his view of the war had changed. Leisy didn't regret serving in the Army, but he felt the war was a lost cause.

In a letter to a friend dated Dec. 1, 1969, Leisy wrote:

"My nerves are calming down now. We had some nasty contact and some rather hairy experiences on our last mission. Thought I'd bought the farm for sure."

In a letter to his dad, Arthur, on the same date, Leisy wrote:

"I'm just sorry I will miss Christmas. We will have to make up for it next year. I hope you folks do something special for Christmas."

He was killed the next day.

On Dec. 2, Hunt and Leisy were serving in the Phuoc Long Province border region northwest of Saigon. On that day, Leisy was hustling with his platoon to save a small unit of American troops under withering fire from a numerically superior force entrenched in bunkers.

Upon arriving, Leisy quickly spotted what was a trap.

"The North Vietnamese were very sophisticated, cunning fighters," Hunt said. "They picked the time when they wanted to have a fight."

While racing from one position to the next to ensure his men were positioned to be most effective, Leisy spotted a sniper in a tree aiming a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade toward his radio man and others. Without even a split second to escape or shout a warning, "and with full knowledge of the consequences," Hunt said, Leisy jumped into the rocket's path, shielding the others by absorbing the explosion with his body.

It didn't kill him outright. Seeming to realize he was dying, Leisy spurned medics, instructing them to help others who could be saved. And he continued giving orders to keep his men calm and effective until the life bled out of him.

His death stunned many. The radio man whose life he saved couldn't talk about it for decades.

Leisy's friends learned of his death before Christmas. "No one was surprised that he died saving someone else's life," Weingarten said.

Meeting Hunt confirmed that.

"Having him here means that Bob will live on a little longer," Weingarten said.

"At the time of Bob's death, we tried very hard to learn about the circumstances, but it was really tough beyond what the Army released. We now have a better mental picture."

Leisy is buried in the veterans' section of Evergreen-Washelli Cemetery in North Seattle. None of his immediate family survives. Leisy's parents never were the same energetic couple after his death. Leisy's only brother died at 39 of a heart attack; his widow and their two sons live in the Midwest.

Leisy's death and subsequent memorials passed almost unnoticed in 1969 and the war-wary, divisive years afterward. The year he died saw a massive anti-war march in Washington, D.C., and first word of the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American troops.

Survivors such as Hunt came home and faded into the nation's frayed social fabric. Hunt, who now works in real estate, didn't find out for 16 years whether his Medal of Honor recommendation had been accepted.

He found out one day in the mid-1980s, while browsing in a bookstore. On a whim, he picked up a book about Medal of Honor recipients. Something told him to check the L's.

"I thought, 'I wonder ...' and opened it, and started reading the citation I had written, word for word," he said.

"It was quite moving. I bought the book, went back to the office and called in my secretary; I had to tell somebody."

In 1971, Leisy's parents quietly received the nation's highest honor for their son. A year later, they cut the ribbon to open the $1.25 million Leisy Army Reserve Center at Fort Lawton in Magnolia. It's outside Discovery Park, where he played as a boy, and not far from the house on 37th Avenue West where he grew up.

"If we had known, we would have attended," Hunt says of his old unit, which has only begun to reunite through the Internet.

What he'll take away from Seattle to share with them is a sense of the loyalty of Leisy's friends to his memory. "It's overwhelming to see what nice friends he had and what a good guy he was," Hunt says.