May 20 2009
About
My name is Doug Borchert, and I am a real estate attorney from Martinez, California. I am interested in a number of different things, most currently alternative energy, applied science, literature, history, and land use law. The picture in the banner is the my summit photo on Mt. Kilimanjaro and was taken on December 8,2006 at about four o’clock in the afternoon, Tanzanian time, four days after my 64th birthdays,obviously an important event in my life. I still enjoy the outdoors and hiking around my home in Northern California.
I graduated from the University of California at Davis in the mid 1960s and spent two years as a undergraduate at the School of General Studies of Columbia University in New York City. I attended the Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of California but my road to an MBA was interrupted by something called Vietnam. I served in Quang Tri Province along the DMZ with the First Brigade of the Fifth Infantry Division as a scout dog handler.
When I got out of the service I had a difficult time finding a job in a difficult economic environment much like the one that servicemen face today. My father was a real estate broker in Sacramento and helped me get a job with a title insurance company, something I knew nothing about. I have now been in this real estate related field for over thirty years and while in my 40s I attended night law school in Ventura, CA at the Ventura College of the Law. I passed the California Bar Exam in 1986.
Blogging presents a unique way to share one’s interests and perspectives with other like minded people wherever in the world that they may be. If you come across this site and find something of interest, I hope that you will take the time to comment and perhaps direct me to additional sources of information about the things that interest me.
You are a true renaissance man, DB. I am glad our trails intersect and combine from time to time on this long strange trip.
Visiting your Blog today. Thanks for this information. Pleased to meet you.
Thank you very much for that magnificent article
good post
good post, thank you!
Hi Doug.
I am trying to locate a dog handler from the 43rd IPSD. His name is Richard Franey.
He had sent a Christmas card and letter from Vietnam to my grandmother. The envelope has 43rd IPSD 1/5 Mech.
She raised the German Shepherd that Richard handled, Bouncer 494A. No one knows how he found out where the dog came from.
She passed away recently at the age of 86 and I have the card and letter. I wanted to contact him and let him know how much that card meant to her.
My uncle also served in Vietnam with the 9th Division at Bearcat.
Any info you might have would be greatly appreciated. I checked the VDHA site he is listed but not active member.
Thanks,
Jeff Frame
Jeff,
I have sought to locate other members of the 43 rd IPSD in the past with limited success. A couple of suggestions:
1. Try the site http://www.military.com. It is a military news site, and it has a locator feature for people one knew in the service.
2. If you know or can find out from military.com what state Richard Franey came from, try the free search website, zabasearch. It will return the names of all Richard Franeys in the country or a particular state. I did the national run and came up with 37 entries. If you knew the state that would narrow the search. Many of the entries show the date of birth. I was one of the older soldiers in the unit, born in 1942, so those litsings of Richard Franeys born in the period 1945 to 1948 would be the most promising.
Good luck on your search. Thank your uncle for his service and thank you for remembering both the soldiers and the dogs.