Corporal Carroll Meier was drafted into the Army and sent to serve in Vietnam in February 1968.

High school friend Dale Hansen remembers Corporal Meier as, “The easiest-going big man that I’ve ever known. He always had a smile on his face. Carroll was the best-hitting, best-fielding third baseman I’ve ever seen, but also the slowest man who ever walked the earth.

The last time we saw each other, he said to me it would be the last ‘because if I’m too slow to outrun a base-hit to right field, how am I gonna outrun a bullet in Vietnam?’; and he didn’t.”