CHANCE REUNION

It really is a small world. Two Sanders County men have crossed paths once again after attending boot camp together nearly four decades ago.

Ed Moreth is a reporter for The Sanders County Ledger. You've probably seen him at various events. He primarily covers the Plains area, but ventures all over the county for stories. Moreth is a curious guy, and will ask any person any question.

Earlier this summer, Moreth covered a ham radio field day event at Power Park in Thompson Falls. He spent the afternoon visiting with different radio operators. Grant Winkler of Noxon noticed Moreth was wearing a U.S. Coast Guard hat. Moreth started to interview Winkler, asking him how he got into ham radio operation. Winkler said he was a radio operator in the Army. Moreth mentioned that he served in the Coast Guard. Winkler had been in the Coast Guard, too.

As the two Sanders County men got to talking, they discovered they had been in boot camp at the same time, in April 1975 at Cape May, New Jersey. Moreth didn't recall what company he had been in until Winkler mentioned Kilo 93. "Even then I was thinking I remembered wrong because it would have been too coincidental," Moreth said. But when he got back to his house and retrieved his company photo, it was Kilo 93. There were no names with the picture and the name tags were unrecognizable. Moreth scanned and emailed the photo to Winkler. He emailed back saying he was the third man from the right in the top row – right next to Moreth.

"I am still amazed that I would run into a former Coastie from that long ago in a small town in Montana," Moreth stated. "The Coast Guard is the smallest of the military branches. What are the odds?" He said there are probably only a handful of former Coast Guardsmen in the area. He knows of at least one other, Sanders County Coroner Pat Barber.

"Boot camp wasn't a fun time and I didn't socialize a lot, except with two guys who were in the honor guard with me," Moreth said. "Boot camp was 10 weeks of classes, endless exercises, running everywhere, and constant yelling." He said on the last day, the honor guard was told that if they screwed up the graduation ceremony, they would have to do basic training all over again. "That weighed heavy on me, but I didn't know at the time they couldn't do that," Moreth said.

Moreth said there were no openings for photojournalism when he finished basic, but was told if he did a tour in the Coast Guard Ceremonial Honor Guard in Alexandria, Virginia, he could get any specialty he wanted. "I did two years there and got a spot at Fleet Home Town News Center in Norfolk," Moreth said.

Winkler went to aviation electronics school in Tennessee after basic training, but took a medical discharge in 1975. He wasn't done serving his country, and went into the Army in 1982. He had a 27-year career in the Army, working as a special forces medical supervisor, teaching at a medical center and traveling the world. He retired from the advanced special operations technique force at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He and his wife ended up moving to Montana in 2010. He had served at Fort Lewis in Washington and knew he wanted to move to the Northwest. He said they got lucky when they found their home in Noxon.

Winkler spent most of his time in the military in the Middle East and Africa. In all his travels, running into Moreth in Thompson Falls, Montana, was one of the most unique. "It was quite a surprise," Winkler noted. "I had the opportunity to travel all over and ran into different people, but running into Ed was by far the most interesting and unusual."

Ham radio has been a hobby for Winkler since the 1990s when he was at Fort Bragg. He has helped organize radio operators in the area and went to the Plains club's event in Thompson Falls to help support them.

Winkler and Moreth met up at Minnie's in Thompson Falls about a week after that initial meeting, spending two hours visiting and swapping sea and soldier stories. "Ed was part of the honor guard so they trained differently than the rest of the class," Winkler said. "We did a lot of catching up and remembering times when we were a lot younger."

Moreth noted that there were 29 men and three women in Kilo 93 and he never ran into any of them after graduation. That is, until 2022 when he met Winkler. The two say they plan to keep in contact.