CASPER — It’s 1968. Hank Schwartzbauer boards a plane from Los Angeles to Billings. He’s a U.S. Navy sailor on furlough from the Vietnam War.

It’s one of the many flights he took during his deployment. He can’t remember if he had a layover in Denver or if it was direct. He doesn’t know the time of year. But he will always remember looking down and seeing that shiny, gold Zippo lighter.

He bent down to pick it up. Turning it over in his hands, he saw engraved on one side the words 199th INF. BDE. and SP4 Ronald R. Roe on the other.

“In that moment that I found it, I knew, in my mind, and in my heart, I knew that immediately I wanted it to be returned to him,” he said.

Schwartzbauer has reached out to various veteran organizations in an effort to return the lighter to its owner or next of kin. He has had no success. All the avenues he’s looked down have proven to be dead ends.

Schwartzbauer joined the Navy on Aug. 25, 1965 at the age of 18. He liked the uniforms. He served on the USS Navasota (A0106), an oil tanker, until his honorable discharge on March 19, 1968.

While he didn’t see direct combat, he watched as coffins were airlifted home. He knew other soldiers who committed suicide, watched people get lost at sea and ships collide. Death surrounded him, and so did fear.

“I know one time we were refueling an aircraft carrier. And they were bringing coffins up from below, to load onto planes to ship back to the United States … I was manning a refueling station and saw these coffins. And several questions came to mind,” he said. “One of them is, ‘I wonder who they are. I wonder where they’re from. I wonder if I knew any of them. And why are we here? And why the hell do they have to die?’ And that put a chip on my shoulder.”

Following his discharge, he wanted to put all that death and suffering behind him.

Life moved on. He did, too. He went back to Montana and became a painter. He stayed in Billings working and doing odd jobs to make ends meet.

He came to Casper in 1998 to see a friend from the past and never left.

He volunteered with various veteran organizations to honor those who passed, ensuring no one was left behind or forgotten.

By all accounts, Schwartzbauer has led a quiet, normal life. Yet every couple of years, that shiny lighter would pop back into his head. Through the moves and deaths of his parents, he lost all keepsakes from his time in the Navy, only holding it in his memories. The lighter was even misplaced for 30 years.

It wasn’t until one day last summer during a rummage sale after his brother died did that little gold lighter reappear. He was selling the whole Zippo collection when a buyer asked if he could only have Ronald’s.

“It could have been sold. An individual asked me how much I wanted for that lighter,” Schwartzbauer said. “And upon discovering that that’s where that lighter was, I knew again that that lighter was not going to be sold or given to anyone other than the rightful owner.”

And so the search started again.

Schwartzbauer reached out to a veteran advocate at the VA who steered him to someone connected with veteran organizations. But that was another dead end.

He then contacted the Star-Tribune in an effort to get the word out and try to find the lighter’s owner.

“(I’ll feel) just the gratification of knowing that I did the right thing and gave it to the right person or getting back to the rightful owner,” he said.

He wants to make sure that Ronald or his next of kin know that he isn’t forgotten; he wants to make sure that they feel what he has spent his entire life trying to make others feel: respected.

Mr. Schwartzbauer has asked for the public’s help in locating the owner of the lighter. If you know the owner or his next of kin, or have ties to an organization that may help, please reach out to editors@trib.com.