Dan Cherry of Bowling Green tells the story of the classmates of his oldest daughter, Jill, writing notes to him while he was serving in Vietnam in 1967. Jill was 6 at the time.

Cherry remembers one student’s note like it was yesterday.

“Dear Mr. Cherry,” it began. “I hope you win the war and come home soon. And if you don’t win the war, take it like a gentleman.”

Cherry, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general and executive vice president of Aviation Heritage Park off Three Springs Road, has aided in the healing of thousands of Vietnam veterans through the publication of his book, “My Enemy My Friend,” in 2009 and the talks he and Lt. Nguyen Hong My hold across the country about their aerial dogfight 15,000 feet in the air near Hanoi, North Vietnam, on April 16, 1972, when Cherry shot down My.

Cherry recently returned from a big aviation show in Oshkosh, Wis., where he and My told their story to another appreciative audience. Cherry said the message resonates with so many people, particularly women, who he said respond to its themes of reconciliation, letting go and forgiveness. Cherry hit My’s MiG-21 with a missile during the five-minute battle. My had to parachute to safety, breaking his back in the process. After years, they met on a Vietnam television show face to face for the first time and have become friends.

They do the presentations with the aid of an interpreter. One presentation in 2009 was for 700 people at the General Electric Lecture Series in the IMAX Theater at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

My told Cherry during a visit to Bowling Green in April 2009 that he was not pleased with the title of Cherry’s book because he doesn’t consider Cherry the enemy.

“We were just soldiers doing the best we could for our countries during a very difficult time,” My says on page 93 of the book’s second edition.

Cherry said those presentations, and continued cooperation between the United States and Vietnam will set right previous attitudes.

“It’s time to move on,” Cherry said, adding, “Vietnam veterans have trouble bringing closure to their war experiences.”

Vietnam’s entrepreneurs recognize the economic potential of an enlarging relationship with America, Cherry said.

With the median age of the Vietnamese population being 28, many don’t remember the war, he said. They see Americans as the tourists that they are.

“It has become very popular for Vietnam veterans to go back,” said Cherry, who went back in 2008. “I felt a really, really warm welcome. The people were so friendly to us.”

Cherry said he’s never been ashamed of his military uniform, but when he worked at the U.S. Pentagon in the 1970s, he wasn’t allowed to wear his uniform to work in light of the anti-war climate of those days.

Cherry entered the U.S. Air Force in 1959 as an aviation cadet and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1960. He flew 295 combat missions and held the positions of commander and leader of the Air Force Thunderbirds, commander of Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, inspector general of the Pacific Air Forces, commander of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing and commander of the Air Force Recruiting Service. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star with one oak leaf cluster, the Legion of Merit with two oak leaf clusters, the Distinguished Flying Cross with nine oak leaf clusters and the Air Medal with 34 oak leaf clusters. He is the former Secretary of the Kentucky Justice Cabinet and was inducted into the Kentucky Aviation Hall of Fame in 2000.

“I’ve never felt any regret, any remorse, of what I’ve done,” Cherry said during a recent interview with the Daily News. “I was delighted that (Hong My) survived and that friendship is important to me. I want the story of our friendship to be an example for our two countries.”

Cherry’s and others’ efforts to move on past the Vietnam War are important. Vietnam and Korea were America’s first wars in which the United States was not the victor and those who fought in the two conflicts were treated differently from their fellow soldiers who served during World Wars I and II.

A social scientist studying the aftermath of the Korean War links it with Vietnam in an article that appeared in the Journal of Social History during the summer of 2001.

Interest in the Vietnam War raised the profile of the Korean War, according to Judith Keene of the University of Sidney, who wrote “Lost to Public Commemoration: American Veterans of the

“Forgotten’ Korean War.”

“The movement to erect the Korean War Veterans Memorial emerged in the powerful wake generated by the movement to inaugurate on Nov. 13, 1982, the memorial to honor Vietnam Veterans,” Keene notes. “The link between the Vietnam memorial and the successful achievement of a commemorative site to mark the Korean War is clear.”

On July 27, 1995, President Bill Clinton opened the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., Keene writes. It was 45 years to the day of the first arrival of U.S. forces in Korea and 42 years to the day on which the Korean War Armistice was signed, she said.

“During the preceding four decades, Korea had been invisible in the national pantheon of war commemoration,” Keene notes.

Not only was Korea invisible, it was a time when Communist hysteria painted the returning soldiers with the same Red brush as U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., had wielded in a speech in Wheeling, W.Va., in February 1950, when he held up a paper and stated that he had names of people in the U.S. State Department who were Communist sympathizers.

Korea lasted from 1950 to 1953. “The popular imagery of the Korean War, within the United States, was of the American soldier as prisoner of war, who was defeated, emaciated and possibly a brainwashed Communist sympathizer,” Keene wrote, adding, “The silence of many Korean War veterans, especially prisoners of war, can be attributed to the fact that after the return home their participation in the Korean War became associated with feelings of shame and humiliation.”

Keene notes that an event or piece of the past may be transformed from the state of being “unnoticed” to that of a “troubling absence” and finally to become a “significant omission.”

The indignity extended to the grave for the Korean War veterans.

“Headstones placed over American soldiers killed in Korea indicated name, rank and date of death but not that they had lost their lives in the Korean War,” Keene notes.

Through letters, we can sense how a soldier in Korea dealt with his tour of duty.