A piece of Don Sunstrom's past has been missing for 40 years.

While fighting in Vietnam, he'd gotten a fancy engraved cigarette lighter as a keepsake to remind him of a place he later would try to forget. But he lost the lighter in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Two months ago, Sunstrom, 65, who now lives in Blaine, was stunned to learn that the Zippo lighter had been found -- at the bottom of a lake in southern Wisconsin.

Scott Mitchen, a professional treasure hunter and author, found the lighter during a dive in Delavan Lake and plans to return it to Sunstrom Wednesday afternoon.

"I'm elated about getting it back," said Sunstrom.

He was 22 when he was drafted into the Army in 1968, serving in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division, known as the Screaming Eagles. After three months in country, Sunstrom spotted a vendor selling Zippo lighters engraved with the Screaming Eagles insignia. He bought it and had it engraved with his name, rank and the words: "I'm sure to go to heaven because I spent my time in hell. Viet Nam 68-69."

It was something a lot of soldiers said then, Sunstrom said.

Vietnam quickly cured him of his smoking habit. At night, the red-orange glow of a cigarette made him an easy target for snipers who shot at him. "You can see that orange coal from a long ways," he said.

"When you have a couple of snipers sniping at your cigarette butt and they come very, very close .... well," it's enough to make you quit, he said.

The cigarette lighter would serve as a "memento of my time there," Sunstrom said.

Months later, he realized the lighter was gone. "I didn't think much about it," he said. "There were other things on my mind, for god sakes. As long I had two clips of ammo in my pocket and my rifle, I was happy. ... [The lighter] didn't have any sentimental value.''

Well, at least not until he got back home. Going through his duffel bag, putting away mementoes, he remembered the lighter. "I said, oh man, I wish I would have had it. It was a token of being with the 101st, being with my unit, the time I spent over there, everything I went through."

But it was gone, and the memory of it eventually faded.

Until two months ago, when the phone rang and Mitchen told him he found the lighter.

Mitchen, of Ashland, Wis., found it during one of 100 dives he made in Delavan Lake, just north of Lake Geneva, during a three-year period in the 1980s. He scoured the lake bottom at what had been a swimming beach and a site of a lake lodge that dated back to the 1800s.

At the time, Mitchen didn't notice anything special about the blackened lighter. "It was encrusted, dirty and tarnished," he said.

It wasn't until 1991, during the long winter wait before dive season, when Mitchen came across the lighter again and cleaned it. As the engraving emerged, he realized he had something "very cool."

But tracking the owner wasn't something he thought was possible until this past year, with the help of the Internet.

When he made the call to Sunstrom, Mitchen said he wasn't sure he had the lighter's rightful owner. But when he asked the man on the other end of the line if he had once owned an engraved lighter, there was a pause.

"He started to choke up," Mitchen said. "He started to cry."

Sunstrom couldn't believe it. He had lost the lighter in Vietnam; it couldn't be at the bottom of a Wisconsin lake.

Mitchen explained that someone must have found the lighter in Vietnam and brought it back to the United States, where it was lost yet again.

Sunstrom told Mitchen: "'It was the only thing that didn't come back with me. It was the only thing that was missing.'"

He then began to tell Mitchen about some of his Vietnam days. And then he asked, "When can I get it back?"

Sunstrom said he'll be glad to place the lighter in a small box he has of his other Vietnam mementoes, including a pocket calendar that he used to cross the days off when he would finally return back home.

But Sunstrom isn't the type to gush over a long-lost lighter. "You can't have a whole lot of significance for a lighter that's been gone for 40 years,'' he said. "I'll put it in my box."

Mary Lynn Smith • 612-673-4788

øLIGHTER FROM B1