The private war of Chuck and Tom Hagel

Tom, who was then 14, remembers that "the last contact I had with him was him beating me up. Jim [the youngest Hagel brother] and I were wrestling around, knocked over the Christmas tree, and we put it back. [Dad] chased me through the house. He was drunk. He said he was going to kill himself." Tom remembers a bottle of empty sleeping pills and a bottle of whiskey by his father's bed.

The senator deflects the inference. "He may have taken some sleeping pills, but the death certificate said heart attack," he said. Their father was only 39, but Hagel says he had health problems, by no means entirely alcohol related. "He'd had rheumatic fever when he was a child and couldn't play sports and had malaria in the South Pacific, which was a terrible strain on your heart, and then he had polio when he came back, wrecked three cars, which he walked away from, except one, when he broke his back."

Chuck's final memory of his father remains haunting. After the fight on Christmas Eve, his father came down to Chuck's basement bedroom. "And I didn't want to talk to him. I was so upset with him that he ruined Christmas. I told him to 'leave me alone.' And 'Go back upstairs.' That's the last thing I said to him."

Telling the story decades later brought no emotion to Hagel's face. "At 16 you're sailing into rough waters anyway ... My dad and I were starting to have some friction. When he drank, it made it worse."

The Hagels were living in Columbus, where Charles had been a salesman for a concrete company. Their home was a one-story frame bungalow with a basketball hoop above the garage door. Across the street lived Frank Murphy and his wife, known to one and all as Babe. Their house was a second home for the Hagel boys.

"The worst day was that Christmas morning," Babe recalled, "when Jim [Hagel] came over and said, 'There's something wrong with Dad. We can't wake him up.' And then Betty and all the kids came over here. Chuck and I went over, stripped the bed, cleaned up. [Chuck] stayed right with me."

All of the Hagel boys credit their mother, Betty, for the strength they showed after their father's death. "She was the glue that held us together," Mike said. "She was 39 and she had four sons to raise." But Chuck, always the responsible firstborn, grew up instantly when his mother told him, "You have to be the man of the house now.'"

Just over six years later, both Chuck and Tom had been to Vietnam and back. Chuck returned to Nebraska first. His facial wounds, which had become infected with jungle rot, were still raw. They would take a decade to heal fully. "I could never shave with a razor blade, just electric, because I would whack off new layers of skin coming onto my face." Meanwhile, he says, he "never had a moment's rest" until his younger brother made it home too. Before his tour was up, Tom got a second Bronze Star for valor when he took out a sniper. He also got a third Purple Heart, but his deeper wounds included bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder.

When her sons made it back from the war alive, their mother's relief was enormous. Then, as if playing out some horrific Greek tragedy, death came but a few miles from home. One night in 1969, Jim, the baby of the four Hagel brothers, then 16 and a star quarterback, hit a telephone pole with his car after a party. Tom had to identify the body. After all the dead he had seen in Vietnam, Tom took it very hard.

Now ready to begin their adult lives, it was apparent that Tom and Chuck had had very different reactions both to the horror they'd seen in Vietnam and to their hardscrabble upbringing. Tom went to law school and worked as a legal aide for the poor before becoming a law professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

Chuck was a conservative. After Vietnam, Chuck graduated from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and moved to Washington to work for Republican Rep. John McCollister of Nebraska from 1971 to 1977. But his combat experience had given him an empathy for the suffering of wounded soldiers. When Ronald Reagan won the presidency, Hagel became the deputy administrator for the Veterans Administration, inspired, as he put it, to work for Vietnam veterans "who were getting a raw deal." Soon he was embroiled in an effort to oust his boss, V.A. director Robert Nimmo, who had referred to Agent Orange as nothing more than a "little teenage acne." Hagel took the battle all the way to the White House. In 1982, after Hagel lost the fight, the Los Angeles Times editorialized that the wrong man had been fired.

That's when Hagel sold a 7-year-old Buick and two insurance bonds to gamble his net worth of $5,000 with two more solvent partners on a then-untested and unknown technology. Friends laughed in derision when he held a loafer to his ear, like the character with the shoe phone in the old TV spy spoof "Get Smart," and told them, "You just wait, in 10 years people will be walking around holding these little pieces up to their ears." Hagel's company, Vanguard International, became, for a time, the second-largest cellular phone operator in the world.

According to Tom, his own experience of doing without, of being on the outside looking in, inspired him to pull for the underdog. His brother's reaction to being on the outside, Tom says, was to try to get inside. Always ambitious, Chuck wanted access to wealth and power.

Having achieved wealth, Chuck made his bid for power after returning to Nebraska in 1992 to run an investment bank. He began to plan for his political future and for the realization of his childhood dream of being a senator. "He has," said a former partner, "a Rolodex the size of an oil drum." In 1996, after Democrat Jim Exon retired from the Senate, Hagel won a landslide victory in the Republican primary and an upset victory in the general election to succeed him.

After fewer than four years in the Senate, Hagel the war hero was on George W. Bush's short list of potential running mates in 2000. Once Bush was in office, Hagel signed on to his tax cuts and other agenda items. He had already racked up a nearly perfect score for his voting record from conservative watchdog groups. Tom was troubled by how little his brother, despite his own past, seemed interested in the plight of the less fortunate. "When I hear him talk about a legislative agenda, nowhere do I hear any concerns that would have an impact on poor or lower-middle-class people."

But on the subject of their experience in Vietnam, the brothers were finding common ground. Today on Chuck Hagel's Senate office wall there is a montage of three pictures of the two brothers -- one when they were young soldiers in fatigues and two taken in 1999 when they returned to Vietnam together for the first time.

Next page: "It used to drive me nuts that Chuck couldn't see it. It seemed to me so clear that we were used"