This Memorial Day weekend I find myself thinking again of my father’s death in Vietnam. At one time, I was upset that my father, who was killed very early in the Vietnam War (September 27, 1965), doesn’t have his name on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall. If his name were there, it would be on the second panel. Years ago, I wrote a formal appeal requesting that his name be added. My father did two tours, the first in 1962-1963 while serving as a counter-insurgency expert and weapons advisor with the US Army. In that tour, he received his second Combat Infantryman Badge while engaging the enemy in remote outposts in the Central Highlands, cut off from most support. He was lucky in that tour. The archival research for my investigative memoir about his still classified death indicated the enemy overran many US posts in those early years. His second tour was with the US State Department’s Agency for International Development (USAID), where he served as a Senior Public Safety training and managing the South Vietnamese National Police.
A minimum requirement to be on the wall is a person dying while a military service member. My father was a civilian when killed while traveling as a passenger on an Air American aircraft.
After discovering 25 years after his death the 400-plus letters he wrote my mother, I now realize why his name shouldn’t be on the wall. My father wrote in many of his letters how critical he was of the war and how both the soldiers from the US and South Vietnam were fighting it. But he emphasized in his letters that he didn’t blame them…he blamed the “high brass” (top generals) and the “Ambassador.” Too many young men, including over 33,000 18-year-olds and one soldier as young as 15, were killed during the war. The average age of the soldier killed was 23.11 years. FDR said, “War is young men dying and old men talking.” My father was so right, and history has proven him so.
James B. Wells 