thedrifter
04-30-06, 08:32 AM
Posted on Sun, Apr. 30, 2006
BELATED HONORS
Some officials wrongly reject requests for listing names on Wall because of confusion over criteria
By CHRIS VAUGHN
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER
Marine Pfc. Hans Lorenz lay in a hospital bed almost completely shrouded in bandages soaked in silver nitrate, the liquid dripping off his bed and staining the floor black.
It was a miracle he'd ever gotten that far, from a base near Da Nang, where a gasoline explosion rocked the April night, all the way to a naval hospital in Oakland, Calif. He had no skin left on 80 percent of his body.
Eleven days after Lorenz arrived in California from his base in Vietnam, bacterial infections ravaged his internal organs, shutting them down one by one. At 2 p.m., April 26, 1966, he died of cardiac arrest.
Flown in from the war zone in Vietnam, Lorenz was never considered a Vietnam War casualty by the Defense Department, and as a result did not appear on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., when it was unveiled in 1982.
Over the years, his mother and her friends made entreaties to the Marine Corps for approval to have his name added. Each time, the Marine Corps denied her.
He was ineligible for the Wall because he died in an accident, and, as she was told, the Wall is only for those killed in combat.
Only that's wrong. Dead wrong.
The Wall was never intended to exclude men and women who died of nonhostile injuries during the years of the war. Indeed, the Wall already bears the names of 10,500 people who died with no help from the enemy.
But because of what appears to be a misinterpretation of the Wall's criteria, dozens of eligible names may have been wrongly denied permanency on the Wall, according to the expert who discovered the problem. It also means that the services are not always consistent in their decisions, meaning that what will get a soldier on the Wall won't get a Marine on it.
The Defense Department has not asked for a thorough review of the hundreds of inquiries made over the past two decades, nor would almost anyone in a leadership position even agree to be interviewed, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a longtime Fort Worth resident.
However, the Navy and Marine Corps agreed to conduct their own reviews after questions were raised.
"I truly hope that this is an anomaly," said Michael Wardlaw, director of the Navy Casualty Assistance Division at Navy Personnel Command. "But I want to get everything out in the open on this."
Very few people intimately involved in Vietnam-related issues knew that some of the military services were excluding noncombat casualties.
One of the principal creators of the Wall didn't know. Neither did the national president of the Vietnam Veterans of America or two past presidents of the American Gold Star Mothers.
Based on Star-Telegram interviews and statements from officials with the services and the Defense Department, the rules have not changed since they were written in the months after the dedication of the Wall.
What appears to be happening is that employees in some of the services' casualty offices are confused about the criteria for deaths during and after the war, and no one in the Defense Department is reviewing the rejection letters to ensure the right decision was made. The result is letters like the one Linda Lorenz received in 2004 from A. Hammers, head of the Marines' casualty section in Quantico, Va.:
"The consensus was that the criteria should not be expanded beyond the original, i.e., to recognize those service members who died as a result of combat with enemy forces. ... His death was not attributable to combat wounds, therefore he is ineligible to have his name added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial."
After nearly 20 years, though, Lorenz's mother finally got the letter she wanted.
Alerted by a dogged Vietnam researcher in Maryland and his congressman, the Defense Department intervened in her son's case and gave its approval in February for Lorenz's name to go up on the Wall.
Maj. Michael Shavers, a spokesman in the Defense Department, called the Lorenz case an "oversight."
"After coordinated review with the Marine Corps ... this case was determined to be an omission," he wrote in an e-mail to the Star-Telegram.
The name of Pfc. Hans J.R. Lorenz will be engraved in time for next month's Memorial Day service in Washington.
"That was the last thing I could do for him," Linda Lorenz said from her apartment in west Fort Worth. "Now it's done."
Four days after the Defense Department wrote to Linda Lorenz with her good news, though, the Navy sent a rejection letter to another family.
Fireman Apprentice Joseph G. Krywicki, killed Sept. 13, 1966, in a friendly-fire accident in a guard tower in Vietnam, was ineligible for the Wall, the Navy told his family in the letter.
"His death was correctly listed ... as a non-battle death, which precludes inscription of his name on the VVM," the letter reads. "The names inscribed on the VVM are intended to afford special recognition to those whose deaths were Vietnam-related combat casualties."
John Rowan, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America who served as a linguist for the Air Force in Vietnam, could hardly believe what the military is telling families. He called it "untrue" and "petty."
"I don't know where they're getting this from," said Rowan, a retired New York City employee. "That's not what the Wall is about."
'Where is my son's name?'
The Wall, formally known as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, became one of the capital's most visited sites as soon as it was dedicated in 1982, when the Vietnam War was still a painful and recent chapter in American history.
More than 3 million people, many of whom still leave personal items at the base of the black granite, visit the Wall every year, and millions more see the smaller, traveling version.
The memorial originated in the late 1970s with a group of Vietnam veterans led by Jan Scruggs, who formed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to raise the $8 million necessary to build it.
Robert Doubek, another of the earliest leaders of the memorial fund, was put in charge of actually making the design happen. He obtained a list of casualties -- 57,707 of them -- from the Defense Department. But a list that long was bound to present problems, and it did.
Doubek, who left the memorial fund in 1983, said he combed the Defense Department list and cross-checked the names with the individual services' lists of casualties.
In some cases, Doubek added names that never appeared on the Defense Department record. Among them were 160 names of Air Force personnel who died in crashes in Thailand, 40 soldiers who appeared only on the Army's list and seven Marines.
"As soon as the Wall was dedicated, the list was opened for scrutiny," Doubek said. "People were saying, 'Where is my son's name?' We began to get into the problem of guys who had died later of their wounds back in the States. At this point, we were getting a lot of pressure from all over the place.
"Frankly, I felt that it wasn't up to me or Jan Scruggs to determine who died in the Vietnam War," he continued. "We were there to establish a memorial."
Scruggs, who still leads the memorial fund, declined to be interviewed for this story.
The Wall is now under the control of the National Park Service. But it is the military services and the Defense Department that decide which names can be added. Since 1982, 310 service members have been added, and more will join them this year.
At no point, Doubek said, did anyone in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund filter out noncombat deaths. Some generals suggested it at the time, but Doubek said the idea was rejected.
The Wall, in fact, contains more than 10,500 names of men and women who died of noncombat injuries -- airplane crashes, vehicle accidents, electrocutions, drownings, suicides, homicides and other causes.
A decades-long quest
Linda Lorenz moved from Canada to Fort Worth a few weeks after Marines came up to Canada to bury Hans.
"I had the feeling I wanted to run," she said. "I had to leave."
She got a job as the chief photographer at the Amon Carter Museum, a position she held until she retired in 1990.
When the Wall was built, she assumed that Hans was on it. But when she leafed through a book sometime in the mid-1980s, she discovered that he wasn't.
It started a years-long slow burn in her, one that the consistent answers she received from the Marines only fed.
"This memorial is a special tribute to those who were killed in combat or in a combat-related situation or who remain missing," wrote David Smith, deputy director of the Marines' Human Resources Division, in 1990. "Consequently, an individual's name cannot be inscribed on the memorial unless his death occurred as the direct result or aftermath of wounds received in combat."
For a period of years, she dropped the subject because she didn't want to hear about it anymore. After her 2004 rejection, she vowed to never put herself through the ordeal again. She kept her end of the bargain.
But Bruce Swander, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Maryland, picked up the case on his own last year as part of a massive research project into Vietnam casualties.
A few years ago, he discovered that Air Force Staff Sgt. Donald Carson, who died in a 1963 plane accident, did not appear on the Wall, even though the rest of the crew did.
The Air Force quickly looked into the matter. Within a month, it submitted his name for addition to the Wall in 2003.
A year later, the Air Force approved Capt. Edward Brudno, a former prisoner of war who committed suicide after returning to the U.S., as an addition to the Wall.
Two years later, Swander uncovered Lorenz's name and Krywicki's name, assuming that they too would be added without question. No one was more surprised than he was to find out they'd been denied by the Navy and Marine Corps.
Swander asked his congressman, Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, a Vietnam veteran and Maryland Republican, to intercede with the Defense Department when he didn't get the answers he wanted from the Marines. He said the Marines had stood firm on their decision and "cut off all communications with me."
"In that briefing, I used the Lorenz case as an example," Swander said. "I never went to specifically get Lorenz on the Wall. I wanted to get to the bottom of what all the services were doing.
"Yet when the DoD responded to Congressman Gilchrest, they responded by only reversing the Lorenz case, something I didn't even ask for, instead of answering the pointed question of 'What is going on here with all of the services?'"
He is researching more than a dozen other names that don't appear on the Wall, trying to find out if the families have received rejection letters over the years.
There are most certainly more cases of accidental deaths left off the Wall, Swander said, particularly from the war's early years when he said the reporting of deaths was more discretionary.
"If they routinely denied [Lorenz] because of nonhostile causes, I have no doubt that the services have been doing this on a regular basis," he said.
Misunderstood criteria
Mary Krywicki never knew her brother-in-law, Joseph, who died in Vietnam before she married his brother.
Joseph's parents are dead now, too, and his brother never accepted that Joseph wasn't listed on the Wall like he thought he deserved. Mary took up the cause, believing that there must have been a mistake even with the February denial.
"They need to correct it," she said from their home in Holton, Mich. "A person's got to fight for it if they want to have it done."
The Navy, however, did correct the problem.
Shortly after an interview with the Star-Telegram this month, Wardlaw, the director of the Navy Casualty Assistance Division, called Mary Krywicki to reverse the earlier decision. He sent a letter of apology to her and a corrected letter to her congressman.
"I'm embarrassed that we didn't do this right the first time," Wardlaw said.
Wardlaw also ordered an immediate review of past denials to see if others have been wrongly rejected.
Confusion remains commonplace regarding the Wall's criteria, especially among those who have been given responsibility for deciding who gets on it.
"The policy is that only those persons who died of a combat injury suffered in Vietnam may have their names added to the Memorial," Lisa Gough, spokeswoman for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, wrote to the Star-Telegram.
That is almost precisely what the letters to the Krywicki and Lorenz families stated.
But Shavers, the spokesman at the Defense Department, wrote in his e-mail that the combat-only rule applies only to "veterans who are currently dying from wounds sustained in Vietnam."
He said the criteria do not exclude service members who died of their injuries -- whatever the cause -- during the Vietnam War. The combat-only rule was meant to exclude veterans who died years later of Agent Orange or post-traumatic-stress suicides, he said.
Lt. Col. Michael Worth, chief of the Army's mortuary affairs branch in Alexandria, Va., said the Army does not exclude nonhostile deaths from the war years.
"There are instances on the Wall who died under those circumstances," he said, including the addition last year of a soldier injured in a friendly-fire incident who died in 1971. "We didn't make the distinction between hostile or nonhostile."
That inconsistency and varying understanding of the rules is at the root of the problem, Swander said.
"The misunderstanding has been passed on as personnel move in and out of the casualty branches," Swander said. "The problem has been perpetuated. But it really lies with the management to understand those rules and ensure they're followed. In the meantime, they put people like Mrs. Lorenz through this hell."
Because of the Lorenz case, the Marine Corps is planning a review of past requests involving service members injured in accidents in Vietnam who died in other locations, according to written responses provided by Connie Pitt in the Marines' Casualty Assistance Branch in Quantico, Va.
Pitt also said that those issues will be raised at the next meeting of the Casualty Advisory Board, which meets three to four times a year with representatives of all the services.
Like virtually everyone contacted for this story, Ann Herd, a past president of the American Gold Star Mothers who lives in Dallas, could not believe that the military was denying people who died during the Vietnam War, no matter the causes.
"There shouldn't be any question about it," she said.
Herd's son, Ronald, is listed on the Wall. He was killed by a bullet fired by a fellow soldier while on patrol.
"I just don't understand," she said. "If a mother gives her son in service to her country, that young man deserves all that he is supposed to get. It hurts families deeply to have to fight for what their sons deserve."
IN THE KNOW
Criteria for the Wall
The Defense Department and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund established these criteria for engraving a service member's name on the Wall:
Died in Vietnam between Nov. 1, 1955, and Dec. 31, 1960.
Died in the defined combat zone on or after Jan. 1, 1961.
Died as a result of wounds sustained in the combat zone.
Died while participating in, or providing direct support to, a combat mission or immediately en route to or returning from a target within the defined combat zone.
SOURCE: Military services
Ellie
BELATED HONORS
Some officials wrongly reject requests for listing names on Wall because of confusion over criteria
By CHRIS VAUGHN
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER
Marine Pfc. Hans Lorenz lay in a hospital bed almost completely shrouded in bandages soaked in silver nitrate, the liquid dripping off his bed and staining the floor black.
It was a miracle he'd ever gotten that far, from a base near Da Nang, where a gasoline explosion rocked the April night, all the way to a naval hospital in Oakland, Calif. He had no skin left on 80 percent of his body.
Eleven days after Lorenz arrived in California from his base in Vietnam, bacterial infections ravaged his internal organs, shutting them down one by one. At 2 p.m., April 26, 1966, he died of cardiac arrest.
Flown in from the war zone in Vietnam, Lorenz was never considered a Vietnam War casualty by the Defense Department, and as a result did not appear on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., when it was unveiled in 1982.
Over the years, his mother and her friends made entreaties to the Marine Corps for approval to have his name added. Each time, the Marine Corps denied her.
He was ineligible for the Wall because he died in an accident, and, as she was told, the Wall is only for those killed in combat.
Only that's wrong. Dead wrong.
The Wall was never intended to exclude men and women who died of nonhostile injuries during the years of the war. Indeed, the Wall already bears the names of 10,500 people who died with no help from the enemy.
But because of what appears to be a misinterpretation of the Wall's criteria, dozens of eligible names may have been wrongly denied permanency on the Wall, according to the expert who discovered the problem. It also means that the services are not always consistent in their decisions, meaning that what will get a soldier on the Wall won't get a Marine on it.
The Defense Department has not asked for a thorough review of the hundreds of inquiries made over the past two decades, nor would almost anyone in a leadership position even agree to be interviewed, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a longtime Fort Worth resident.
However, the Navy and Marine Corps agreed to conduct their own reviews after questions were raised.
"I truly hope that this is an anomaly," said Michael Wardlaw, director of the Navy Casualty Assistance Division at Navy Personnel Command. "But I want to get everything out in the open on this."
Very few people intimately involved in Vietnam-related issues knew that some of the military services were excluding noncombat casualties.
One of the principal creators of the Wall didn't know. Neither did the national president of the Vietnam Veterans of America or two past presidents of the American Gold Star Mothers.
Based on Star-Telegram interviews and statements from officials with the services and the Defense Department, the rules have not changed since they were written in the months after the dedication of the Wall.
What appears to be happening is that employees in some of the services' casualty offices are confused about the criteria for deaths during and after the war, and no one in the Defense Department is reviewing the rejection letters to ensure the right decision was made. The result is letters like the one Linda Lorenz received in 2004 from A. Hammers, head of the Marines' casualty section in Quantico, Va.:
"The consensus was that the criteria should not be expanded beyond the original, i.e., to recognize those service members who died as a result of combat with enemy forces. ... His death was not attributable to combat wounds, therefore he is ineligible to have his name added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial."
After nearly 20 years, though, Lorenz's mother finally got the letter she wanted.
Alerted by a dogged Vietnam researcher in Maryland and his congressman, the Defense Department intervened in her son's case and gave its approval in February for Lorenz's name to go up on the Wall.
Maj. Michael Shavers, a spokesman in the Defense Department, called the Lorenz case an "oversight."
"After coordinated review with the Marine Corps ... this case was determined to be an omission," he wrote in an e-mail to the Star-Telegram.
The name of Pfc. Hans J.R. Lorenz will be engraved in time for next month's Memorial Day service in Washington.
"That was the last thing I could do for him," Linda Lorenz said from her apartment in west Fort Worth. "Now it's done."
Four days after the Defense Department wrote to Linda Lorenz with her good news, though, the Navy sent a rejection letter to another family.
Fireman Apprentice Joseph G. Krywicki, killed Sept. 13, 1966, in a friendly-fire accident in a guard tower in Vietnam, was ineligible for the Wall, the Navy told his family in the letter.
"His death was correctly listed ... as a non-battle death, which precludes inscription of his name on the VVM," the letter reads. "The names inscribed on the VVM are intended to afford special recognition to those whose deaths were Vietnam-related combat casualties."
John Rowan, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America who served as a linguist for the Air Force in Vietnam, could hardly believe what the military is telling families. He called it "untrue" and "petty."
"I don't know where they're getting this from," said Rowan, a retired New York City employee. "That's not what the Wall is about."
'Where is my son's name?'
The Wall, formally known as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, became one of the capital's most visited sites as soon as it was dedicated in 1982, when the Vietnam War was still a painful and recent chapter in American history.
More than 3 million people, many of whom still leave personal items at the base of the black granite, visit the Wall every year, and millions more see the smaller, traveling version.
The memorial originated in the late 1970s with a group of Vietnam veterans led by Jan Scruggs, who formed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to raise the $8 million necessary to build it.
Robert Doubek, another of the earliest leaders of the memorial fund, was put in charge of actually making the design happen. He obtained a list of casualties -- 57,707 of them -- from the Defense Department. But a list that long was bound to present problems, and it did.
Doubek, who left the memorial fund in 1983, said he combed the Defense Department list and cross-checked the names with the individual services' lists of casualties.
In some cases, Doubek added names that never appeared on the Defense Department record. Among them were 160 names of Air Force personnel who died in crashes in Thailand, 40 soldiers who appeared only on the Army's list and seven Marines.
"As soon as the Wall was dedicated, the list was opened for scrutiny," Doubek said. "People were saying, 'Where is my son's name?' We began to get into the problem of guys who had died later of their wounds back in the States. At this point, we were getting a lot of pressure from all over the place.
"Frankly, I felt that it wasn't up to me or Jan Scruggs to determine who died in the Vietnam War," he continued. "We were there to establish a memorial."
Scruggs, who still leads the memorial fund, declined to be interviewed for this story.
The Wall is now under the control of the National Park Service. But it is the military services and the Defense Department that decide which names can be added. Since 1982, 310 service members have been added, and more will join them this year.
At no point, Doubek said, did anyone in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund filter out noncombat deaths. Some generals suggested it at the time, but Doubek said the idea was rejected.
The Wall, in fact, contains more than 10,500 names of men and women who died of noncombat injuries -- airplane crashes, vehicle accidents, electrocutions, drownings, suicides, homicides and other causes.
A decades-long quest
Linda Lorenz moved from Canada to Fort Worth a few weeks after Marines came up to Canada to bury Hans.
"I had the feeling I wanted to run," she said. "I had to leave."
She got a job as the chief photographer at the Amon Carter Museum, a position she held until she retired in 1990.
When the Wall was built, she assumed that Hans was on it. But when she leafed through a book sometime in the mid-1980s, she discovered that he wasn't.
It started a years-long slow burn in her, one that the consistent answers she received from the Marines only fed.
"This memorial is a special tribute to those who were killed in combat or in a combat-related situation or who remain missing," wrote David Smith, deputy director of the Marines' Human Resources Division, in 1990. "Consequently, an individual's name cannot be inscribed on the memorial unless his death occurred as the direct result or aftermath of wounds received in combat."
For a period of years, she dropped the subject because she didn't want to hear about it anymore. After her 2004 rejection, she vowed to never put herself through the ordeal again. She kept her end of the bargain.
But Bruce Swander, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Maryland, picked up the case on his own last year as part of a massive research project into Vietnam casualties.
A few years ago, he discovered that Air Force Staff Sgt. Donald Carson, who died in a 1963 plane accident, did not appear on the Wall, even though the rest of the crew did.
The Air Force quickly looked into the matter. Within a month, it submitted his name for addition to the Wall in 2003.
A year later, the Air Force approved Capt. Edward Brudno, a former prisoner of war who committed suicide after returning to the U.S., as an addition to the Wall.
Two years later, Swander uncovered Lorenz's name and Krywicki's name, assuming that they too would be added without question. No one was more surprised than he was to find out they'd been denied by the Navy and Marine Corps.
Swander asked his congressman, Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, a Vietnam veteran and Maryland Republican, to intercede with the Defense Department when he didn't get the answers he wanted from the Marines. He said the Marines had stood firm on their decision and "cut off all communications with me."
"In that briefing, I used the Lorenz case as an example," Swander said. "I never went to specifically get Lorenz on the Wall. I wanted to get to the bottom of what all the services were doing.
"Yet when the DoD responded to Congressman Gilchrest, they responded by only reversing the Lorenz case, something I didn't even ask for, instead of answering the pointed question of 'What is going on here with all of the services?'"
He is researching more than a dozen other names that don't appear on the Wall, trying to find out if the families have received rejection letters over the years.
There are most certainly more cases of accidental deaths left off the Wall, Swander said, particularly from the war's early years when he said the reporting of deaths was more discretionary.
"If they routinely denied [Lorenz] because of nonhostile causes, I have no doubt that the services have been doing this on a regular basis," he said.
Misunderstood criteria
Mary Krywicki never knew her brother-in-law, Joseph, who died in Vietnam before she married his brother.
Joseph's parents are dead now, too, and his brother never accepted that Joseph wasn't listed on the Wall like he thought he deserved. Mary took up the cause, believing that there must have been a mistake even with the February denial.
"They need to correct it," she said from their home in Holton, Mich. "A person's got to fight for it if they want to have it done."
The Navy, however, did correct the problem.
Shortly after an interview with the Star-Telegram this month, Wardlaw, the director of the Navy Casualty Assistance Division, called Mary Krywicki to reverse the earlier decision. He sent a letter of apology to her and a corrected letter to her congressman.
"I'm embarrassed that we didn't do this right the first time," Wardlaw said.
Wardlaw also ordered an immediate review of past denials to see if others have been wrongly rejected.
Confusion remains commonplace regarding the Wall's criteria, especially among those who have been given responsibility for deciding who gets on it.
"The policy is that only those persons who died of a combat injury suffered in Vietnam may have their names added to the Memorial," Lisa Gough, spokeswoman for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, wrote to the Star-Telegram.
That is almost precisely what the letters to the Krywicki and Lorenz families stated.
But Shavers, the spokesman at the Defense Department, wrote in his e-mail that the combat-only rule applies only to "veterans who are currently dying from wounds sustained in Vietnam."
He said the criteria do not exclude service members who died of their injuries -- whatever the cause -- during the Vietnam War. The combat-only rule was meant to exclude veterans who died years later of Agent Orange or post-traumatic-stress suicides, he said.
Lt. Col. Michael Worth, chief of the Army's mortuary affairs branch in Alexandria, Va., said the Army does not exclude nonhostile deaths from the war years.
"There are instances on the Wall who died under those circumstances," he said, including the addition last year of a soldier injured in a friendly-fire incident who died in 1971. "We didn't make the distinction between hostile or nonhostile."
That inconsistency and varying understanding of the rules is at the root of the problem, Swander said.
"The misunderstanding has been passed on as personnel move in and out of the casualty branches," Swander said. "The problem has been perpetuated. But it really lies with the management to understand those rules and ensure they're followed. In the meantime, they put people like Mrs. Lorenz through this hell."
Because of the Lorenz case, the Marine Corps is planning a review of past requests involving service members injured in accidents in Vietnam who died in other locations, according to written responses provided by Connie Pitt in the Marines' Casualty Assistance Branch in Quantico, Va.
Pitt also said that those issues will be raised at the next meeting of the Casualty Advisory Board, which meets three to four times a year with representatives of all the services.
Like virtually everyone contacted for this story, Ann Herd, a past president of the American Gold Star Mothers who lives in Dallas, could not believe that the military was denying people who died during the Vietnam War, no matter the causes.
"There shouldn't be any question about it," she said.
Herd's son, Ronald, is listed on the Wall. He was killed by a bullet fired by a fellow soldier while on patrol.
"I just don't understand," she said. "If a mother gives her son in service to her country, that young man deserves all that he is supposed to get. It hurts families deeply to have to fight for what their sons deserve."
IN THE KNOW
Criteria for the Wall
The Defense Department and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund established these criteria for engraving a service member's name on the Wall:
Died in Vietnam between Nov. 1, 1955, and Dec. 31, 1960.
Died in the defined combat zone on or after Jan. 1, 1961.
Died as a result of wounds sustained in the combat zone.
Died while participating in, or providing direct support to, a combat mission or immediately en route to or returning from a target within the defined combat zone.
SOURCE: Military services
Ellie