The design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington,
D.C. sparked debate and introspection, awe and outrage, when it was proposed.
In the decades since, the black granite memorial has become
a national shrine, a healing and holy place.
But not everyone who died during the Vietnam War era is on
the Wall. And adding names is a cumbersome, bureaucratic process.
Almost immediately after the Wall was dedicated in 1982,
requests started coming in from family members of individuals who had been left
off, said Tim Tetz, director of outreach for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Fund. That group created the Wall in 1979 and assembled the original list of
names inscribed there from military records.
The requests have never stopped. “We didn’t figure almost 40
years later, we’d still be adding names,” he said.
VVMF transferred the memorial to the National Park Service
in 1983 but continues to work with that agency to maintain the memorial site.
Over the years, Tetz said, the Department of Defense put in
place criteria for inclusion on the Wall: death in the defined war zone; on a
combat mission in or out of that zone; or within 120 days of returning home
from wounds or sickness suffered in Vietnam. There is some leeway, Tetz said,
for soldiers who died from their wounds later, in some cases many years later.
DOD relies on the military branches to research the records of those submitted
for inclusion.
But those criteria exclude many of those who served,
including the 74 sailors who died when their ship, the USS Frank E. Evans, was
struck during an international training exercise in 1969 in waters outside the
Vietnam combat zone. And they don’t include the 93 Americans soldiers who died
when Flying Tigers Flight 739 plunged into the Pacific Ocean en route to
Vietnam in 1962.
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