Authors: Greg Dinallo
N
ames. An entire wall of dead GIs’ names.
I don’t know a whole lot about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but I do know that Jan Scruggs, the veteran who started it all, was into the names. I remember reading that he woke up in the middle of the night terrified they’d all be forgotten. He tried to drown his fears in a bottle of whiskey, and when that didn’t work, he decided he was going to put the name of every GI who was killed in Vietnam on a memorial to make sure they weren’t. He pulled it off.
But one name is missing.
Now, the mystical force that was driving him seems to be driving me. It kept me up half the night.
The travel alarm reads 6:21.
Nancy is still sleeping. I slip out of bed and cross to the window of our hotel room. The Washington Monument is shrouded in mist, its red warning beacon winking eerily in the darkness. Below, a few people bundled against the cold are crossing Lafayette Square on two long paths that converge on the White House.
I can’t help thinking about the decisions that were made there, decisions made by four Presidents to send young Americans into battle, decisions responsible for those fifty-eight thousand names and for my frustrating case of insomnia. I don’t know how long I’ve been standing at the window when I feel Nancy beside me.
She wraps her arms around my waist and hugs me in silence. “It’s really gotten hold of you again, hasn’t it?” she finally whispers.
I let out a long breath and nod. “The guy died for his country, babe. His name should be on the Memorial. I just can’t get it out of my head.”
“I think you need to get home,” she says, knowing that just being in the modern, light-filled house built on a hilltop in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu always brightens my mood.
“Maybe,” I say with a solemn shrug. “I’m sorry, I just can’t help wondering about him, you know? Was he an FNG, a lifer? Black, white, brown? Married? Did he have kids, a cat and a dog? Parents? The questions just keep coming. I mean, if my parents weren’t notified, who was? What happened to his body? Who was it sent to for burial?”
“I don’t know, Cal,” Nancy says, almost mouthing the words. She has a look in her eyes that I haven’t seen in years; a look of poignant sadness, bordering on fear, that tells me she’s concerned I’m being dragged back into the past, into the ugliness I worked so hard to overcome. “Are you sure they’re your questions to answer?”
“No. No, I’m not. But it’s my name. So who else if not me?”
“Well, yesterday the clerk said he was going to report it to the Army. They made the mistake; maybe you should let them handle it.”
“You’re right. I probably should,” I reply defensively. “Trouble is it doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m feeling. I mean, I just have this . . . this . . . compulsion to find out who he was myself.”
Though I don’t have the answers, I don’t have to run a probability analysis on my computer to know that if another soldier ended up with my dog tags, he was most likely killed on the same day and in the same province where I was wounded. In descending order of probability, he was a member of my squad, platoon, or company, or other units deployed in the area. It’s a basic data analysis problem: assemble a complete roster of names, eliminate those on the wall and those who’d survived, narrowing the list to a few men, preferably one who somehow wasn’t officially accounted for.
“You have the name of the clerk?” I ask, deciding the Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial data base would be as good a place as any to start.
“Our flight leaves at eleven,” she cautions as she fetches her notebook.
It’s our last day in Washington. I’d forgotten. It’ll be hours before FVVM offices open. I spend the time entering Nancy’s data into my laptop, then list as many names of GIs in my company as I can remember. At 8:45 I go downstairs to get a taxi. Nancy stays at the hotel to pack our things.
Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial headquarters is on M St. NW about a mile and half east of the Hay Adams in a four-story brownstone converted into office space. The small staff works in simply furnished surroundings where an almost churchlike quiet prevails.
The clerk, a soft-spoken man in his early forties with thinning hair, seems uncomfortable at being face-to-face with the latest member of the group I’ve crudely nicknamed The Living Dead. I brief him on my time/place parameters and ask if he has any ideas how I might go about identifying the soldier.
“Well, I’ve notified the Army Casualty Office,” he replies, confirming what he told Nancy. “By the way, in case you’re wondering about having your name taken off the wall, we looked into it when we found out about the others. Must’ve been three, maybe four years ago. But nobody’s been able to figure out a way to do it without defacing the Memorial or replacing the panels.”
“I’m more interested in adding one,” I say a little too sharply, shifting into management mode. “I need to find out which guys in my company were killed on a certain day and in a certain province, but I don’t have very many names. Are you programmed to do multitarget searches?”
“Sure are. Company, date, and province is all I need. I can check every company that was in the province on that day, if you like.”
“Yes, I like,” I reply, my mood brightening as I rattle off the information—G Company, 18 April 1968, Champasak Province—and he begins entering it.
“It’s a brand-new program,” he explains while the computer does its work. “We put it together to help veterans, families, and friends keep in touch. That’s what we call it, ‘In Touch.’ ” He glances at the screen and types something, then looks up and says, “Spent some time in Laos, huh?”
“Yeah, creating traffic jams on the Trail. You?”
“Can Tho; that’s way down south in the Delta. I was a gunner on a PBR.”
“Riverine forces.”
“Uh-huh. Haven’t been on a boat since.”
“I know what you mean.”
We continue trading war stories until the printer interrupts us. There are approximately twenty-five to thirty names. Mine is one of them, as are the ones I saw on the wall. I keep my emotions in check, and slip the printout into my attaché. “Any idea where I go next?”
“Well, when we were compiling the names for the wall, we had a master list made up of casualty reports from all the service I branches. It was raw data, loaded with mistakes, misspellings; so we had each entry checked by the NPRC. They’ve got the original personnel files for everybody who’s ever been in the military.”
“The NPRC?”
“National Personnel Records Center. If anybody can figure out who your man is, I’d say it’d be them.”
“Thanks. I still have a little time before my flight. Where are they, the Pentagon?”
“Oh, no, they’re in St. Louis.”
“You mean as in Missouri?”
“Yes, sorry. It’s a big building out by the airport. The guy who was in charge of the verification project was a Mr.—” he pauses, and spins the wheel of a Rolodex—"Collins. Jack Collins.”
I can’t believe it. I’m in the nation’s capital, surrounded by government buildings, and the records of all military personnel are stored in Missouri. I return to the hotel and ask Nancy how she feels about making a stop in St. Louis.
She sighs, overwhelmed. “I still haven’t gotten through those term papers, I’ve got a staff meeting in the morning before classes start. I’ve got to get home and get my act together.”
We decide she’ll return to Los Angeles, and I’ll go to St. Louis alone. I have no trouble getting on a flight but can’t reach Mr. Collins. His secretary explains he’s at a meeting outside the office and isn’t expected back until after lunch. I make an appointment.
The flight to Lambert-St. Louis International is scheduled at two hours, seven minutes. I spend the time working my way through the alphabet in an effort to recall more of the men in my company.
It’s a short taxi ride from the airport to the National Personnel
Records Center on Page Boulevard. The five-story building is sheathed in horizontal bands of glass and concrete curtain wall. It isn’t big, it’s gargantuan, easily as long as three football fields, and surrounded by acres of cars.
A receptionist clips a visitor’s tag to my jacket, then directs me to an institutional green office with government furniture and the obligatory portraits of the President and Joint Chiefs. A stocky man with the unflappable demeanor of someone who processes thousands of requests for information each day waves me in.
“Jack Collins,” he says, latching on to my hand. He’s genuinely intrigued when he hears why I’m there, and reveals there are more like fourteen mistakes on the Memorial, three of which have been publicly acknowledged; but he balks when I request information on the men in my company who came back from Vietnam. The rules are hard and fast: access to files other than my own requires permission in writing from Total Army Personnel Command in Virginia. Furthermore, it could take hours to retrieve my file from the archives. He suggests we look up my listing on the master casualty list first.
He fetches a horizontal format computer printout that’s as thick as a dictionary. Labeled
A through M
, it contains the names of approximately half the men who died in Vietnam. Collins finds the section he wants. Morgans fill half of one page and all of the next. There must be at least a hundred of them.
“That’s you,” he says, pointing to an entry near the top between Abraham Bruce, and Aubrey Donald. Each runs in a single line across the page. Mine reads:
All6301743 MORGAN A CALVERT LAA28961 3SFCE512/05/68 BOSTONY2322/3/48BC621SM10*10/3/6863IVBR19
I’m used to working with statistics condensed in this fashion, but each data log has its own code, and I’m as baffled as any layman. “You have the key handy, or do you know it by heart?”
“Not enough of it.” Collins retrieves a binder that contains the data keys. The first divides the line of letters and numbers into columns—more than thirty in this case—and identifies them. The others are used to decipher the entries under each. “The first column’s the service branch,” he begins. “As you might imagine, A
stands for Army; the column right after your name is the country of casualty. LA stands for Laos, not Los Angeles.”
I force a smile.
“A2 means died from hostile wounds.”
“Fits,” I remark, referring to the soldier who died with my dog tags.
“Then there’s case number, rank, pay grade, date of casualty: 12 May ’68. Hometown, Boston; that Y means you enlisted; next is—”
“Hold it. You say 12 May?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s weird. I was wounded on 18 April. The way I figure it, the guy had to be killed on the same day in the same province.
“Yes, I’d think so,” Collins muses, as he runs a finger along the line of data, then scans the key. “Province code’s sixty-three. Sixty-three is Bolikhamsai Province.”
“Bolikhamsai? That’s
really
weird. You sure?”
“Uh-huh. Why?”
“I was wounded in Champasak.” I can see the worn map of Laos I carried with me in the field as if it were yesterday. “Bolikhamsai’s at least four, maybe five hundred miles north.”
I’m baffled. How could somebody all the way up there have ended up with my dog tags, let alone three weeks after I was wounded? My theory didn’t last a day. My time/place parameters and the list of KIAs in my attaché are useless.
“There’s always a chance they’re data encoding errors. You know, somebody checks a wrong box, hits a wrong key, and nobody catches it.”
“That would mean there’s no mistaken identity, and no other soldier,” I say, torn between being spared the torment of reliving the past, and being cheated out of the satisfaction it’s giving me.
“Could be. On the other hand, if it’s all correct—your date, province, cause of casualty, wound—then I’d say somebody else died with your tags.”
“Any way we can find out?”
“Sure, check your file. You’ll have to fill out a one-eighty first.” He takes a form from a drawer, makes a red X in the lower left corner, and slides it across the desk with a pen. “Make sure you sign it.”
Form 180-106—REQUEST PERTAINING TO MILITARY RECORDS—has more blanks than the SATs. Collins makes phone calls
while I work on it. “Is it really going to take hours to get this stuff?”
Collins nods then tilts his head, reconsidering, and copies some data from the computer screen onto a routing slip. “Let’s go,” he says, reading aloud as we leave the office. “Third floor, sector N–W, aisle twenty-six, rack eighty-four, shelf five, box two. I’ll probably catch hell for doing this myself but—” he pushes the elevator button, then looks at me with sad eyes “—I lost a close friend over there.”
We ride in silence. When the doors open, we exit into a narrow canyon of identical cardboard file boxes stacked on shelving units that tower over us. My head fills with the musty smell of paper and ink.
“In case you’re wondering, this place holds over a hundred million individual military jackets in over two million cubic feet of storage space.” He makes his way through the maze guided by signs that act as street names and house numbers. Finally he rolls a ladder in to position, then climbs up, removes one of the boxes, and carries it to a table beneath the windows.
My pulse quickens as he opens it and culls through the jackets. He quickly finds—MORGAN A. CALVERT 116301743—and starts thumbing through the documents, which are several inches thick.
“What’re you looking for?”
“The report filed by the medic who treated you in the field.”
He finally slips a yellowing page from the jacket. The pertinent data blanks read: WIA 18/04/68 CP LA—wounded in action, 18 April 1968, Champasak Province, Laos. It’s all correct.
We set the medic’s report aside and examine all the other documents to see if one of them contains the incorrect data that’s on the master casualty list.
“Pretty much settles it,” Collins says, after we determine that isn’t the case.
How I wish it did. “The date someone was killed in action came from a casualty report, right?”
“Right. If somebody in the field recovered a body, or even part of one, with your dog tags there’s got to be a record of it.”