When the grainy, black and white photo from a 1966 obituary popped up on her computer screen, UWM junior Amanda Porter reached out and touched it. “Well, there you are at last, Nathaniel Merriweather.”
Porter was one of 27 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee journalism students who helped locate photos and tell the stories of Wisconsin soldiers killed in Vietnam as part of a national effort to find approximately 18,000 missing photos for a digital display at The Wall in Washington, D.C.
The project was completed last weekend when relatives confirmed that an old North Division High School yearbook photo showed Willie Bedford, the final image missing of the 1,161 Wisconsin service members who died in Vietnam. With that confirmation, Wisconsin became the sixth state, and largest so far, to collect photos of all its service members killed in Vietnam.
Organizers hope the digital Wall of Faces planned for the new Vietnam veterans Education Center will eventually include images for all 58,300 men and women listed on The Wall.
“The Wisconsin effort has been by far the most efficient and the most successful,” said George DeCastro, coordinator of the Faces Never Forgotten Program. “The high level of coordination and cooperation between all parties involved was astounding. And, of course, your students and all of the other volunteers are the ones who actually got it done.”
Andrew Johnson, publisher of the Dodge County Pionier in Mayville,spearheaded Faces Never Forgotten in Wisconsin. Jessica McBride, senior journalism lecturer at UWM, got her JAMS 320: Integrated Reporting classes involved after meeting Johnson in February 2015.
‘Stories that matter’
“I thought it was an excellent way to teach basic research and storytelling skills, as well as the role the media can play in communities,” says McBride. “I want students to work on stories that matter. It’s moving how they have embraced this cause.”
“Photos are so important in making a person ‘real,’” Johnson explains, adding that there are few photos of many of the soldiers who fought in the unpopular Vietnam War. Further compounding the problem is the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records center that destroyed approximately 16-18 million official military personnel files.Johnson had two very personal reasons for getting involved. The Education Center at The Wall also will project photos of the nearly 8,000 service members killed in action since Sept. 11. One of those soldiers is U.S. Army 1st Lt. David Johnson, who was killed in Afghanistan in January 2012. Andrew Johnson says Vietnam veterans, like those in the Patriot Guard, have been supportive of his family as they mourned David’s death. Patriot Guard members helped lead his son’s funeral procession and accompanied Lt. Johnson’s casket up until his burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
When Johnson started the Wisconsin project a year ago, 400 Wisconsin soldiers killed in Vietnam had no photos on file. By the time UWM student journalists got involved in winter 2015, the list was down to 63. Each student took two, and McBride took the remaining seven.
Finding photos and information about soldiers dead for 45 years or more proved challenging, so students pored over cemetery records, checked phone directories and yearbooks, looked through veteran memorial sites and tracked down surviving family and friends any way they could – email, telephone, the U.S. Postal Service.
Mourning sons, remembering friends
The research trail was often long and difficult. Senior Justin Skubal’s soldier, Thomas Shaw, had left a widow, but she and Shaw’s mother had both remarried and tracking stepsiblings was challenging. Fellow senior Jonathan Powell agreed: “It’s difficult to dig up information when people remarry, and sometimes families seem to fall apart after a death.”
Some family members barely remembered a long-dead relative. For others, the pain was still fresh. McBride located soldier Michael Bohrman’s 95-year-old father in Delafield. He still hasn’t opened the box of his son’s belongings sent home from Vietnam, but he kept Michael’s candy-apple red Corvette. The 20-year-old was killed three days before he was scheduled to end his tour.
After locating a photo of her first soldier, George Anthony Chapman, 19, in a John Marshall High School yearbook, Porter began looking for 23-year-old Sgt. Nathaniel Merriweather, killed in 1966. With hundreds of people with that last name in Milwaukee, she didn’t have much luck until she began searching cemetery records. She found his grave in Stanton, a small town in Tennessee. Cemetery and funeral records didn’t go back to 1966, but she talked to Stanton Mayor Allan Sterbinsky – a Racine native happy to reconnect with his home state.
With Sterbinsky’s help, Porter made contact with Larry Knapp, an army buddy of Merriweather’s, now living in suburban Chicago, and Jim Ackerman in Stanton, who sent her a copy of Merriweather’s obituary from the Brownsville States-Graphic.
Both wrote her encouraging emails, and were thrilled that Merriweather and others were getting long overdue recognition and honor. Knapp and Merriweather had been close friends, and Knapp had posted about him on a veteran’s memorial site: “Luco and I cried when we read that you had been killed in this battle.”
The project gave the students new insights into the sacrifices these and other soldiers had made. Skubal says he understands better why his stepfather, a Vietnam veteran, awoke some mornings startled and shaking.
“This was way more than a class assignment,” says Powell. Echoing Johnson, he adds, “A soldier never dies unless he’s forgotten.”
“When we started this project, I thought about these Vietnam soldiers as old men, but they were my age, or my brother’s age,” says Porter. Touching that obituary photo of Nathaniel Merriweather on her computer screen, she says: “It gave me a warm feeling, but really sad. I’m grateful that they are going to be remembered and I was part of that.”
Faces Never Forgotten
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
