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Virtual healing

On the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, you’ll find their names. But to find out who the soldiers who died in Vietnam War really were, you can log on to The Virtual Wall.

By KEVIN GRAHAM
Published May 28, 2006

Army Spc. David Scott Griffin  always turned for a final wave goodbye as he stood atop the airplane steps at Tampa International  Airport before going to war.

But in 1967, the last time he boarded a plane headed for South Vietnam, he never looked back.

“It was like he was heading to his destiny,” said his sister, Ann Griffin Lambeth .
Griffin, 20, died four months later.

For more than three decades, Lambeth, 56, of Suwannee, Ga., wondered what really happened to her brother. Then four years ago she heard about The Virtual  Wall, a Web site for memorials to the 58,249 men and women named on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

She learned about the others who lost their lives with Griffin, and met a man through the site who explained to her how the crash happened. And she received a picture of her brother she had never seen.

“The power of the Internet is just wonderful, where stories can be shared,” Lambeth said.

That’s what creators of The Virtual Wall — www.virtualwall.org — envisioned when they launched the site in March 1997.

“Not everyone can wander out to Washington (to see the memorial). But that doesn’t mean they have forgotten the folk they served with or kin folk,” said Ken Davis,  president of The Virtual Wall Web site. “They remember them very well, and this is a means where that remembrance can be made very public.”

Davis, 63, a retired Navy commander, lives in Toccoa, Ga., near the South Carolina border.

He has spent thousands of hours creating the online memorials, building each page by hand.

“If some North Vietnamese gunner had been a better shot, I’d be on the wall, too,” he said. “If I were, someone else would be doing this.”

Davis is one of about a half-dozen people, mostly Vietnam veterans, who voluntarily manage the site, where visitors can search by name, or by town.  He said they don’t keep track of how many individual pages have been added to The Virtual Wall. They go up at family and friends’ requests. The site does see about a 15 percent increase in traffic around Memorial Day and Veterans Day, according to some tracking Davis did. Overall, the site averages about 85,000 visitors per day, or more than 15-million between November and April, Davis said.

Davis relies on volunteers to research each soldier’s background. It is a lot of ground to cover.  

A few hundred U.S. troops operated in South Vietnam as military advisers as early as 1961, but U.S. involvement quickly shifted into all-out combat, with thousands of troops pouring into the small, divided nation. The number peaked in 1968 with more than a half-million American troops in the country.

After signing a treaty in January, 1973, the Nixon administration pulled out nearly all of the remaining 24,000 forces. The country fell to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong communists on April 30, 1975.

One of the Web site’s volunteers lives near the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin. He searches through presidential condolence letters and forwards them to Davis, who gleans information about the soldier’s unit and other details. He then includes that on the memorial page.

Davis said they also get help from the Nixon Library and Marine Corps Historical Division, and have access to Naval records from the period.

“I can tell you how (a soldier) died, who they died with. I can’t tell you how they lived,” Davis said. That is where family, friends, and fellow veterans come in, adding their own memories.

The Virtual Wall contains nearly  250 memorial pages for soldiers from Florida.

Lambeth’s memorial page to her brother represents one of the more extensive ones on The Virtual Wall.

Their father owned Seminole Pharmacy at Hillsborough and Florida avenues in Tampa. Her brother worked behind the soda fountain and could charm anyone into purchasing expensive gifts, Lambeth said.

She included family photographs and letters that Griffin wrote to her during the war.

He was there in 1966 and 1967, the year the Johnson administration poured another 100,000 troops into the fight, and Griffin’s letters display the playful teasing of an older brother alongside the anger and cynicism of a combat soldier in a war going badly.

“I, for being so young, have been around and seen and done a lot of things,’’ the 19-year-old wrote. “I think, far too much for a person my age.’’

Lambeth remembers the final moments she spent with her brother, in June 1967. He came home to see her graduate from Hillsborough High School, his alma mater.

He was depressed, she said. At times, he would crawl into his sister’s bed at night and cry. “David just didn’t have that spark in him anymore, that bravado,” she said.

And yet, about the same time that Griffin wrote of hating the Army, the war, and the Vietnamese, his actions in an airborne assault earned an Air Medal for heroism.

His helicopter carried a South Vietnamese Ranger unit into an area surrounded by Viet Cong. The entrenched enemy forces shot down six other helicopters, and Griffin, as the citation states, volunteered without hesitation “to fly into the enemy’s murderous fire’’ to rescue the wounded and stranded troops below. That done, he and his crew spent the rest of the day pulling troops out of the battle.

He died eight months later.

Griffin was a door gunner on a Cobra gunship. On Oct. 26, 1967, in Dinh Tuong,  South Vietnam, they took fire, wheeled around to shoot back, and lost the helicopter’s main rotor blade in a mechanical failure. The chopper crashed in a rice paddy, killing all four members of the crew.

Griffin’s tour of duty in Vietnam was set to end in less than a month. In late 1966, he wrote: “There is only one of me. I don’t think the world could stand another one like me. At least that’s what everyone tells me.’’  

Judy Thain , 52, of San Francisco, said her brother, Army Capt. Harry Lindsay Thain,  was a West Point graduate who served one tour in Vietnam, then went back again, telling her the soldiers he served with there needed his help.

A 1962 graduate of Zephyrhills High School, Harry Thain was a competitive youngster. At 17, he held three Florida pistol championship titles, and dreamed of becoming an astronaut.

“I think we all kind of want to fast forward now and picture him as an old man and wonder what kind of family he would have had, and where they’d be now,’’ said another sister, Bonnie King, 56, of Carlisle, Pa.

Thain, eagle scout, altar boy, co-pilot, died May 24, 1972, at age 27 while flying in combat support of a radar site, when a mortar shell struck his plane near Quang Tri, killing all five men aboard.

Marine Lance Cpl. Francisco Albert Mazariegos  of Tampa found God in the midst of the Vietnam War.
He wrote a poem that his sister Mary Quinnell  has posted.

Though I wasn’t friendly with you before, I wonder, God, if you’d wait at your door? Look, I’m crying. Me, shedding tears. I wish I had know you these many years. Well, I will have to go now, God. Goodbye. Strange, since I met you, I’m not afraid to die.

Quinnell, 55, of Valparaiso  described Mazariegos as a ladies’ man. He placed fourth runnerup in a Mr. Florida contest in the mid 1960s, she said.

Born in Germany to a military family, he at age 12 played a young Mexican boy with a short speaking role in the 1958 movie, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw,  starring Jayne Mansfield.   Mazariegos graduated from Robinson High School in 1965.

“He was the one most likely to succeed out of all of us,” Quinnell said.

Wounded once, he recovered and returned to combat. A sniper’s bullet killed Mazariegos, age 19, on June 27, 1967, in Quang Tri.

Tom Brennan  never met Air Force Maj. Woodrow Wilson Parker. All he knew of the soldier from St. Petersburg, Brennan learned from his mother. She met the Parker family when she worked in the officers’ club at Fort Devens, at a military facility northwest of Boston.

When Brennan returned from two years in the Army, stationed at Fort Benning, Ga., he put on a missing-in-action bracelet bearing Parker’s name. He’s taken it off once since than — to move it from his left to right wrist.

“I don’t know how I would feel without it,” said Brennan, 59, of New London, N.H. “Whenever I believe life has become difficult, I simply look at my wrist and see his name and remember his sacrifice.’’

Brennan found The Virtual Wall while searching the Internet for Parker’s family. He wanted to tell them how much Parker has meant to him. He’s still trying to locate them.

The Virtual Wall says Parker, 25, the navigator in an F-4 Phantom jet, went on a night strike mission over North Vietnam on April 4, 1968, and crashed while dropping flares to mark a target. Initially listed as missing in action, Parker’s remains were identified in 1998. He’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

“I think we need to make sure that we never lose sight of them, both literally and figuratively,” Brennan said. “The debt is incredible. We can never repay it, but we should never forget it.”

Kevin Graham can be reached at (813) 226-3433 or kgraham@sptimes.com.

[Last modified May 28, 2006, 21:58:31]