Faces Not Forgotten: The Photos and Stories of Wisconsin’s Vietnam Fallen

There were 64 names. Of supposedly unfindable photos of men from Wisconsin who’d died in Vietnam more than 40 years ago. Almost all of the men on the list were from Milwaukee, the state’s urban center. But had these men really vanished without a public trace, other than their names? A photo shows something more dimensional than letters on granite, although those also have their own power. In the words of Ansel Adams, “photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.”

A team of student journalists from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee began investigating, at the behest of a local father whose son had died in Afghanistan (read student journalist Daniel Zielinski’s story here on Andrew Johnson). It was part of a national effort to match every name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. with a face. Many others in Wisconsin had contributed over the years (reporters, public radio, volunteers, and so on), and others were also dutifully researching the remaining names. Student Nicole Beilke tells the story of one such dedicated Baraboo veteran, Terry Kramer, who was posting so many photographs at the end that he almost seemed like the students’ shadow.

The photos will run someday in a major education center across the street from the Wall. For now, they run on a virtual Wall of Faces.

At the beginning of the project, in February, each student was given two names and instructed to find the photos and choose an angle for a story. Archival searches revealed the media did little to humanize most of the men when they died; the students were to write that rough draft of history more than 45 years later in some cases, tracing the relatives and friends of men who died before the advent of the Internet.

In just over three months researching, only a single name remained on the list – Willie Bedford of Milwaukee- and it would be left to journalism student Rachel Maidl to tell his story. She continued diligently working on Bedford’s picture – all five of his siblings had no picture of Bedford and his parents are deceased – after the semester was over and her grade already  in. We tell that story separately here of the final photo. In the end, Maidl found a photo of Bedford, meaning that Wisconsin became the 5th state nationally to find all of its photos.

But here are some of the rich and human stories the students found, along with the service members’ photos. They do not represent each photo found. In numerous cases, students obtained photos from yearbooks or reached families or friends who provided them but were too emotional to talk. So each photo found and submitted to the Wall of Faces does not have a story with it. In some cases, others found photos; in some of those, the students found the relatives and wrote stories. Some families posted pictures after being informed by students about the project. In many cases, the students obtained interviews with loved ones and photos as well. Their instructor, Jessica McBride, found seven of the 64 photos for a hometown newspaper and several from Milwaukee after the semester ended. Over 1,100 Wisconsin Service members died in Vietnam. There is a separate effort underway by Vietnam veterans’ organizations and Wisconsin Public Radio to also account for men who had strong Wisconsin roots but enlisted in other states. But this list did not encompass those. It’s based on the official Department of Defense count of Wisconsin fatalities.

The students’ research took them from the Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee Indian reservations to the deep South. It took them from California to Arkansas and from Milwaukee’s inner city to its western suburbs. The final list was extraordinarily diverse, containing the names of service members who were African-American, Native-American, Latino, and Caucasian. The men on the list ranged in age from a 17-year-old whose death spurred the military to ban combat of juveniles to several older service members who had served in several wars dating back to WWII. They included a German and an Italian immigrant. “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus,” said the filmmaker Orson Welles. “It is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.”

The students found that, decades later, the wounds are still fresh as they recounted the stories of men who died, in some cases, at ages younger than they. In one case, a soldier’s sister sent all of her photos to the student for historical purposes because she is dying of cancer. In another case, a student interviewed a man who killed the soldier by friendly fire and has been blogging about it in an attempt to come to terms.

“Do him justice,” was how he started his letter.

Here are some of those stories and photos.