James Salamone and Vincent Wright: When the Wounds Stay Silent

The journalism students were given one task: To find each of the 1,244 missing photographs of Vietnam veterans from Wisconsin who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country 40 years ago. But in some cases, they found the photos but also families whose shattering losses remained so emotionally vivid they couldn’t put them into public words.

That was the case with James Salamone and Vincent Wright.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, a nonprofit organization based in Washington D.C. who also built the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, invited Wisconsin to help in the search of the missing pictures. Their goal is to collect and preserve photos of each Wisconsin service member whose names appear on The Wall in D.C. and eventually on a national level.

To help honor the memory of these Wisconsin service men and women, the photos will become part of their project The Wall of Faces. It will also eventually become part of a memorial at The Wall itself.

UW-Milwaukee’s journalism students took this matter into their own hands. Each student in the JAMS (Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies) Integrated Reporting 320 class was given the names of two soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

Finding pictures from this era had challenges. The Vietnam War was a much less photographed time in history mostly due to the lack of access to technology. The generation didn’t take photos as much as people do today, especially if you were poor. Without proof of existence, these soldiers are slowly vanishing into nothing but faint memories held by few.

For those who do keep their loved one’s memory alive, they sometimes cannot overcome the grief of the past and emotionally are unable to pass their stories down, at least publicly.

James Salamone, a photo-less veteran from Wisconsin, died in Vietnam in 1969 just one night before he was to be sent back home. At 10 p.m. that night, he tragically died in a friendly fire accident.

Channel TMJ4 covered the 320 class’ search for the photos and aired the class on television hoping to prompt others to aid with the project. The feature aired April 27.

Instructor of the class, Jessica McBride, received an email from Chris Salamone, James’s brother’s wife. She had been watching TMJ4 and saw the story on the missing veteran pictures. She believed James was on the list.

After meeting with a journalism student at a local restaurant, Chris and Al provided a picture of James in his military uniform to the cause. It has now been added to The Wall of Faces online site. The student asked for an interview to properly celebrate James’s life rather than focus on his death, but the Salamones simply could not talk about it.

“It was the night before he was sent home and they were in an area where they weren’t allowed to have guns,” said Chris. “To this day, we still don’t know what happened. It’s too hard.”

In some cases, finding relatives of the deceased is near impossible. But everyone, as it turns out, can be found.

Serviceman Vincent Wright from Milwaukee died in Vietnam in 1971. After intensive online research, his family members were found, still living in Milwaukee. He was one of the few men on the list of 64 remaining photos to still have a living parent. The clue came through an old newspaper article that reported his next of kin. From there, it was just a matter of realizing they were still in the phone book. “I’m his mother,” said the woman who answered.

But as with the Salamone family, even after all of this time, the wounds were too raw to share publicly, even for a quest to humanize the men.

Sometimes, it appears, a photo will have to do. The photos of Wright and Salamone—which in their own way humanize the men as words never could anyway—were sent to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund for inclusion in The Wall of Faces project.