Terry Kramer: Keeper of the Flame

Many days, you can find Terry Kramer, a Vietnam-era veteran who lives in Baraboo, sitting in the Milwaukee Public Library and digging though records to find faces to put with names on a very important list.

Kramer, who makes the 116-mile drive each way to Milwaukee for his research, has found many of the fallen Vietnam soldiers’ photos for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund faces project by spending his free time scanning through yearbooks, through obituaries from newspaper microfilms and through Ancestry.com.

The project, which is spearheaded by the non-profit that built the Wall, seeks to find a photo for every one of the men and women named on it. In Wisconsin, that’s more than 1,100. And Kramer has uploaded 41 of them himself and another 29 were posted by people he contacted. As a class of students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee worked to find the remaining 64 Wisconsin photos this spring, Kramer was toiling away at the library, trying to find them too. The students found a lot of them; he did too. In a way, it was a tag-team effort at the end.

He had heard about the project during his 50^th high school reunion from a classmate who had volunteered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in D.C. Around the same time, as a regular listener to Wisconsin Public Radio, he kept hearing their promotion to find “a face for every name” for all those who had died in the war in preparation for the educational center to be built to project their photos and tell their stories.

But the last thing that confirmed his determination to pursue the project was a conversation with another veteran classmate. They were a year apart, but they knew each other well. He was the brother of one of his aunts. He had served in Vietnam and had “done it all” as Kramer said. He was airborne, had been a tunnel rat and had returned with three purple hearts and a silver star.

“He told us that he spoke of his time in Vietnam in schools and how when he had finished a student would usually say ‘you are a hero.’ His reply to them was that he was merely a good soldier; he did what he was told. The heroes were those who died while serving,” Kramer said.

He said this was the tipping point when he decided to find the photos to honor those heroes who had fallen.

Kramer never served in Vietnam and instead spent his enlistment at a base in Colorado. He never saw the war firsthand but saw its effects. Many soldiers returning from their tours of duty in Vietnam were sent to his base before being discharged. He said that when these soldiers arrived, one of the first things they would ask is how they would like to be woken up in the morning.

Kramer recalls asking this to two brothers who had just returned. One said, “Don’t wake my brother up. Wake me up and I will wake my brother up.”

Later Kramer asked why and found it was because he slept with a knife under his pillow.

Knowing the effects of the war on those who came back and the fact that so many didn’t return back seems to be another part of his determination to find these photos.

Terry Lee Albright was one Marine’s picture out of all of the pictures of the fallen servicemen that Kramer has found. He found him posed in a class photo while flipping through a yearbook. He cropped the photo and uploaded it onto the VVMF website for the world to see and to remember.

And though Kramer did not know Albright, he is still a living memory for others. His brothers, Gary and Larry Albright and his battalion’s Operations Officer, Roland Monette remembered him in interviews with Media Milwaukee.

Monette said he served with Albright, operating in the jungles and rice paddies of the Song Thu Bon River basin about 19 miles from Da Nang. The mission of Albright’s Rifle Company at that time was to guard land and water approaches to the vitally important pontoon bridge called Liberty Bridge across the Thu Bon River. One night, during the monsoon season, the rain poured and the river swelled. The tower Albright was manning was engulfed by flood water.

Monette describes that about 300 Marines of the battalion were lined along the bank, some waist deep, some with ropes and inflated air mattresses, to attempt anything possible for the rescue, and also to guard against any enemy sniper fire that might be encountered from upstream.

A rescue sling was thrown to Albright from a helicopter, though he couldn’t get it around his body. A rescue swimmer also attempted to save him downstream. Monette was that Marine.

“I never got close enough for a reasonable chance. I was just one of the many witnesses who wanted to try something,” Monette said. “I never knew PFC Albright personally. And he never saw me in the water as he was being swept away.”

Monette says that the best tribute he can give him is to his bravery.

“When the river ripped the sling from his arm, he still tried his very hardest to live out that day,” Monette said. “He never gave up. He fought the good fight to the heart-rending end, but his final remaining energies were nothing against the tremendous force of that rampaging water.”

He says that the story of Albright’s attempted rescue also goes to show the timeless Marine Corps mandate that casualties are never abandoned, whatever the price of recovery.

“As with so many others lost in Vietnam, we may have never met each other but we are forever part of their fatal story,” Monette said.

That tragic day and the loss of Albright still resound in his brothers’ hearts. Both Gary and Larry Albright found the memories of losing their brother too painful to talk about in an interview.

Larry, while thinking about if he could bear an interview, shares a glimpse of their relationship.

“I loved my brother,” he said. “I shared a bedroom with him all my life.”

Perhaps some memories really are too painful to share and are easier to remember in the silence of one’s heart.

But Kramer is working to make sure each of these fallen servicemen, like Albright, has at least a photo for everyone to remember them by.

His research is mostly conducted while rifling through piles of books and papers that are sprawled out on his table in the library but it also includes sending some handwritten letters to relatives requesting photos. And he has received much mail with photos and letters of thanks from them in return.

“Little notes like that help me keep searching after hitting many dead ends,” Kramer said.