Bruno Demata and Paul Pamanet: Different Worlds

Feb. 27, 1969 was just another normal day at Naval Support Activity Da Nang, South Vietnam. The LCU-1500 was unloading ammunition when a rocket collided with the side of the ship and destroyed it. On that ship was Bruno W. Demata.

At the age of 18, Bruno DeMata decided to enlist in the United States Navy. An Italian immigrant who was born into a military family, he traveled the world with his father, who was in the Air Force. It only made sense to follow in his father’s footsteps, and fight for his country like the man he looked up to his entire life. With three months left in his tour, and one month left before his 20^th birthday, he died.

“I don’t mourn his death any longer but anxiously am waiting to hug him in the resurrection,” Maria D’Arrigo, of Stockton, Cal., said about her brother Bruno Demata.

Just a few months before Demata died, another young man connected to Wisconsin would also fall in Vietnam. Paul Pamanet, 21, was from a completely different world than the young Italian who had moved to America only a few years before. Both men, though, were from worlds disrupted and yet embraced the military cause of their country.

A member of the Menominee Nation, Wisconsin’s indigenous tribe, Pamanet was raised as a foster child after being taken by the state from his family, and he was one of at least 226 Native Americans who died in the war. Ninety percent of Native Americans enlisted to fight in the Vietnam War. It’s the highest enlistment population of the war.

Although from different backgrounds—one new to this country, and the other a member of a sovereign nation within it—the two men are linked now by a list, and by another soldier who went to war and didn’t come home decades after they died.

Like the other two young men, Army 1st Lt. David Johnson, a Mayville native, died in combat, while serving in Afghanistan on Jan. 25, 2012. His father, Andrew Johnson, publisher of the Dodge County Pionier, has made it his mission to find every picture of every fallen Vietnam veteran from Wisconsin. It’s part of a national effort to put a photo with every name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C.

Out of more than 1,100 deceased Vietnam veterans from Wisconsin listed on the wall, 64 were missing photos in February. Andrew Johnson took his efforts to the rest of the journalistic community and found his way into a UW-Milwaukee Integrated Reporting class.

The class was assigned to help assist Johnson in his never-ending mission to seek out the rest of the pictures.

On that list of 64: Paul Pamanet and Bruno DeMata. The military listed both men’s hometowns as Wisconsin; however, as it turns out, DeMata barely lived there. He’s buried in California (Pamanet, though, is buried in Neopit, where he was born).

These two young men may not have known each other, but they both enlisted to take on the blistering heat, booby-traps, and raining bullets, because their entire life they were surrounded by the warrior mentality.

“The soldier never dies unless he’s forgotten,” Johnson said.

A foster child

Until the age of eight, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pamanet raised Paul Pamanet in Neopit, in the heart of the Menominee Indian Reservation.

Paul Pamanet and his brother were taken from their parents by the state and lived with foster parents Paul and Ida Porfilio on their farm in Crivitz.

“They were treated like regular family,” Grace Christensen, daughter of the Porfilios, told Media Milwaukee.

Christensen was around 17 or 18 and wasn’t living at home when the Pamanet brothers first came to her parents’ house.

According to Christensen, Paul Pamanet was an outdoorsman and loved to go hunting and fishing.

“They were expected to do chores just like the rest of us,” Christensen said. “He would help take care of the chickens and collect eggs.”

He graduated from Crivitz High School in 1967 (it’s his yearbook photo that was found by Baraboo veteran Terry Kramer). He then enlisted in the Army. He started his tour in Vietnam on Oct. 9, 1968 and, a little more then a month later, died in small arms fire.

According to his obituary, he was buried at St. Anthony’s Cemetery in Neopit, back on the Menominee Indian Reservation where he first grew up.

Unlike the reaction faced by other returning Vietnam veterans, the Native American population didn’t shun their soldiers, historical accounts say. They honored their soldiers.

The immigrant

Bruno W. Demata was born in Naples, Italy. His mother Anna Vincenzo married an Air Force man, Cornelius “Jack” Tyler. When Tyler retired from the Air Force, he brought his family to the United States.

According to Demata’s sister, Maria D’Arrigo, they were raised as Air Force brats, and the military was an aspect of their upbringing.

“Bruno was the kindest and most humble person I knew besides my husband,” D’Arrigo said.

Being raised in a military family, it was no question that Bruno Demata was going to join the armed services.

He never graduated high school. Maria D’Arrigo described how Demata didn’t have any doubts with his decision to join the Navy, until he found out he was going to Vietnam.

“He was very distraught when he found out that he had to serve in Vietnam, and had terrible nightmares that he was going to die,” D’Arrigo said.

Maria D’Arrigo was very close to her brother. She was in constant contact with him when he was in Vietnam.

“He sent pictures to mom of him and his Vietnamese girlfriend. I sent pictures to him of my newborn son,” Maria D’Arrigo said.

With only three months left in his tour, Bruno Demata and 12 other crew members (along with others) were killed on the LCU-1500 in the port of Da Nang. John Spilker served for a time on that vessel, and remembered Demata as a gentle person whom his comrades looked out for. “He was just a kid,” Spilker said.

The Navy commemorates the LCU-1500 tragedy with memorial ceremonies, and there is a memorial erected for the 13 who died there in Coronado, Cal.

Maria D’Arrigo was devastated after her brother died in Vietnam. In 1974, she turned to religion to help her deal with the loss and studied the Bible.

D’Arrigo has many memories of her brother. Her favorite one that stands out is when he would pay her to stay up and watch scary movies with him.

“I’d take his dollar and then end up sleeping on the sofa,” D’Arrigo said. “The main thing was to have a body in the same room.”

It didn’t take too long to find Bruno Demata’s relatives. Maria D’Arrigo posted a message on the Virtual Vietnam Veterans Memorial website. A student journalist backtracked her e-mail, and ended up getting in touch with her. The entire family lives in Stockton, Cal. They only lived in Milwaukee briefly.

Their mother Anna Vincenza Johnson died in 2012. She had many of the family pictures. A brother did not return messages, and, as it turns out, Demata left behind a wife and daughter, both of whom also died relatively young.

However, D’Arrigo found a photo of her brother in a box in her garage. It meant a lot to her, she said, that people cared enough to seek out his photo.