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SPOT ON THE WALL HARD TO GET EVEN IF YOU EARN IT FOR VIETNAM VETS' FAMILIES, IT CAN FINALLY MEAN CLOSURE
Abstract:
Dorothy Duggar imagines the knock and the smiling face at the front door of her home in south suburban Thornton, but she knows it will never come.
Her son Kenneth's bedroom is made up as if he never left. But the framed mementos on the wall above the simple black headboard and chest of drawers give notice that he did leave, and that he came back, decorated with two Purple Hearts for wounds and a Bronze Star for heroism in combat during the Vietnam War.
Last week Specialist 5th Class Kenneth Duggar's name joined that of 58,208 others carved on the black granite roll of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
Full Text:
Copyright Chicago Tribune Co. May 11, 1997
Dorothy Duggar imagines the knock and the smiling face at the front door of her home in south suburban Thornton, but she knows it will never come.
Her son Kenneth's bedroom is made up as if he never left. But the framed mementos on the wall above the simple black headboard and chest of drawers give notice that he did leave, and that he came back, decorated with two Purple Hearts for wounds and a Bronze Star for heroism in combat during the Vietnam War.
Not until this week could Dorothy finally feel a sense of peace about the wrenching events entwined with the simple, homemade memorial in Kenneth's room.
On Sunday, Mother's Day, Dorothy will go to church and to the cemetery where her son is buried. And she will celebrate a victory that ended an emotional, decadelong bureaucratic battle--one that few families ever win.
Last week Specialist 5th Class Kenneth Duggar's name joined that of 58,208 others carved on the black granite roll of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
Thousands of families have tried, but only 270 names have been added to the wall since it was dedicated in 1982.
Seven new names were inscribed onto the wall last week, including another Illinoisan, Harrison Allen of Springfield.
"This is what we worked for," said Dorothy Duggar. "But I didn't know it was going to come like this. It is like opening up a wound that was healed. I feel like I am burying him again."
Getting a name added "is extremely difficult," said Capt. Kristi Johnson, of the Marine Casualty Section. "Their death must be directly attributable to wounds in combat."
Those whose deaths are attributed to chemicals such as Agent Orange or suicide from post-traumatic stress syndrome do not qualify.
Even when there is a death from a war-related injury, the petition to join the wall can be denied.
Officials from each branch of the military review the cause of death, and the Pentagon gives the final approval.
The Duggar family had to fight for Kenneth's inscription because he died in a military hospital in Germany from an infected lung damaged by a gun shot in a Vietnam jungle five years earlier.
As a member of the 25th Infantry Division, Kenneth Duggar had already received two Purple Hearts when he was on patrol in the Ia Drang Valley on June 6, 1966, three days before his 21st birthday and the day his sister graduated from Mother of Sorrows High School in Blue Island.
His unit was patrolling an area that turned out to be the underground headquarters of the Viet Cong in the southeast part of South Vietnam, a fact learned years after the war ended.
In an ambush, Duggar took two shots from an AK-47.
"He then went back to the ambush zone to drag out two buddies," said John Richmond, a counselor with the Vet Center in Tampa, Fla., which helped the Duggar family get his name memorialized on the wall. "That's when he took a third shot."
Duggar, a Thornton High School graduate, was awarded the Bronze Star with V device, signifying valor in combat.
One bullet went through his collarbone, another through his lung and a third shattered his hip, said his sister, Phyllis Duggar Alexandroff.
He was found in tall grass by a medic, who was led to the area by the sound of Duggar praying.
"The medic that found him was wounded and used the plastic wrapper from a pack of cigarettes to stick on the chest wound and held it on the chest wound all the way back on the chopper," said Richmond.
Duggar was sent to Great Lakes Hospital to recover, but refused a medical discharge.
After he was honorably discharged, he shocked his family by seeking to re-enlist. "He didn't feel he finished his hitch in Vietnam," said his mother.
Four doctors refused to qualify him for military service, but the physician who delivered him as a baby finally gave military doctors a letter that he was fit.
He was shipped to Germany, but his mother said he was never well.
When he came home on leave, he told his sister he had internal bleeding but asked her not to tell their parents.
"Four months later, he was gone," she said.
With only one lung, he died of pneumonia. The attending physician said it was due to his war wounds.
The family was devastated. After the wall was erected, his father, Roy, began a quest to include his son's name.
"He talked and wrote to everybody and couldn't get anywhere," said Dorothy Duggar. "I remember talking to a retired Marine who told us, `The Army didn't do anything in Vietnam. We cleared the way for them.'
"I told him, `Well, you didn't do a good job; because you're here and my son's not.' "
After her father's death, Duggar Alexandroff learned from reading his journals that he visited his son's graveside almost daily.
"I knew then that I had to start the process of getting his name on the wall all over again," she said. "I knew then that this was going to be a personal mission I would pursue until the day I died--for my father, my brother and my entire family.
"In my mind he was a hero."
With the help of the Vet Center located in Tampa, where she supervises humanities and art for the Hillsborough County school district, she was finally successful. She and her mother will attend a special ceremony at the wall on Memorial Day.
With her daughter and older son living out of town, Dorothy Duggar planned a quiet Mother's Day. It was to include a visit to the graves of her husband and son, who lie side by side at Assumption Cemetery in Glenwood.
"He was a gift from heaven," she said of Kenneth, while holding his medals. "His name should be on top of the wall. That's the kind of a boy he was."
Kenneth Duggar's inclusion on the wall is rare because even when a veteran seems to die from war-related injuries, the addition of the name may not be approved.
One example cited by memorial officials is a veteran who died years after the war when a piece of shrapnel left inside his body moved and severed an artery while he was jogging.
His name isn't on the wall.
In another instance, Phoenix Staff Sgt. Robert Shockey did get his name on the wall--but not until last week.
An exploding mine drove a piece of shrapnel the size of a silver dollar into Shockey's temple during an attack in 1966.
His family said Shockey went into a coma and never came out of it before he died about a year later.
Military officials had earlier told Shockey's family that one had to die in a combat zone to be included on the wall.
Given only six months to live following an ambush on Feb. 14, 1968, Allen, who joined Duggar and Shockey on the wall last week, survived a difficult life with paralyzing injuries for nearly 23 years afterwards.
The name of another Chicago area soldier, Francis Jelinek, of West Chicago, was added in 1994.
Many families who succeed in getting a name added decline to talk about the ordeal because of the reawakened pain. Why do they persist?
"It's part of the mourning process," said Jan Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. "It brings an emotional and psychological closure to death.
"It gives a family the opportunity to put a loved one's name on the wall next to the Washington Monument, next to the Lincoln Memorial. You're giving your loved one a place in history."
There is another lesson in the families' dogged quest.
It shows that the ravages of the Vietnam War, and its healing, are still ongoing.
For years after the war, Vietnam veterans were vilified for their service to country.
Linette Sparacino recalls that her brother, Charles Wood, who suffered massive internal and burn injuries in the crash of his plane during his second tour in Vietnam, simply quit talking about it.
Sparacino said Wood was in intensive care from a massive infection that had invaded his body when she and he were watching the dedication of the wall on television Nov. 13, 1982.
"I told him that I thought the idea of the memorial was real great," she recalled. "He nodded in agreement and between that and the expression on his face there was no doubt in my mind that if he died I would pursue putting his name there."
Wood died a short time later. His name also was added last week.
As for Dorothy Duggar, she said when she heard the news that Kenneth's name would be added to the wall, she hurried to the graves of her son and husband.
"I just told them they can turn on their side now and sleep. The job is done," she recounted.
"When I told my pastor, he said, `Don't you think they didn't hear you, Dorothy.' "
[Illustration]
PHOTOS 2; Caption: PHOTO: Dorothy Duggar holds a picture of her son Kenneth, who died in a German hospital from wound he sustained while on active duty in the Vietnam War, in the bedroom he lived in as a youth. Tribune photo by Walter Neal. PHOTO: After a decade of fighting through a maze of bureaucracy, Dorothy Duggar succeeded in getting her son Kenneth's name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Tribune photo by Ernie Cox Jr.
Sub Title: [CHICAGOLAND FINAL Edition]
Start Page: 1, 1:1
ISSN: 10856706
Subject Terms: VeteransMemorials & monumentsMothersVietnam War
Companies: DEFENSE DEPARTMENT
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