Photos Sought For Locals Killed in Vietnam War

What if you could put a face to all 59,195 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund hopes you can.

The National Call for Photos is a project organized by the VVMF to match a headshot or portrait photograph to every service member listed on The Wall, which includes the names of seven men from Novato. If you were friends with them or family members, you can scan in your old snapshots and help this effort.

The pictures will be displayed in an exhibit at the future Education Center at The Wall, an underground visitors center to be built near the Vietnam Veterans and the Lincoln memorials. Every day, the center will celebrate the birthdays of service members who died during the Vietnam War by featuring their photos on a giant digital wall.

So far, 25,526 veterans have complete profiles with at least one photograph, according to George Pojani, a research associate at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. These profiles are currently featured on The Virtual Wall, an online database of the Memorial's veterans.

To locate photos for the project, contributors can click here and search for veterans who enlisted in their area. The VVMF recommends contacting family and friends of the veterans to find photographs or visit local libraries and search through yearbooks or newspaper obituaries.

The Novato names on the VVMF website are:

• Cpl. Edward Wayne Bethards, Army, age 20
• Capt. James Michael Gribbin, Army, age 21
• PFC Robert Allen Johnson, Army, age 18
• 1st Lt. Daryl Roy Kunzler, Army, age 23
• PFC Allan Joseph Nelson Jr., Army, age 21
• PFC Michael Gordon Tandy, Marines, age 19
• PFC James L. Wright, Army, age 18

To submit a photograph, contributors should obtain a high quality scan of the image and post a remembrance at http://www.vvmf.org/remembrances. The VVMF will send an email to contributors when their photo is posted with a matching profile.

Relatives of service members with complete profiles are encouraged to submit photographs to the VVMF, even if there is already a photo available.

Pojani says that the contributors to the National Call for Photos will help improve the visitor's experience at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

"It's a place where people can go back and find stories about all the casualties on the Wall," Pojani said about the future Education Center. "It will be more personal than just names on the Wall."