Tributes to the fallen

From 1967, when her son David died in Vietnam, until her own death in 2000, Lois Woods Eaton reminded his brother Bill of her standing request.

"She would say, 'Find out what happened to David.' "

The task wasn't an obsession for Woods, and while he found some details, other information eluded him. For decades his family had to be satisfied with a telegram saying only that David Alexander Woods had died Nov. 1, 1967, as the result of a "gunshot wound received while on reconnaissance patrol."

Still, his mother's request never left Woods' mind.

"We never got what we considered satisfactory information," said Woods, today a retired real estate appraiser in Raytown.

That all changed just last year, in part because of the Wall That Heals, a half-scale traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that was exhibited in Blue Springs in October.

Today Woods knows that his older brother was a member of the Studies and Observation Group of the U.S. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, a special operations force.

Woods also knows that on Nov. 1, 1967, his brother had been not in Vietnam but in Laos, a member of a small strike team assigned to tap an enemy communications line when the team was attacked by an overwhelming force.

And he knows, too, that his brother was considered an ace field radio operator and was a highly desired pinochle partner. And that one colleague enjoyed referring to him as "My Little Davy." That was funny because David Woods stood about 6 feet 2 inches, and that particular colleague - fellow special operations force member James Ringland - stood several inches south of that.

Last year, through a complicated series of Internet links and referrals, Woods tracked down Ringland, today retired in central Missouri. A key stop was the Virtual Wall, an online memorial that lists photos and other information about those whose names are engraved into the memorial in Washington, D.C. Woods and Ringland exchanged e-mails. They agreed to meet in Arrow Rock, Mo., brought maps and compared notes.

Then Ringland gave Woods copies of the presidential citation that the Studies and Observation Group had received in 2000, which referenced the "officially denied actions" that SOG members had carried out.

And just like that, more than 42 years after his mother first asked, Bill Woods fulfilled his mother's request.

"The Wall did that," Woods said.

It was a moment, Woods decided, that called for beer and cigarettes.

Last October, accordingly, Woods left a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of beer in Pink Hill Park in Blue Springs during the four-day exhibit of the Wall That Heals. Some of the approximately 50,000 people who visited the Blue Springs exhibit left other items.

Joan Bland of Independence left two POW/MIA bracelets bearing the name of her first husband, Samuel K. Toomey III, reported missing in action in 1968 and confirmed killed in action in 1974.

Cathy Stacker of Independence left a bouquet of six artificial flowers, each one of which featured a name from the Wall. One was of a cousin from Norton, Kan., whose aircraft was shot down in September 1971.

Jerry Barham of North Kansas City parked an automobile near the wall. It was the 1967 Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport that his brother Larry had purchased the summer he was drafted. His brother died during the Tet Offensive in 1968.

He had driven the car only a few months.

Barham drove the car back home when the exhibit ended but left behind a photograph of his brother and the car on a piece of foam board.

Ultimately, visitors left enough three-dimensional artifacts to fill nine boxes, which today are kept at the Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence.

Many of the items are specific in who they honor. The items include several POW-MIA bracelets, worn often in the 1960s and beyond in remembrance of service members considered prisoners of war. One is a testimonial to a nurse, with details about how she died.

Many other artifacts are not as specific: assorted hats, shoes, one teddy bear, a miniature road hazard cone. Their backstories remain untold.

The practice of leaving personal items at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which began almost immediately upon the monument's 1982 dedication, is now a familiar ritual of remembrance. Today the artifacts left in Washington are cared for by the National Park Service, which administers the memorial.

The same phenomenon often occurs during travels of the Wall That Heals, which each year visits about 25 communities across the country. So in Blue Springs, members of a volunteer committee were on hand each night to make notes about the mementoes and, if there was no name, where it had been left.

The formal processing of the nine boxes of materials continues.

Diana Watkins, genealogy center staff archivist and committee volunteer, has insisted the practices of professional archivists be observed. Accordingly, those artifacts left - even the more ephemeral items such as the cigarettes or beer - today are handled only while wearing white cotton gloves. The bottle of beer, in fact, since has been drained to guard against the possible damage that yeast, present in beer, can present to other artifacts.

Materials already processed are stored in acid-free boxes in the genealogy center's rare book room, with its humidity controls and fire suppression system.

The artifacts deserve such treatment, Watkins said, as they represent authentic individual sentiments that collectively form a one-of-a-kind heirloom of remembrance.

Committee members also have agreed that the collection will be kept intact.

"If we keep it as a whole, and we don't take pieces out of it, someone could come in 20 years from now and see how many people were emotionally invested in the exhibit and took the time to actually leave something," Watkins said.

Even the small sample of donors I was able to contact suggests that the act of remembering friends and family members lost in Vietnam represents not a closed book but a still-unfolding personal story that sometimes includes discoveries experienced decades later.

More than 100 other visitors brought photographs to be scanned in as part of the "Put a Face With a Name" initiative, recently announced by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation of Washington, D.C., which coordinates the replica wall's annual itinerary.

Volunteers at Pink Hill Park scanned in the images of veterans whose names are engraved on the wall. Those images now can be accessed over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation website, www.vvmf.org.

The more recent the war, the less information may be available about an individual who served in it.

Midwest Genealogy Center staff members routinely receive requests for information from the military records of relatives. The center holds materials on microfilm such as pension files, service records or muster roles going back perhaps as far as the Revolutionary War.

But patrons wanting to learn about relatives who served during World War II or the Korean or Vietnam wars may find such information more challenging to dig up.

Requests can be submitted to the National Personnel Records Center, a National Archives facility in St. Louis.

But federal records officials adhere to privacy standards that often require the individual requesting such information to be a "direct line descendant" of the person whose records are being requested, said Watkins.

The website for the personnel records center is www.archives.gov/st-louis. However, genealogy center staff members will help patrons navigate the site and download record request forms.