For Memorial Day, in honor of those who gave all

[BackInTex]

Simply post the names of those you knew, family members, or family members of someone you know, who died while serving our country along with a brief note of when, where, and if known how. Let their stories be on our hearts and mind this weekend.

I'll start:

Captain T. Cliff Bland, USAF - Killed in Action Jan. 31, 1991.
Shot down over Kuwait during the first Gulf War. Cliff was a fraternity brother of mine at Texas A&M. He was co-piloting the AC-130 gunship providing cover fire, deep in enemy territory, for marines on the ground. Even while taking on hostile fire Cliff and his crew continued to circle the position where the marines were to continue protecting them. 13 service men lost their lives along with Cliff.

Captain John E. Simpson, USAF - Killed in Actions Sep. 2, 1958.
Shot down over Soviet Armenia by Russian Mig-17s. In 1997 the NSA finallay declassified, or admitted, the Captain Simpson's plane was on a spy mission over Turkey and strayed into Soviet airspace. Captain Simpson's 3 1/2 month old son, Mark, is a high school classmate of mine. Mark went on and became a pilot in the USAF and retired as a major several years ago.

Major Norman Alexius Leikam, US Army - Killed October 23, 1965
Major Leikam was the father of a former co-worker and friend of mine, Mike Leikam. Major Leikam was serving in country in Vietnam at the time of his murder. I do not have any specifics of the case, I just know he is counted as one of the casualties and is on the wall in D.C.

[Bob Juch]

Ray Wilbert Etter was born on 3 Oct 1930, in Warren, Pennsylvania. He was a PFC in the U.S. Army, Company A, 13th Engineer Combat Battalion, 7th Infantry Division. He was in the Hoengsong massacre in South Korea, 13 Feb 1951, and declared POW/MIA. He was my biological father.

[themanintheseersuckersuit]

Megan Malia Leilani McClung (April 14, 1972–December 6, 2006) was the first female United States Marine Corps officer killed in combat during the Iraq War. Major McClung was serving as a public affairs officer in Al Anbar Province, Iraq when she was killed.[1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_M ... ung-01.jpg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_McClung


Not related to anyone I know, but her death and sacrifice touched me.

[silverscreenselect]

Sergeant Howard Roth, my father, was wounded shortly after D-Day. He was in an Engineering company and was clearing a minefield. He and the man next to him got too close together, and that man stepped on a mine. He was killed instantly, and my father took a lot of shrapnel and lost a leg. Despite that, he recovered sufficiently to meet and marry my mother and have a child (me). But they never got all the shrapnel out, and it eventually caused a heart attack, killing him while he was still in his 30's (and I was less than two years old at the time). Ironically, he had been in the Pacific earlier, contracted malaria and was sent stateside to recover. He could have remained stateside but chose to go back to Europe.

Corporal Sidney Roth, my uncle whom I was named after. He was serving in New York state in a supply unit shortly after the war began. He was driving a truck when he saw a house on fire and a woman trying to get her possessions out. He stopped and tried to help and somehow touched a live power line (which is what probably caused the fire) and was electrocuted. Jimmy Cannon, the well known sportswriter, was serving in the same unit and regularly wrote articles for his paper about his experiences. He devoted a column to my uncle a few days after his death, and that column and others were collected in book form and published as The Sergeant Says. I still have a copy of that book.

[Beebs52]

Thank you to all. My dad served in the Navy, WWII, grandfather WWI, both lived. My broinlaw was a fighter pilot in Nam, and is alive and well, but listed as MIA on the website, which is amusing, as it were, to my sis and niece. Have wounded warrior friends, but realize this is about those who gave their life. God bless all.

[mellytu74]

http://www.pvvm.org/heroes

The City of Philadelphia had more than 640 men die in Vietnam. Of the six high schools that lost the most attendees/graduates in Vietnam, four were from Philadelphia -- Father Judge, Northeast Catholic, Cardinal Dougherty and Edison, which lost more than any single high school in the country, 64.

From Roman Catholic HS, Boonie's HS, comes Pat Ward. Whenever he walked into a classroom, everyone would chant in unison, "Paddy Ward! Paddy Ward!"

From the Philadelphia Vietnam Veterans Memorial website:

Pat Ward overcame a childhood bone affliction to become an active teenager and athlete, He was voted "most popular student" in his senior year at Roman Catholic High School, sang in the glee club, ran track and was a guard on the varsity football team. "It was all he lived for. Everything was Roman, Roman, Roman," his policeman father recalled. Ward was working at ITE Circuit Breaker Co. when lie was drafted into the Army in November 1966. He loved children, and frequently sent home from Vietnam pictures of children living in an orphanage he had "adopted." His family had just mailed off a box of supplies for the orphanage when notified that Ward had died on Aug. 22, 1968. The specialist four was 21 and had flown more than 25 combat missions as a helicopter gunner for the 92nd Assault Helicopter Company, 17th Aviation Group, 1st Aviation Brigade. He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star. Ward was survived by his parents, three brothers and two sisters, A corner of a neighborhood park at 24th and Aspen streets in Fairmount is dedicated in his memory, while St. Francis Xavier Grade School, which he attended as a young boy, presents the Patty Ward Memorial Trophy each year.

His namesake, Under Secretary of the Army Patrick Murphy, said in the Philadelphia Inquirer that Pat Ward was his guardian angel.

And one from me ... my friend, Jimmy Reinhardt. He was a couple of years older than I but he was our Enoch Snow and The Kralahome in the King and I.

From the Philadelphia Daily News' series profiling as many of the local boys who died as possible:

As teenagers, Reinhardt and his brother, Steve, were a popular song-and-dance team in theater groups, including those at the Cardinal Dougherty High School, the Germantown Boys Club and La Salle College Music Theater. Following graduation, James worked as a clerk for 30 months in the Acme supermarket at Chew and Chelten Avenues. He was drafted into the Army in June 1969, and planned to return to the theater in a behind-the-scenes capacity when he got out of the service. The 26-year-old sergeant, a rifleman and machine gunner, often wrote home from Vietnam about the beauty of the country. He was assigned to Company C of the 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division. Reinhardt died on April 13, 1970.

[silvercamaro]

I'll add my memorial to Max, who was the first person from my high school class to be killed in war. I didn't know him well. He wasn't particularly inclined to excel in academics, he wan't particularly popular, he wasn't particularly good-looking, and he wasn't an athlete. I defined him -- then and now -- as a nice guy with a ready smile, who always said "hi" in the hallway. I am not even sure he and I ever had a real conversation. Without looking it up in an old yearbook, I can't even remember his last name. What I remember is that within three months of our high school graduation, he was shot and killed by sniper fire in Vietnam at age 18. I also remember my horror and sorrow that his life had been taken before he'd had a chance to live more of it.

Max, I remember you with affection on this Memorial Day. I am sorry that we never had a chance to have that "real" conversation at a class reunion decades later.

[Spock]

David Day-25-Feb 21, 2005. One of 3 guardsmen from small town Western Minnesota that were killed that day in Baghdad. I did not know him personally, but I know a lot of people who knew him.

He married his high school sweetheart just days before he left.

He was a police officer in the suburbs of the Twin Cities and I was driving back home that day from the Twin Cities and I met tons of police cars heading back after the funeral. Took me a little while to figure out what was going on.

[T_Bone0806]

Thanks for starting this thread, BiT, and thanks to everyone for posting your stories. They have touched my heart.

Most of all, thanks to all who have served and given everything they had to give.