Campaign aims to collect photos of every American who died in Vietnam

From Ny Daily News: Campaign aims to collect photos of every American who died in Vietnam
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly on Tuesday handed a disk with 100 digital photos of New Yorkers killed in combat to organizers of an effort to round up pictures of every American who died in Vietnam.

"We owe it to those that died that we remember," said Kelly, who fought as a Marine in Vietnam.

"We owe it to them that we tell their stories of how and why they gave their lives."

Kelly's photos, along with pictures contributed by Mayor Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano, will be displayed at an education center planned for the National Mall near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Groundbreaking on the $85 million privately funded center is scheduled for November 2012.

Organizers of the effort erected a half-scale replica of the wall in Times Square Tuesday to draw attention to the campaign.

Bloomberg contributed a photo of college buddy Charles (Chuck) Aronhalt Jr., of Cumberland, Md., who like the mayor graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1964. Both were engineering students.

Aronhalt went on to enlist in the Army. Bloomberg said he tried to do the same but was rejected because of flat feet.

The mayor said he talked to Aronhalt's family after his pal was killed in action in South Vietnam in 1967 at age 24. "I made a resolve today [to] track them down and call them again," Bloomberg said.

Organizers of the effort have collected photos of more than 22,000 of the 58,272 people memorialized on the wall. There were 1,366 city residents killed in Vietnam.

"Some people have photographs of these guys from high school," said Jan Scruggs, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. "We're trying to find pictures of them, not so much in military uniforms but the way they were in civilian life as well."

The memorial fund is working with the History Channel to get the word out. But photos of some war heroes with no living relatives may never be located, Scruggs acknowledged.

John Rowan, president of Vietnam Veterans of America, who grew up in Elmhurst, Queens, was determined to find a photo of a slain classmate from Brooklyn Technical High School.

"I had gone through my entire yearbook," Rowan said` of his hunt for a picture of William Bauer, a chemical engineer who grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, and was killed in 1969 at age 22. "There were 1,300 guys in my graduating class."

Bauer's only sibling, a brother, died of leukemia a few years after Bauer's death, Rowan said. When Bauer's parents later died, there was no one left to remember Bauer.

Rowan eventually found a photo.

"This whole thing prompted me to dig him out," Rowan said. "The idea of seeing a face just personalizes it so much more. You can really see how young they were. These are handsome guys taken in the prime of their life."

Cassano plans to contribute a photo of his brother-in-law, Brian Wallace, who died at age 19 in 1967, the same year Cassano returned home from his Army service.

"When I came home in 1967, we were forgotten," Cassano said. "Finally, we are being recognized for what we've done."