24-hour Taunton vigil remembers missing Vietnam soldiers

By Charles Winokoor, Staff Writer
GateHouse News Service
Posted Sep 20, 2009

Taunton — As far as the Taunton Area Vietnam Veterans Association is concerned, there is no statute of limitations on memory.

At noon on Sunday, at the site of the city’s Vietnam War memorial on Church Green, TAVA members concluded their annual POW/MIA Remembrance Vigil, a 24-hour event that has been held there since 1983.

Starting at noon on Saturday, at half-hour intervals, 38 replicas of soldiers’ dog tags — each inscribed with the names of Massachusetts soldiers who went missing while serving in Indochina during the Vietnam War — were placed on a bamboo fence.

Individual names, rank, date missing and hometown of each soldier were also read aloud. A miniature-scale “wall” — inspired by the Vietnam memorial in Washington D.C. — was illuminated to passersby overnight with an improvised “eternal flame.”

It’s been 36 years since the last combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam. But to date 1,731 Americans are still listed by the U.S. Department of Defense as missing — most in what was then South and North Vietnam, and almost 400 in Laos and Cambodia.

The point of this past weekend’s vigil was simply to never forget.“We need to keep it current in people’s minds,” said Leslie Spousta, TAVA president.Spousta, 80, initially enlisted in the Army in 1946 and served 24 years, more than 20 of which were with the U.S. Air Force. He said that he served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969 at the Cam Ranh Bay aerial port.

Spousta said the purpose of the Taunton vigil — during which a handful of dedicated association members rested and slept in a tent — is to hold the government accountable for retrieving the remains of dead soldiers, but also to investigate any possibility that a soldier could still be alive in Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia.

Fellow member David Levesque, 60, who served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, said chances are slim to none that any soldier previously held as a prisoner of war, or who went missing for any other reason, is actually alive today.

But he said that the efforts of TAVA and the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia have over the years been effective — with more and more soldiers’ remains being identified and returned for proper burial on U.S. soil.

Levesque noted that the number of Bay State soldiers listed as missing because of the Vietnam War has dropped from 65 when TAVA began their annual vigil 26 years ago to 38 today.

“Everyone wants to have their relative returned for burial, for closure,” Levesque said, adding that Taunton is one of the few communities in the commonwealth that holds such an event year in and year out.He also noted that the Silver City was one of the first cities or towns in the state to have built a permanent memorial for Vietnam-era veterans.

“Taunton’s pretty unique, it’s always been on the leading edge that way,” Levesque said.

Sunday’s event was attended by Mayor Charles Crowley and other city officials. During a short speech at the podium, Crowley stressed the historic significance of Taunton residents who have served in previous military conflicts. Taunton, Crowley said, “has a tradition of patriotism” dating back to the Colonial period.

Crowley noted William Ellery Walker who, after being released from the Andersonville Civil War prison, came back to the city and started the Weir Stove Company, and the late Rudy DeSilva, a Korean war prisoner who went on to serve a single term as Taunton’s mayor in the early 1970s.

Also attending the conclusion of the vigil were Frances and Keavin Duffy, the parents of Shane Duffy, the Taunton Army sergeant who was killed in Iraq in 2008, and Jane Van Gyzen, mother of Marine Lance Cpl. John Van Gyzen, who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

According to government statistics, among the 38 missing soldiers from Massachusetts none were from Taunton, but two were from Brockton and one each from Middleboro and North Easton.

Ferdnand Medeiros, 86, said that he was there on Church Green as a reminder that “everything isn’t free, you have to fight for it.”

Medeiros said that he was a Private First Class and part of the 1st Ranger Battalion, sometimes called Darby’s Rangers, when he was captured behind enemy lines in Italy during World War II.

He said the Germans put him to work on a farm in East Prussia: “That’s where I learned to milk cows and do all the things you do on a farm,” he said with a smile.The Vietnam vigil is important, Medeiros said, because “it’s a memory thing” that highlights soldiers in any war who have sacrificed their all for the benefit of others.

During Sunday’s ceremony, 16-year-old Michaela Gordon sang two songs — “Travelin’ Soldier” by the Dixie Chicks and “God Bless America.” She said it was the third year in which she sang for the event on the Green.

A contingent of Taunton High School’s Air Force Junior ROTC also participated.

This weekend’s vigil happened to fall less than a week after President Barack Obama posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor to Raynham Sgt. First Class Jared C. Monti, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2006.