398 heroes

Vietnam veterans Art Canales of Santa Fe, left, and Art De Vargas of Albuquerque look over the photos they have collected of New Mexico servicemen killed in Vietnam. Volunteers have spent the past four years collecting the photos for display in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s planned education center in Washington, D.C. Of the 398 N.M. casualties, photos of 395 have been obtained. (Pat Vasquez-Cunningham/Journal)

Army Pfc. Alvin J. Munson, an 18-year-old soldier from Albuquerque who died 45 years ago this month in Vietnam, was the last name on fellow Vietnam veteran Art De Vargas’ list of the 105 Albuquerque servicemen killed in that long and unpopular war.

For the past four years, De Vargas and a handful of volunteers — led by Vietnam veteran Art Canales of Santa Fe — have doggedly pursued photos of all 398 New Mexicans who died in Vietnam.

Their work is part of a nationwide effort by the Vietnam Veterans of America to collect and display photos of all 58,272 U.S. casualties at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s planned $85 million education center in Washington, D.C.

Plans call for the photos to be displayed prominently in the education center on the serviceman’s birthday. For Alvin Munson, that would be May 19.

“That was a hard one to find,” De Vargas said shortly after discovering that a childhood friend of Munson’s had provided a photo of the soldier as a youngster to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the nonprofit that built The Wall and other monuments that comprise the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Vietnam veteran Art Canales of Santa Fe holds a photo of Marine Cpl. Billy McCall Rea of Tijeras, who died Sept. 9, 1968, in Vietnam’s Quang Tri province. Since 2009, Canales and a small group of volunteers have collected photos of 395 of the 398 New Mexico servicemen who were killed in Vietnam. (Pat Vasquez-Cunningham/Journal)

With Munson’s photo, the volunteers have collected 395 of the 398 photos needed to complete New Mexico’s portion of the project. If they can find photos of the last three casualties, New Mexico could be the first state to complete the mission, De Vargas said.

Two photos have eluded them from the start:

• Marine Cpl. Raymond Yazzie of Church Rock, who was born June 1, 1947, and died Feb. 26, 1969
• Army Sgt. Bobby Joe Martinez of Fort Wingate, who was born March 27, 1946, and died May 25, 1967.

Earlier this week, Canales received word that another New Mexico serviceman — Aviation Boatswain 3rd Class Clark D. Franklin of Alamogordo — will be added to The Wall.

Franklin, 25, died April 24, 1966, in a catapult accident aboard the USS Ranger off the South Vietnam coast. The search for his photo is already under way, Canales said.

According to the New Mexico Department of Veterans’ Services, New Mexico ranked No. 1 in the percentage of its population was drafted to fight in Vietnam, and was No. 3 for casualties per capita.

Detective work

When De Vargas signed on to the project four years ago at the request of an old friend from Vallecitos, volunteers had collected just over half the photos needed.

De Vargas was given a list with the names, birth dates and death dates for 69 servicemen whose hometown was listed as Albuquerque. That list eventually grew to 105, mainly because of the military’s definition of “hometown.” The Defense Department often lists a serviceman’s hometown — or home of record — as the place they were inducted, and not necessarily where they grew up.

Because of that, several servicemen listed as being from New Mexico are actually from some other state, De Vargas said, and vice versa. Eventually, De Vargas and his wife Rosemary — working from their North Valley home, collected photos of 105 servicemen from Albuquerque.

“It’s been a learning process for me,” De Vargas said a year after starting his search. “I started with the libraries, obituaries, military records, different websites.” High school yearbooks, he said, are also a valuable resource.

De Vargas soon evolved into an amateur genealogist, archivist, historian and detective. In some cases, he became a new friend to relatives of the young men whose images he sought out.

A photo of Marine Cpl. David Earl Garrapy of Albuquerque rests in a binder as volunteer Art Canales of Santa Fe looks over information about other New Mexicans killed in Vietnam. (Pat Vasquez-Cunningham/Journal)

“Some people were happy to see that somebody was doing this,” De Vargas said. “Others were brought to tears.”

“Sometimes, this is the first time in 40 years that anyone has contacted these families to ask about their loved one, and it brings up a lot of buried memories,” Canales said.

Canales, who did two tours as a Navy “river rat” patrolling Vietnam’s rivers from 1968 to 1970, and De Vargas, who drove 2 1/2-ton trucks in Vietnam’s central highlands from May 1966 to July 1967, are not immune to the exhumation of painful memories.

“Originally, I didn’t want anything to do with this project,” Canales said with a laugh, adding that he feared it would exacerbate the post-traumatic stress disorder he deals with. But he knew it was an important mission, so he volunteered to troubleshoot a few computer problems encountered by volunteer searchers with the Vietnam Veterans of America chapter in Santa Fe.

“The next thing I knew, I was there running the thing,” he said.

New Mexico’s volunteers — including Jerry Martinez and Henry Urioste of Santa Fe and Melvin Martinez of Chimayó — were sending in so many photos to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation, officials there asked Canales to set up a model for searchers from other states.

Based on the foundation’s latest figures, New Mexico is far ahead of most other states in collecting their photos. No state has completed its mission.

Armijo to Munson

The first photo De Vargas found was of Army Pfc. Frank Charles Armijo, 18, whose daughter was just 9 months old when he was killed in Vietnam.

Based on De Vargas’ research, Armijo went to school in Santa Fe but moved to Albuquerque after high school. He worked for the city briefly before entering the Army. Armijo had been in Vietnam for only two months when he was killed in Tay Ninh province on Aug. 15, 1969.

The last name on De Vargas’ list was Alvin Munson. Despite years of digging, Munson’s photo eluded De Vargas until earlier this month when he found it on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund website, www.vvmf.org.

The black-and-white photo, probably shot in Munson’s Albuquerque neighborhood, shows a tow-headed young boy in a T-shirt kneeling beside a dog.

Like De Vargas, Munson was a truck driver in Vietnam’s central highlands. He arrived “in country” a month after De Vargas left, according to De Vargas’ research.

Munson was born May 19, 1949, in Albuquerque where his father, Leo A. Munson, was employed at Sandia Base, which eventually became part of Kirtland Air Force Base. The family lived on Marble Place NE, a few blocks northeast of Eubank and Lomas.

Alvin attended Jackson Junior High School, now Jackson Middle School on Indian School NE, and joined the Army in August 1966. He arrived in Vietnam on Aug. 6, 1967, and was assigned to the 88th Transportation Company.

On March 13, 1968, Munson was driving a group of combat engineers to a site near Pleiku, a city in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, where they were to construct a helicopter landing zone. The convoy came under heavy attack and in the ensuing fight, Munson was among 13 soldiers killed and 34 wounded. He was 18 years old.

Munson is buried in Santa Fe National Cemetery, and his name appears on The Wall in Panel 44E, Line 39.

Despite their initial hesitance to take on the photos project, Canales and De Vargas said they’re glad they stuck with it.

“It’s to honor these poor kids who answered the call of their country and ended up giving their lives for it,” De Vargas said in explaining why he spent four years on the project. “I sometimes wonder whether I might have unknowingly crossed paths with some of these guys while I was in Vietnam.”

“We just never gave up on it,” Canales said. “These are our brothers, and we don’t want them to be forgotten.”

Call for photos

Volunteers are still looking for photos of New Mexico servicemen killed in Vietnam. The photos will be displayed in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s planned $85 million education center in Washington, D.C.

In some cases, volunteers have obtained only poor-quality photos, and are looking for the best photos available. Anyone with information about these servicemen — or their relatives, friends, neighbors, etc. — can call Art De Vargas at 897-0926 or Art Canales at 505-986-8384.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal