One more call to duty: To preserve stories of Vietnam War

By Jim Anderson  jim.anderson@startribune.com

Pfc. Kerry Gossman had a hunch. And it wasn't a good one.

"Mom," reads the carefully preserved letter, written in pencil in the fall of 1970 on a tiny piece of paper, "I have a feeling that I won't be coming back alive from Vietnam. I don't know why, but something keeps saying 'you won't make it.' "

Gossman's ominous final letter home proved tragically prescient — the farm kid with the broad grin from little Whalan in southern Minnesota, who had pressed for permission to enlist in the Army at 17, was killed in action soon after.

For Herb Reckinger, Gossman's story, and those of the nearly 1,100 other Minnesotans killed in Vietnam, is deeply personal. And for nearly two years those stories have moved him to crisscross the state — sometimes with a detective's dogged determination — to complete a mission to collect and preserve them as part of a project that will soon be incorporated into a new Education Center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.

Reckinger, 62, of Cottage Grove, is part of a small group of volunteers in Minnesota working with the "Faces Never Forgotten" project, which aims to connect photos, faces and stories with the more than 58,000 names etched on the memorial, known simply as The Wall. It also will include a selection of the more than 400,000 poignant mementos left there, and a war timeline.

The Wall is the very incarnation of somber, black and powerful, with its row on row of names giving a stark sense of the enormity of the sacrifice exacted by the war. It's enough to drive strong men to their knees. But the project adds context to the names etched in stone, Reckinger said.

Connie Thedens still grieves when she talks about her brother, short of stature but with broad shoulders, who loved scooping up his little sisters in his arms.

When Reckinger paid her a call in Elgin, Minn., she not only provided him with photos, but put her graphic designing skills to work and made a flier that the volunteers use to explain their project to ­families like hers.

"It means a lot," she said of the project. "I think a lot of people, especially younger people, don't know what [Vietnam] was. And it also gives people a better sense of what those who were killed left behind. It's heart-wrenching."

Thedens was only 5 years old when the two sergeants from the Army came up the long driveway to deliver the grim news about her brother. With a son now serving in the Air Force, she now has an even deeper understanding of the anguish military families endure.

Reckinger's sense of mission is driven by stories like Thedens', and he has come to know many of them well.

Or Ronald M. Cloud, of the Red Lake Nation, namesake of the local veterans post in Ponemah.

And Bernard Terhorst of St. Paul, who went to Cretin High School, whose wife was pregnant with their sixth child when he was killed in 1969. In a poignant photo, Terhorst is seen carrying his small daughter up to bed.

It's an emotional journey for Reckinger, who traveled all the way to Oregon to visit Terhorst's grave. He tracks his progress in finding families on a large cardboard-mounted highway map, festooned with paper strips with each veteran's name. The volunteers are down to the last few dozen names on their list, focused mainly around the Twin Cities.

"I've talked to everybody. I've talked to a lot of spouses, brothers, sisters. I've talked to daughters and sons, and quite a few nieces and nephews," Reckinger said. "But one thing, I'm glad I haven't talked to a mother. What do you say to them?"

Reckinger served five years in the Naval Reserve in the early 1970s, and still struggles with knowing that he never endured what other veterans did. Getting to know dozens of families of veterans has been a humbling and profound experience.

As difficult as the work can be at times, it is also uplifting, he said.

"I don't want to say it makes me happy, because none of it is anything to be happy about," he said. "But it's some kind of feeling."

The project, he said, grows more important to future generations as firsthand memories of the Vietnam War, which played such a dominant role in the lives of a generation of Americans, slides into history.

"You try not to let it get too personal, because it can tear you up, you know?" Reckinger said. But it clearly does, and he admits his wife sometimes worries. His sense of duty keeps pushing him to complete this self-appointed task.

"There's an end to this," he said, and when that time comes, "I'll still do my thing on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Veteran's Day. But I'll always remember these guys."