I am helping find the last missing pictures for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC
I was a "soldier boy" and don't know a frigate from a carrier. Lady in Hawaii has asked me to help her with the last few missing in Louisiana. Gil Lester Carter being the name I'm interested in.
BUT my experience looking for pictures has caused me to realize that army aviation unit were extraordinarily close and kept good contact with one another after the war. EVERY time I go looking for an army KIA from an aviation unit I respectfully ask them to look up all their KIAs to make sure each has a picture at the Vietnam Memorial. They often have others missing pictures and they move to fill those missing pictures fairly quickly.
This is you business and not mine, but I wanted you to know while people are still alive to jump in and complete the mission. One in every three men awarded the Vietnam Service Medal has now passed so time IS running out.
1. Does anyone know if there was a Cruise Book for Helicopter Attack Sq -3 for 1967?
2. Can you survey your membership for a picture of Carter?
3. If there is no one with a picture, may I very respectfully ask for ANY kind of clues/tips/leads about Carter?
Please read this letter sent to a lady thought to be his mother, likely no longer alive
Dana
Kwist
6345
Tuckerman Lane
Colorado
Springs, CO 80918 ( [hidden email]
) 719-306-4632
November
10, 2017
Roberta
C. Sturdivant
5914
Southwind
Houston,
TX 77033
Dear
Ms Sturdivant,
I wonder if you are the
mother of, or related in any way to the late United States Navy Aviation
Machines Mate Gill Lester Carter who was killed in action in the Vietnam War on
August 17, 1967?
This letter is sent to,
very respectfully, ask you for your help locating a photograph (or even a
newspaper image) of Gil Carter. The
photo will be posted to “The Wall of Faces” as a portion of “The Wall” on the
mall in Washington, DC. If you go to that website you will recognize that
there is no image posted for Gil Carter.
This letter is directed to you based
on a study of the names of people who appear are related.
Like all who gave their
lives in that war, Gil Carter’s face deserves to be placed alongside the
thousands of others now at the Vietnam Memorial for all Americans to see.
Lacking a photo could I, very respectfully, ask you to help find out where he
attended high school, to look for a yearbook picture and help find people who
might still be able and willing to help in the hunt for a picture?
I am attaching an
updated online version of a New Orleans Advocate article from January 14, 2017
that explains the nature of Ms Hoehn’s campaign. When Ms Hoehn began to
focus on Louisiana in January 2017 she was looking for 280 of the 885 lost from
Louisiana. Today that number of missing
pictures is 44 and Gil Carter is one of them.
Ms Hoehn lives in Hawaii and, now that my home state of Colorado has a
complete set of pictures, she has asked me to help her.
Please watch this
youtube video that deals with the subject of the Wall Of Faces:
https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=7BHBU5HJW8o
For more information
about Ms Hoehn, please look up her name on the internet where you will see many
articles about her. Her campaign does
not solicit money or advertisements: just pictures that are immediately sized
and touched up then hung on the Wall of Faces for all of America to see at the
Vietnam Memorial. In the process her
campaign has completed state sets in South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Hawaii,
Nevada, Oregon, Alaska, Utah, Colorado, Washington state, Nebraska, Kansas and
recently Arizona. Hopefully the state of
Louisiana will soon follow.
If a photo is located it
can be sent to Ms Hoehn at [hidden email] or to my email [hidden email].
Sincerely,
Dana Kwist
Enclosure:
New
Orleans Advocate Jan 14, 2017 updated online article
Woman
on mission to help 'Wall of Faces' project put faces with names of soldiers
killed, missing in Vietnam
BY FAIMON A.
ROBERTS III JAN 14, 2017 - 6:30
">
Janna Hoehn looks at pictures of Vietnam veterans that she has
collected as part of her work to help the Wall of Faces project by the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial Fund. The project seeks to put a picture with every name
etched on the wall.
Harvey Watkins Booker is a name like 58,000
others (NOTE: Booker’s name, used here, is merely an example and Gil Carter could just as easily have been used as the
example) : inscribed in the
black granite wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Booker, who was from New Orleans, was killed
on April 26, 1968, the deadliest year of the war, during a gun battle in Long
An province.
And while Booker's name has been memorialized, his
image has not, at least not yet. He is among more than 8,000 soldiers — 279 from Louisiana — either
killed or missing in Vietnam whose picture has so far eluded the volunteers of
a project called the "Wall of Faces," which
is trying to match every name on the wall with a photo.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is
raising money to build an educational center near the Washington, D.C.,
memorial that will include photos of the slain. In the meantime, it has
established an online “Wall of Faces.” The site — vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/ —
also provides other basic information about each deceased veteran and provides
a way for friends and loved ones to post remembrances.
Janna Hoehn is one of the volunteers seeking
photos.
This is something of a mission for Hoehn,
who eight years ago visited the memorial and, in a spontaneous act of
commemoration, did a rubbing of the inscribed name of a randomly chosen
soldier: Gregory John Crossman.
After she returned to Hawaii, she decided to track
down Crossman’s family and give them the rubbing from the wall, but she
couldn’t find them. She enlisted the help of a cousin, and after several
months, they located Crossman’s family and sent them the rubbing.
Some
time later, Hoehn saw a news story about efforts to put pictures with every
name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. She sent in a photo she had gotten
of Crossman and was later contacted and asked to help locate pictures of fallen
soldiers from Maui.
Hoehn pored over phone listings, skimmed
newspaper obituaries and traveled to high schools to flip through yearbooks.
She met siblings, children and sometimes even parents of soldiers who died in
America’s most controversial war.
Still, the effort lagged.
But a story in her local newspaper gave it
a boost. Pictures started pouring in from around the country.
“That’s when I realized how many people
read the newspaper online that have moved away,” she said.In six months, she
was able to track down the 42 missing pictures from Hawaii.
But Hoehn decided to keep going. She
started looking for the missing pictures of soldiers from her California
hometown and then broadened her search from there.
Six years later, Hoehn has helped locate
all the photos for soldiers from Washington, Oregon and Idaho and has launched
efforts in several other states, working her way from west to east. In all, she
estimates that she has helped collect more than 4,000 photos.
She has ongoing efforts in Texas, Oklahoma
and Missouri, but after completing Kansas a couple of months ago, she decided
to tackle Louisiana.
The parish with the most missing photos is
Orleans, with 35. Caddo Parish has 29, Calcasieu and Ouachita 17 each.
Tracking down the photos is not easy. Often
the hometown listed in the official Department of Defense records is the town
where the soldier enlisted, rather than where they were born or grew up,
meaning searches of local databases come up empty.
Also, many of the casualties in Vietnam
were too young to have their own children, so their photos often ended up in
the hands of siblings and then got passed down to nephews and nieces who never
knew the fallen soldier. “At some point, they don’t keep the pictures
anymore,” Hoehn said.
Also, the emotional toll of the war meant
some pictures may never have been kept in the first place, she said. “For some,
it was too much to keep a photo around,” Hoehn said.
Hoehn concedes that her project may never
be complete, but every time she gets discouraged, she thinks of Jack McKinnon.
McKinnon was from Santa Cruz, California,
or at least that’s what it said on his military records. But Hoehn wasn’t able
to find any record of him or his family. A local historian had also tried to
locate McKinnon, without success. Then a
story ran in the local newspaper, and about two weeks later Hoehn got a call
from a man in Indiana. He was a
long-haul trucker and had happened to be in Santa Cruz on the day the article
ran. Jack McKinnon was his brother.
The
Wall of Faces will be a part of an underground gallery near the Vietnam
Memorial (sometimes called The Wall) on the mall in Washington, DC.
">
The campaign to build the Education
Center at The Wall is an effort to build an educational and honorific component
to one of the nation’s most powerful and moving memorials.
The Education Center at The Wall
will:
- Put a
face to every one of the more than 58,000 names listed on The Wall
- Share
some of the hundreds of thousands of objects left at The Wall by families,
military comrades, and others over more than three decades.
- Provide
a historical account of the events that took place on the battlefield and
the homefront during the Vietnam Era.
- Tell
the story of The Wall
.
The campaign to build the Education
Center at The Wall is well under way. The land has been appropriated. Final
design approvals are in hand.
With each passing day, we lose more
Vietnam veterans. Their stories must be preserved and told now so that future
generations never forget the lessons of the Vietnam era.
There
were 58,318 lost in the Vietnam War.
Most have a picture to represent themselves but Gil Carter does
not, so instead a “place holder” image is used that looks like this:
">
The entire
Carter family gave a lot to America and I hope you will agree that Gil Carter
deserves to be remembered with more than a “cartoon” style image of himself.
To
verify the accuracy of this letter: 1. Go to the internet and type in “vvmf”,
2. Hit “Wall of Faces”, 3. Activate “Advanced Search”, 4. Type in “Gil Carter”,
then hit “Louisiana” and you will see the above image in the place of an actual
photograph.
_
">
Artist’s rending of the
inside of the future Education Center that will serve as a gallery to display
pictures of the men lost in the Vietnam War as a part of the Vietnam Memorial
on the mall in Washington, DC
Locked
CARTER - Gill Lester Carter - Alexandria LA Rapides Parish.doc (1M) 
