3 Listed on Viet Memorial Alive, Well

Two of the soldiers whose names are etched in granite with the list of dead on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are still alive, the Army said today, and apparently a similar error was made in a third case.

Lt. Col. Keith Schneider, an Army spokesman, said the service concluded that “a coding error somewhere down the line” caused military records to incorrectly list the date two Army privates were injured as the dates they died.

The error was perpetuated when the names of about 58,000 Americans killed in the Vietnam War were provided by the Defense Department for listing on the face of the memorial when it was built in 1982.

The cases of former soldiers Robert Bedker and Willard D. Craig were discovered in 1985, Schneider said. Both are from Virginia, with no hometown listed on military records, he said.

A third case arose this week in preparations for Veterans Day observances Wednesday. Darrall E. Lausch, 41, of Baroda, Mich., said he learned his name was on the memorial when he saw a list of men from Michigan killed in the war that appeared in the Detroit News last Sunday.

“It don’t bother me,” Lausch said in a telephone interview. “Naturally, I think a little about it. . . . If they want to leave it (on the memorial), it don’t matter.”