Going to the Wall to Honor Her Father : Woman Fights to Get Vietnam-Era Veteran’s Name on Memorial

Elaine Roach was 8 years old when her father, Navy pilot Lt. Harold S. Roach Jr., became one of the early casualties of the Vietnam War.

While on a mission in the South China Sea, Roach died in a plane crash Oct. 2, 1964. He was 31.

Today, Elaine Roach of La Habra has her own mission: to win for her father the honor and recognition given to other dead veterans of that war.

The challenge began last June when Roach went to Washington to observe Father’s Day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

But when she looked for his name on the black granite wall, it wasn’t there.

“I cried a lot,” she said, recalling that day. “I saw the other men being honored and my dad gave his life too. It’s really not fair.”

Disappointed, she thought the omission was a mistake and would be easily fixed. Navy officials told her they would investigate. Before leaving Washington, Roach tried to learn all she could about her father’s death and began what she now calls the too-long and frustrating process of bringing the military bureaucracy in step with reality.

“In one week’s time, I gave them all this information” about her father, she said. “He was obviously in the war zone. . . . He definitely was killed serving his country, yet they won’t confirm any of that.”

Navy officials confirm that they are investigating the case and that they have been asked to add Lt. Roach’s name to the memorial. Denise Vigneault, a spokeswoman for the Navy, said the Bureau of Naval Personnel is continuing to research records and that an answer is expected soon.

“They paid us his pension, they gave him two Vietnam service medals, but they won’t put his name on the wall,” Roach, 36, said recently in an interview at her home, where she lives with her husband, Dwayne, son Joel, 9, and stepson Kris, 16.

Roach said Navy officials she has spoken to recently told her they are “looking toward a favorable answer.”

Pat Montgomery, Roach’s mother, who lives in Bonsall, northeast of Oceanside, said the mistake is painful and that the slow response by the Navy is disturbing.

“I feel his name should be on the wall,” said Montgomery, who raised the couple’s three children after her husband’s death and has since remarried. “He died for his country in that war. . . . To me there’s no question, no doubt. I feel the Navy owes me an explanation why they’re not putting his name up there.”

Jan Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the private group that built the memorial, said Roach’s father fits the criteria for inclusion on the memorial. Eligible are all servicemen and servicewomen who died in battle or from non-hostile or accidental causes, while serving in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos or adjacent waters, and died between 1959 and 1975.

“It doesn’t seem proper to draw the line where this name is concerned,” Scruggs said, noting, however, that the inquiry is not unique.

Each year, the memorial fund is contacted by many people who want the name of their loved one placed on the memorial--and over the years, military officials have corrected names omitted by error. At its dedication 10 years ago, the memorial had 57,939 names. Now it has 58,183 names, he said.

Five more names, as well as the possibility of others, are due to be added on the memorial in October, 1993. “Hopefully she’ll come in October of ’93 and see her father’s name,” Scruggs said.

Despite the difficulty with military officials, the day after Veterans Day, Roach won a small victory when her father’s name was added to the traveling replica of the memorial during its weeklong visit to Orange County.

“Even if I don’t have it in (Washington), it’s on the wall here--and I have a name to look at,” Roach said.

In recalling her trip to Washington, Roach said she traveled with a group of others whose loved ones had died in the war. Hoping the trip would be the end of an odyssey, instead, the discovery that her father’s name was missing turned it into the beginning of a crusade. She spent the week searching library archives and talking to military officials.

Roach said she learned that her father was sent to serve in the South China Sea aboard the aircraft carrier Kearsarge. Part of his mission was to provide anti-submarine patrol for other American ships, she said.

After his death, Roach said the family was told by a Navy chaplain that Roach’s S2F tracker aircraft went down after takeoff because of a mechanical failure.

She said his military records do not mention the plane accident, in which two other servicemen were also killed and whose names are not on the memorial. Roach also hopes to have their names added to the memorial as well.

The loss of her father at such an early age has caused her emotional problems, she said.

“I will never have a dad,” she said. “It’s a real sadness that I have to learn to live with. For 28 years, I hadn’t let my dad die and now I need to let him be dead, because he is.”

To help her deal with the emotional turmoil of her father’s death in that war, two years ago she joined Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s Sons and Daughters In Touch, a nationwide group whose members’ parents died in Vietnam. She said the group has helped her to deal with her pain.

“I finally found people who understood the feelings I had,” Roach said. “A lot of us sons and daughters, we made them such heroes. I look at my dad as being so perfect that I kept trying to be good enough so he would be proud of me. But it’s hard (for me) to measure up to this perfectionist view.”

One reason Roach had taken the trip to Washington was because the wall is known as a symbol of healing and reconciliation. It was a way to confront her feelings, a way to begin to grieve.

Now, Roach said, she won’t be at rest until her father’s name is on the memorial.

“I want the whole family to come together; his death broke the family apart. . . . It was too painful to feel,” she said.

Roach said she also hopes his name is added while her father’s parents, who are in their 80s, are alive.

“This will be a chance for us to come together and honor him, share our pain and let him rest in peace. That’s my real dream.”