What’s in a Soldier’s Misspelled Name? A Lack of Honor

Just a vowel. A simple little “i” in a name where a simple little “a” should be. One letter off. You couldn’t call it a gross misspelling.

Unless, that is, it’s your son’s name up there on the Vietnam War Memorial wall. Unless it’s your son who, at 19, died on a faraway trail in 1970 serving his country and deserves to be properly remembered with other fallen comrades.

That’s how it seems to Carmen Rocha, a retired waitress who hasn’t asked anything of her government except that it spell her son’s name right on the Vietnam Memorial.

On the wall, Robert Salas Rocha is memorialized as Robert Silas Rocha. Adding to the family’s sadness over the misspelling is that Salas is Carmen’s maiden name.

“It seems like his name is not on the wall,” Carmen says of the son and brother the family called Bobby. “It has always bothered me. When friends see it, they say, ‘It’s not your name.’ ”

The Rochas have been told that only gross misspellings on the wall, which has more than 58,000 names, are corrected. If the correction can’t be made where the name was originally inscribed, there’s space to add names elsewhere on the wall.

For some reason, that hasn’t been done.

The family hasn’t made a crusade over it. In fact, after being rebuffed several years ago, the Rochas basically gave up.

Enter Tom Umberg, former Orange County assemblyman and a colonel in the Army Reserves. While at the Army Reserve office in Los Alamitos recently, he saw dog tags hanging in the office of Rosie Rocha, an Army master sergeant and Bobby Rocha’s sister.

When Rocha told Umberg, who is also a lawyer, the story of the misspelled name, he promised to do something about it. So far, he’s heard the same reason for why the mistake can’t be fixed.

I ask if he accepts that. “I don’t,” Umberg says. “My view is that his name is not on the wall. Until the name Robert Salas Rocha appears up there, this country hasn’t honored him.”

Talking about her son isn’t a subject Carmen Rocha readily embraces. Thirty-one years later, she can do it, but the words don’t always come easily.

Bobby Rocha, who followed an older brother’s footsteps and volunteered for the Army, had been in Vietnam three months when he and three buddies were killed after one stepped on a mine.

As we sit talking in El Cholo, the venerable Los Angeles restaurant where she worked for 37 years and where she learned of her son’s death on that November day in 1970, Carmen, now 70, says she put her son’s possessions away for years and never took them out.

One of the things she shows me, though, is a large oil painting sent home with her son’s body. It was done by one of Bobby Rocha’s buddies and depicts the young soldier with his hand on the shoulder of a Vietnamese boy he had befriended--the boy Bobby Rocha had written about to his mother, asking her to send clothes for him.

Carmen has never been to Washington to see the actual wall. The family learned of the misspelled name when they saw a scaled-down replica of the original that tours the country.

Carmen supports Umberg’s effort to revive the issue, even if it brings back painful memories--and even if it fails.

“I’m prepared,” she says. “He’s never out of my mind and heart. I get up in the morning and say, ‘Good morning, Bobby,’ and when I go to bed at night I say, ‘Good night, Bobby.’ It’s not something you forget. It’s just easier to talk about now.”

Names are added every year to the wall, says Alan Greilsamer, a spokesman for the Vietnam Memorial. Last year, six were added; the year before that, two.

“The policy has been over the years that if there has been a gross misspelling, that if the name is absolutely unidentifiable, we’d place it on again,” Greilsamer says.

As for fixing the Salas-Silas mistake where it now is on the wall, Greilsamer says, “We don’t know of any way to do this. We could change an ‘f’ to an ‘e,’ but if you’re starting with an ‘i’ and trying to make an ‘a,’ I don’t think that can be done.”

A decision on adding a name to the wall, he says, has to go through the Defense Department. Greilsamer won’t speculate on the Rocha family’s chances.

Umberg jokingly threatens to “bring out a division of lawyers to fix this thing.”

More seriously, he says, “I think it’s unbelievable they would say it’s not a gross misspelling. Her last name is Salas. Silas is close, but if you give a son [in combat], you deserve to have his name spelled correctly. . . . As an Army officer, I’d say when you ask young people to make those kinds of sacrifices, I think the only thing they ask in return is that if they should make the ultimate sacrifice, we’ll appropriately honor them.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.