Vietnam: the sixteen

1965 – 1975

The count and its cross-check: Mishawaka's Vietnam death roll is sixteen names. The count is taken from the Virtual Wall's Indiana roll, which lists the state's dead under their official home-of-record cities; the sixteen below stand under the heading MISHAWAKA. The same sixteen are the Mishawaka share of St. Joseph County's fifty-four Vietnam dead as South Bend's pass verified that figure three ways — against the Defense Department's casualty file extract and the Wall's two renderings — dividing as thirty-one for South Bend, sixteen for Mishawaka, six for Walkerton, and one for Osceola. The two passes agree name for name in the total, and the sixteen are printed here whole.

The sixteen: Staff Sergeant Ivan Richard Asper Jr.; Sergeant Raymond Earl Chambers; Private James Barry Gard; Private Ronald L. Hazen; Private First Class Michael Lynn Heitger; Sergeant First Class Leo Neal Kryske; Lance Corporal Stephen Dwayne McGee, of the Marine Corps, killed in Quang Tri; Corporal Dennis Everett Morgan; Specialist Four William Deo Nicodemus; Sergeant Richard Lee Nuziard; Corporal Mark Anthony Riggle; Private First Class Paul Allen Smith; Specialist Four Hardy Wesley Stebbins Jr.; Private First Class John Van Driessche; Sergeant Wilfred Wesley Warner Jr.; and Specialist Four Paul Aaron Young. Each man's full record — his unit, his tour, the date and province of his death, and his line on the Wall in Washington — stands on his Virtual Wall memorial page, which is the settling source for anything beyond the roll itself.

The boundary at Osceola: The county's fifty-four close with one man under Osceola, the other Penn Township town — Private First Class James Noble Kalil. Osceola is its own place with its own future build; he is named here so the county's arithmetic is complete and no reader mistakes him for a seventeenth Mishawaka name, and he is counted nowhere in Mishawaka's roll.

Sources:

1. The Virtual Wall, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Indiana page (home-of-record city listings), read entire for the Mishawaka heading.
2. South Bend pass, wars-second-pass file: the county's 54 verified three ways (DCAS extract; the Wall's city and county renderings), with the city division 31 / 16 / 6 / 1.
3. St. Joseph County veterans index (INGenWeb), McGee entry (Quang Tri), corroborating.