The Vietnam War · fifty-four in the county, thirty-one in the city

1956 – 1975, as the file runs

Vietnam's toll is the most precisely documented of any war in this section, because two independent renderings of the same official file agree to the name: The Defense Casualty Analysis System's Vietnam extract, published by the National Archives, records fifty-four fatal casualties with St. Joseph County as home of record. Counted by home-of-record city, they divide exactly: South Bend 31 · Mishawaka 16 · Walkerton 6 · Osceola 1 — and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial's own city lists, built from the same Defense Department file, print the identical division, name for name. Mishawaka's sixteen are boundary-printed here and belong to Mishawaka's build; this city's thirty-one are South Bend's. They run from privates first class barely out of the city's high schools to Master Sergeant James Earl Austin, a career soldier who died 18 February 1971, Major John Russell Hills, and Captains Dewey William Heroy and Lee Charles Hitchcock. The county's war also has its Walkerton column — six names from a town of two thousand, among them Sergeant Louis Joseph Maher, Jr., killed in Long An — a per-capita price the small towns of this county paid in every war in this record, and paid heaviest here. The names are carved on the Wall in Washington in the order they fell; the county's memorial record of them is carried into the Veterans section, and the Tribune's Service Notes index — which closes its 1941–1979 run with this war — is the hometown paper's parallel roll.

Sources:

1. National Archives, U.S. Military Fatal Casualties of the Vietnam War for Home-State-of-Record: Indiana, prepared from the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (RG 330), as of 29 April 2008 — counted in full: fifty-four St. Joseph County records, divided by home-of-record city 31 / 16 / 6 / 1 as printed.
2. The Virtual Wall (virtualwall.org), Vietnam War casualties from Indiana, city lists for South Bend, Mishawaka, Walkerton and Osceola — the same thirty-one, sixteen, six and one names, independently rendered from the Defense Department file; Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Wall of Faces — the Austin, Borowski, Conley, Creamer, Freund, Hall, Harris, Hawkins and Heroy profiles with their panels and dates.
3. St. Joseph County Public Library, Military Service Notes Column Index — Walkerton's Maher entry cross-checked against the county veterans' roll ("Killed in Long An").