Adding a New Milford Face to the Names on the Wall

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is working hard to put a face to every name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and they need your help. Four of New Milford's sons names appear on the wall:

• SP4 Thomas Grix (Army)
• PFC Lawrence Merschrod (Army)
• PFC James Bernard Woods (Army)
• SSGT Lester George Michels (Marines)

The VVMF has pictures of Grix, Merschrod and Woods. However, Marine SSGT Lester George Michels still needs a photo. If you have a photo of him, click here to submit.

The National Call for Photos is a project organized by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to match a headshot or portrait photograph to every service member listed on The Wall.

The pictures will be displayed in an exhibit at the future Education Center at The Wall, an underground visitors center to be built near the Vietnam Veterans and the Lincoln memorials. Everyday, the center will celebrate the birthdays of service members who died during the Vietnam War by featuring their photos on a giant digital wall.

So far, 25,526 veterans have complete profiles with at least one photograph, according to George Pojani, a research associate at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. These profiles are currently featured on The Virtual Wall, an online database of the Memorial's veterans.

Pojani still needs one photograph of a service member to complete the profiles of New Milford veterans.

To locate photos for the project, contributors can visit www.vvmf.org/thewall and search for veterans who enlisted in their area. The VVMF recommends contacting family and friends of the veterans to find photographs or visit local libraries and search through yearbooks or newspaper obituaries.

To submit a photograph, contributors should obtain a high quality scan of the image and post a remembrance at http://www.vvmf.org/remembrances. The VVMF will send an email to contributors when their photograph is posted with a matching profile.

Relatives of service members with complete profiles are encouraged to submit photographs to the VVMF, even if there is already a photo available.

Pojani says that the contributors to the National Call for Photos will help improve the visitor's experience at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

"It's a place where people can go back and find stories about all the casualties on the Wall," Pojani said about the future Education Center. "It will be more personal than just names on the Wall."