SAN ANTONIO – Nearly 9 million Americans served in the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam era, with more than 2.5 million serving in Vietnam alone.
Over 58,000 service members were killed during the Vietnam War.
Back in 1973, 2,633 Americans were still listed as missing in action. Today, that number has dropped to 1,573 thanks to the efforts by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and their joint field activities with the governments of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The mission is to find, identify and return soldiers’ remains to their loved ones.
>> Click here to view our interactive project.
Of those soldiers from Bexar County, eight are still listed as missing in action or non-recoverable. Five of them have been honored with markers at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.
While people may still criticize and question America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam, even 50 years later, several veterans who served have a message they would like to share with others.
“What they need to remember is that we were called upon to serve,” said Richard Lopez, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam in 1970 and is an alumnus of Edgewood Independent School District. “We are proud that we served. We think we made a difference in someone’s life. We, our comrades, the United States, were called upon to make a difference for South Vietnam.”
“They would have given their lives for that job, to complete the mission, people need to know that,” said Dwight McDonald, a Marine who served at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon during the final evacuations.
When talking about his fellow Marines during the fall of Saigon, he said, “You have no idea what it does to our warrior ethos to make us pull away and leave. It just goes against everything we learned in boot camp. But these guys would have stayed until the last man and would have thought nothing of it.”
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