POW/MIAs remembered

From HelenaAir: POW/MIAs remembered

Since World War II, 55 Montanans went abroad fighting for America and never returned, alive or dead.

Some local veterans are making sure those former prisoners of war and troops missing in action are not forgotten, and they took a moment to read all 55 names aloud Friday in Memorial Park, marking National POW/MIA Recognition Day.

Since Ray Read began exploring the subject 32 years ago, five of the missing have returned, most recently a Vietnam veteran who returned to Billings for proper burial a year ago.

“If we keep these names floating through the ether, someone will think of them and maybe we’ll get one of them back,” said Read, a retired colonel who served in the Special Forces in Vietnam, and is now director of the Montana Military Museum.

Read, along with retired Gen. Gene Prendergast and Jim Heffernan, a Marine and Coast Guard veteran who served in Korea and has been active in veterans issues for decades, also read the POW’s prayer and a proclamation related to the day.

They conducted the short ceremony at the Veterans Memorial in Memorial Park, where the names of those from Lewis and Clark County who died in wars are etched, including the names of five who died in Iraq.

Read has conducted plenty of research on the missing. Only one of the 55 has had a reported sighting: U.S. Navy pilot Lt. j.g. Lee E. Nordahl of Choteau went down in what was then North Vietnam in 1965.

“We actually have pictures of him in prison,” Read said.

The memorial site also has plenty of meaning. In addition to the names and the flags of the service branches — plus the POW/MIA flag — the stars and stripes wave from a flagpole removed from Fort Harrison. The group plans a ceremony in November to mark the fifth anniversary of the memorial’s renovation.

“This is a solemn and sacred site,” said Prendergast.

More than 78,000 Americans who fought in World War II met an unknown fate; more than 8,000 are missing from the Korean War, 120 from the Cold War, 1,737 from the Vietnam War, two from Desert Storm and one from the current global war on terror.