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Re: Students Honor Those Who Died

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: January 08, 2003

"Students Honor Those Who Died
State's Vietnam Dead Focus Of ‘unbelievable' Middle School Project

By JUDY BENSON
Day Staff Writer

Thanks to some middle-school students in Coventry, residents throughout the state now have easy access to biographical sketches on the 612 Connecticut soldiers, sailors and airmen who died in the Vietnam War.

Copies of the 300-page book, the culmination of a project that began 31/2 years ago, were sent to all 169 city and town halls in the state late last month. They will be kept in town halls, town libraries or with town historical collections, depending on the community.

“It's a great collection,” Plainfield First Selectman David Allard said Monday. “Projects like this are long-lived. The students (who worked on it) will never forget it.”

Allard said that for the next several weeks, anyone who wants to look through the book can find it at town hall. After that it will probably be kept at the town historical society, he said.

Reading the book, Allard learned about the five former Plainfield residents who died in the war — Joseph Baczalski, Edward Lamoreau, Norman Surprenant, Donald Zastowski and James Du Fault. Throughout the book, some of the entries are relatively brief, including military record, circumstances of death and location of the name on the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C. Others are longer, with information from interviews with relatives and other sources.

The entry for Peter Hesford, an Air Force Academy graduate formerly of Mystic, is one of the more extensive. It tells of his career as an Air Force pilot who was listed as missing in action after his plane, an F4D Phantom fighter jet, crashed in Laos. Like several other biographies, the one for Hesford includes a citation for additional rememberances and information available on two Web sites: www.thevirtualwall.org and www.scopesys.com/powmia/powsearch.html.

Thomas Dzicek, the teacher at Capt. Nathan Hale Middle School who oversaw the project, said students researched military records, the Internet and newspaper accounts, and sought out relatives willing to share their memories.

“There was no central location to get all the information,” Dzicek said. “Some of the interviews were extremely heart-wrenching.”

One of those interviews was with Dorothy Whiteley, the aunt of DuFault, one of the Plainfield residents in the book. She tells of her nephew's favorite fishing spot, his time in the Little League in Moosup, when he'd hang out with friends at her restaurant, and the band he once played in with his brother, Eddie.

“He was a joy to be around,” she said. “His parents had difficulty dealing with his death.”

DuFault was drafted into the Army in May 1969, when he was 22, and died as a result of small arms fire in Binh Dinh, South Vietnam, five months later.

The book, Dzicek said, grew out of other Veterans Day projects at the school and proved a very engaging learning tool for students that also benefited the community. Virtually all of the school's 560 students participated in some way — by conducting interviews, doing research, writing the entries or editing and proofreading the selections.

“It was an unbelievable project,” Dzicek said. “Out of all the things I've done in my (30-year) career, this one has had the most impact, from the kids to the adults to the towns.”

Grant funds paid for the publication of the book and for a related activity, when the school hosted The Wall That Heals, a traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the nation's capital, last May.

On Veterans Day in November, Robert Cornell, a Coventry resident and Vietnam veteran, presented a copy to Jan Scruggs, who spearheaded the effort that led to the creation of the Vietnam memorial.

Dzicek said he has received several calls from town and city officials around the state requesting additional copies.

Waterford First Selectman Paul B. Eccard is one who wants more copies. One will be kept in the town library, he said, and others will go to a civics class at Waterford High School that has become involved in efforts to urge federal officials to authorize a mission to recover the remains of former resident Arnold Holm Jr., who died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam in 1972. The book includes almost a full page on Holm, as well as entries about nine other Waterford residents who died in the war.

“I'm 53,” said Eccard, a lifelong Waterford resident. “I knew most all of these people.”

He said he was very impressed by the depth of the information the students obtained. “This is sort of a model,” he said.

Dzicek now plans to oversee a new project in which students will write biographies of the 325 Connecticut residents who died in the Korean War. 

 © 1998-2003 The Day Publishing Co."