Re: The Phone Call that Finally Came

Date: May 22, 2004

"Vietnam POW's family gets closure

By BRETT NAUMAN
Eagle Staff Writer

Carlene Tackitt received a phone call last January that ended an enduring mystery surrounding her younger brother who was captured and reportedly died during the Vietnam War.

A U.S. government official told the 70-year-old Mexia woman that a DNA sample she submitted three years ago matched the skeletal remains of a man recently unearthed near a Vietnamese prison camp.

“ I didn’t understand what she was saying,” Tackitt said Thursday from her home. “I said, ‘Are you trying to tell me that you identified my brother?’ The woman said yes. I couldn’t believe it. It floored me.”

Thirty-six years after he was imprisoned by the Viet Cong, U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Dennis Wayne Hammond will be buried Saturday next to his parent’s graves in Bremond.

“ It’s wonderful and it’s sad,” Tackitt said of her brother’s return. “It’s been half a lifetime since he died. I had just about given up hope.”

Relatives, friends and several Vietnam prisoners of war who watched Hammond’s slow, gradual death in a Quang Nam Province camp will pay their respects Saturday during visitation at the Bremond Funeral Home, Tackitt said. A 21-gun salute will be fired during a 2 p.m. graveside service at Herds Prairie Cemetery near Bremond.

Hammond, who was born in Mexia in 1946 and later raised in Detroit, enlisted in the Marines when he was 18 and by 1967 was serving his first tour of duty in Vietnam, Tackitt said.

During the 1968 Tet Offensive — the largest Vietnamese attack on U.S. troops during the war — Hammond was taken prisoner, according to military documents and the accounts of former Vietnam veterans.

The Skidmore, Mo.-based P.O.W. Network, a nonprofit organization that serves veterans and their families, has taken statements from servicemen who were imprisoned with Hammond to tell of his capture and 18-month torture in the camp.

Harold Kushner, one such veteran, said on the P.O.W. Network Web site that the Viet Cong began torturing Hammond two years after his capture when he and another prisoner tried to escape.

While the other man was executed an hour later when the Viet Cong caught both men, Hammond’s death was more prolonged, according to Kushner’s statement.

“ Hammond [was] carried back tied on a stick like a pig. [He was] beaten severely in front of the rest of us and placed in stocks and on very reduced rations. His legs were pinned to the ground, and he was fed one coffee cup of rotten rice per day. He had to defecate in his hands and throw it away from him and spent about two weeks in the weather in stocks with daily beatings. He subsequently died about 18 months later.”

Tackitt said Kushner and several other soldiers who were imprisoned in the camp with her brother and released after the war ended have said he died of malnutrition on March 7, 1970. He was 23.

The brutal descriptions of torture are what Tackitt has learned not to think about since her brother was imprisoned. Wondering what his captors were doing to her son, drove their mother, Opal Hammond, to her grave, Tackitt said.

Hammond’s family didn’t learn of his death until 1973, when Kushner and several other prisoners were released and told their stories, Tackitt said.

“ I watched my mother die during those years,” Tackitt said. “She lost her mind. She couldn’t take it. She quit eating. She said it was because she knew he wasn’t eating.”

With the relief of bringing her brother home comes renewed anger over how the war affected the family, Tackitt said. Her mother died in 1981 after not being able to cope with the grief for her missing son, Tackitt said.

“ All for nothing, that Vietnam War,” she said. “A little bitty country you could place in the state of Texas. I really don’t know what we were over there for, and I’m sure a lot of those boys didn’t know either.”

But the government’s continued efforts to identify the bodies of young men who served their country and have yet to make it back brings a certain amount of comfort, Tackitt said.

In the Herds Prairie Cemetery, she likes to think, there will be some comfort for her mother and father Saturday when the son they lost is put to rest at their side, she said.

“ I feel in my heart, they know he’s going to be there,” Tackitt said. “That he’s home.”

Brett Nauman’s e-mail address is bnauman[at]theeagle[dot]com
© 2000 - 2004 The Bryan - College Station Eagle "