‘What might have been’: Remembering those who died
Long before they were white names engraved on a black wall, they were men, some still teenagers, who left Montana for Vietnam. They came from small towns that are hardly a blip on the map and from Montana’s largest cities.
Today we’re remembering the 267 Montanans who died in the Vietnam War.
Fifty years ago, May 30, 1966, most of the worst of the fighting was yet to come.
But Manford Kleiv was already dead, the first man from Montana to die in Vietnam, a conflict already six years old and 10 years from its end. More than 58,000 Americans died before the war was over, with a million or more dead among the Vietnamese.
Kleiv came from Whitefish. He enlisted in the Army in 1943, fighting in the Ardennes, Rhineland and Central Europe campaigns of World War II. He became an Army Ranger.
By Vietnam, he was a helicopter pilot. He died Oct. 9, 1964; shot down on a support mission in the Quang Nam province.
“To send a distress call for his downed crew, he repeatedly braved enemy fire to return to the aircraft and was mortally wounded. His actions let the rest of his crew be rescued,” wrote James Williams in “A History of Army Aviation.”
Kleiv earned a Silver Star that day.
Leslie Sampson of
Richey disappeared in nearby Laos, before most Americans knew war was coming to southeast Asia. He was shot down in 1961, and his remains were recovered and identified in 1991.
John Urban of Helena had died by 1966, too. He was flying a U.S. Army Reserves helicopter when he was struck by a single round, perhaps “friendly fire,” on the left side of his flak vest on Feb. 9, 1965.
Mark Hinkle of Havre had already died by 1966, and so had Lee Nordahl of Choteau and Ken Knudson of Saco. Douglas Kern of Billings had just months left. Four days after he died, Preston Polk of Whitlash would fall, too.
Dennis Lee Casey was preparing to leave for Vietnam 50 years ago today. He would be dead in fewer than 13 months in the Quang Nam province. He was central Montana’s first lost in Vietnam.
He was 13 days from shipping home on the day he died. He would have turned 25 that July.
Casey was 5-feet, 3-inches tall, but he loomed large for little sister Mary Kepler.
A recent graduate of Rocky Mountain College, Casey was going to be a history teacher when he came home, and he wanted to go into politics. Military service, like college, was supposed to be a step toward achieving his plans.
Casey was a leader. He was a strong Republican and had a high set of standards. He was patriotic, Kepler said, and he wanted to do his duty. He was inducted into the Marine Corps two days after Christmas 1965.
Between boot camp and Vietnam, Casey jogged beside his sister as she rode her bike. As he ran, he’d sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the “Marines’ Hymn.”
“First to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor clean…”
She remembers him in big horned-rim glasses, with a crew cut. She remembers him picking her up and swinging her onto his shoulder.
She remembers in May 1966 and the family taking Casey to the airport in Lewistown. When the flight was canceled, Kepler thought, oh, good, now he doesn’t have to go. Instead, they went back home, said goodbye and their dad drove him to Billings.
And then he was memories and letters.
In those letters, his sense of mission shines through. In one letter home, he wrote:
“I’ve been taught too, too much by too, too many fine people, especially my parents to let some damn little Communist who has no idea for what he is fighting get me. I consider myself lucky to have had so much. You should see some of these kids. The 1,500 Marines leaving tomorrow were loading gear today. I looked around; the average age is about 19 I’d say. Not one has voted! Why do these young kids have to go 30,000 miles across an ocean to fight and are not able to cast one vote at the polls or buy a beer?”
Casey worked in the intelligence office. He saved a message from a villager that helped reinforce that sense of mission. “Lt. Sir,” it began. The Viet Cong were near. Please help. “I stand for the people in my hamlet.”
“How could America fail to answer calls of this nature from oppressed people anywhere?” Casey wrote. “Is this the ‘Nasty Aggressor’ America is sometimes described as being? I do not think so. Neither do the people of the Republic of South Viet Nam.”
“There was so much controversy. We wanted to give the war some meaning, and what Denny was doing was the right thing and the good thing,” she said. “As a family, we gained peace that when Denny was serving there, he was doing good things and appreciated not just by military members but by Vietnamese.”
Five days before Kepler’s 11th birthday, she walked in the back door of her home and saw her brother Mike in the kitchen with his head between his arms. She went into the living room and strangers were with her parents.
“Denny’s not coming home,” her mother told her. In her mind, she can be that almost-11-year-old girl again in an instant.
“I remember the young Marine who accompanied Denny’s body home to Montana, and I remember standing at the cemetery and hearing taps played,” she said.
“When you lose someone at such a young age, you try to make up for it the rest of your life, living as much as you can to fulfill that young life lost,” she said.
All but one of Kepler’s four children is older than Casey was when he died.
“To me as a mom, they’re still kids. I looked at Denny, and he seemed so grown up. He was truly my hero,” she said. “All these young people, these young soldiers, you look at them and think, ‘What might have been?’”
After Casey died, his family heard from a young soldier Casey helped obtain his GED in Vietnam. The local Demolay group named their chapter for him. A bandstand in Kendall Boy Scout Park was erected in his honor. A room at Rocky Mountain College was dedicated to him.
By 1969, the war had a new, uglier aspect. But Mike Casey followed his brother to war in Vietnam. She doesn’t know how her parents could sign the waiver for him to enlist having lost one son already.
“Mike was one of those young soldiers like Denny would have looked out for,” she said. “My parents instilled in all of us the love of country, the love of God and looking out for your fellow man. All of us have chosen to live our lives that way through our professions and our families and our communities.”
Kepler was an elementary school music teacher and “how much more joy can you have than that?” Her sister Jeany served 15 years in the Army as a nurse, and her brother Jim was a teacher and coach. Kepler married a man in Army Aviation, who served in Desert Storm and in the National Guard. Her dad served in World War II in the Army Air Corps.
“It’s a huge legacy in our family,” she said. “And it’s a legacy in the families that support these soldiers, and in Montana. Montana is so supportive of our military.”
This Memorial Day, her son leaves for Korea. He’s in the Army infantry and served in Afghanistan.
“I say goodbye to my son knowing he’ll be relatively safe in Korea, and I think my parents were really special people,” Kepler said.
In 1970, her cousin, Toby Gritz, died in Vietnam.
“They’re just two of the 58,307 killed,” Kepler said.
A Marine, Gritz died in the midair collision of two Cobra attack helicopters. He was 18 days from finishing his second tour. Four of his five brothers served in the military, and one, Col. John Gritz, escorted his body home, he wrote on the online wall of remembrance. Toby Gritz had a wife and new son. He loved fast Chevys, skydiving and being a Marine Corps officer.
“To us, he’s always 25 and smiling,” John Gritz wrote.
That year, Ronald Tanner of Missoula, died, too, on May 31, 1970, in the Quang Tin province. A “real Montana cowboy,” Tanner served in the Army.
A former EMT when he returned to civilian life, Scott Smith posted on the remembrance wall that Tanner was the first patient he had in the field “and I lost you. It was 25 years before I even knew who you were. And longer than that before I began to believe that it was the booby-trapped grenade and not me that killed you.”
“I want you to know you were with me on every one of more than a thousand aid calls,” he wrote to Tanner.
Most Montanans who died in Vietnam had already died then, but there were more Montanans who followed Casey and Tanner.
A Navy SEAL, James Gore of Sunburst died in 1970 in a helicopter crash on his way to R&R, and Mark Hensley of Great Falls, Emil Naasz of Wolf Point and Alan Kultgen of Cut Bank died that year, too.
West Point graduate Tom Dellwo of Choteau was killed with a grenade was tossed into the officer billet by a fellow American at Bien Hoa Army Airfield in 1971. He was 24 and scheduled to leave Vietnam that day.
Among the last Montanans to die in Vietnam, Roger Kojetin of Great Falls died in January 1972. His cousin Kathleen Sanders posted a photo of him because she wanted others to see his smile “to know he had a wonderful family and had planned for a future, like all of us. He lost his future, but gave us ours. We should never forget that or him and so many others like him.”
In May 1972, Terry Neiss of Havre died in a crash that killed five crewmen and all 29 soldiers aboard his Chinook helicopter. And just before Christmas 1972, Randolph Perry Jr. of Troy was shot down by a surface-to-air missile that struck his B-52 during the bombing of Hanoi. Long listed as missing in action, his remains were only laid to rest in 2004 in his hometown, finally identified decades after the end of the war.
Kepler has been to Washington, D.C., and found Casey’s name on the Vietnam Memorial Wall. Panel 22 E, Row 6.
“It’s been 49 years since 1967, but it’s still very poignant,” she said. “The feeling there, the sense of respect. Even if you weren’t touched by anyone losing their life in Vietnam, there’s still love there.”
The “second death” a person has is when his or her name is no longer spoken. Casey’s name, Gritz’s name, all those names on the wall live on, Kepler said. “And always with life, there is hope.”
Reach Tribune Staff Writer Kristen Inbody at kinbody@greatfallstribune.com. Follow her on Twitter at @GFTrib_KInbody.
Vietnam War by the numbers
1959-1975: Dates of Vietnam War
58,156: U.S. deaths
303,704: wounded in action
267: Montana deaths
22: Prisoners of War from Montana
34,478: Vietnam veterans in Montana today
More than 36,000 Montanans served
More than 200 Montana Native Americans served
Source: Governor’s office
Montanans on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Black Eagle man gets Vietnam War medals
Great Falls veterans reflect on Memorial Day
