Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 11, 1991 TAG: 9102110021
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
"It was kind of scary," said Eugene J. Toni, who lost part of both legs in Vietnam. "It's like seeing your name on a gravestone."
Toni's name is there because a government clerk typed a wrong number into a computer. All 14 computer records have been corrected, but the names can never be erased from the polished granite.
There are 58,175 names of dead and missing carved on the V-shaped wall. The fact that it lists 14 living Army veterans as dead was buried in computerized Defense Department records at the National Archives. Only three of those errors have been publicly acknowledged before - four years ago.
Toni's journey to the wall began on an October morning in 1970 when he tripped a land mine on a reconnaissance patrol for the 101st Airborne in a jungle west of Hue.
Twenty years later, the 41-year-old former Army sergeant said: "I woke up one day and decided I didn't want to be a double amputee anymore. . . . I felt like a prisoner who wasn't getting any time off for good behavior."
He sought treatment for post-traumatic stress syndrome and "part of the treatment was that I went down to the wall" - just across the Potomac River from his Virginia home.
Standing under a nearly full moon on a mild night last March, he flipped through the paperback directory of names on the wall, looking for friends. He turned to the T's in a long-shot search for an uncle he never met.
Instead, he found his own name.
When Toni made his discovery, he told only his psychiatrist and priest, swearing them to secrecy.
"It was like a secret treasure that I knew and no one else did," he said. "I was afraid they were going to take my name off."
Toni, a Navy purchasing manager, later demanded an explanation.
"Somebody made a keypunch error transcribing the Army database," he said. "Instead of `21,' someone hit a `51,' " the code for killed.
The names were compiled by government clerks hired by the private Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which paid for the wall and helps maintain it.
Jan Scruggs, head of the fund, said they tried to reconcile death records from each branch of the military, the central Defense Department files and the military records center in St. Louis.
"It's 99.9 percent accurate," Scruggs said.
by CNB