
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, February 15, 1991                   TAG: 9102150681
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

WAR MEMORIAL MAY HAVE NAMES OF 38 LIVING VETS

The man responsible for deciding which names were carved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial says there may be as many as 38 Army veterans mistakenly listed as dead.

Robert Doubek said he wasn't positive at the time that the men had been killed because their records were incomplete. But he included them anyway because he didn't know that it would be possible to add names once the memorial was built.

The Associated Press disclosed earlier this week that 14 Army veterans listed as dead on the wall are alive. After reading that story, Doubek volunteered that there may be another 24 errors.

The war memorial is a V-shaped wall that has 58,175 names of dead and missing carved in black granite. As records are updated, names are periodically added to the wall. But it's impossible to remove any.

An attorney who now develops real estate in suburban Virginia, Doubek was a co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and, as its project director for more than three years, oversaw design and construction of the memorial. It was opened in 1982.

"I felt that if we were going to make an error, it was better to include someone's name than to not include someone's name," Doubek said.

When he began compiling the names, Doubek obtained the Defense Department's central casualty records on computer tape and then checked each service to see if their files contained anyone accidentally left off the master list.

This process added seven names from the Marine Corps and about 160 from the Air Force - all of whom had military death certificates. Gold Star mothers who handchecked the Army list found 53 names not on the Pentagon list, but no military death certificates could be found at the National Personnel Records Center, where a 1973 fire had destroyed millions of files.

Seeking corroboration, Doubek finally located, in the federal records center in Suitland, Md., the 8-and-a-half-by-14-inch, handwritten ledgers containing the daily Army casualty reports from Southeast Asia.

Wherever he found a notation like "mortal wounds" or some other indication of death, he included the name for the memorial. He also included the names of those for whom he found no record.

by CNB