By John Howell Sr.

Their names, most of them, are etched in the stone of the war memorial monument on the Downtown Square in Batesville. They are 12 men from Panola County who died in the Vietnam War.

 There were 11 names from that war when the monument was erected in 1978 by the Batesville Exchange Club. Another was added later when his remains were recovered and placed under Panola soil. Two more have since emerged, somehow missed in the extensive, cross-county canvassing to make sure no one was left off.

Fourteen in all, maybe more.

Who were they? Besides the name now etched in the stone of that memorial?

They ranged in age from 19 to 41. The first man from Panola to die in Vietnam was killed July 15, 1966. The last died while held as a prisoner of war on September 6, 1972, 36 years ago. Men from Panola were killed in savage fighting, they died in helicopter crashes and they drowned.

Two of the men had already fought in World War II before they went to Vietnam. Some would die within days of their arrival, others within days of their scheduled departure.

Lynn Spann

Lynn Spann of Sardis was the first Panola soldier killed in that long ago, far off place. Spann had grown up on the J. Q. West Farm and attended Green Hill Elementary School and Walnut Chapel High School. He moved to Memphis, taking a job while he attended night school. Spann was drafted. He married and 11 days later shipped out to Vietnam with the First Infantry Division.

Wounded in the leg during fighting in the Central Highlands, Spann was sent to Japan to recover. While there he wrote to his older brother Robert. He said he did not want to go back to active duty, Robert told the reporter for the Memphis Press-Scimitar after he died. “’He said things were tough, and he hoped our brother, Curtis, would never have to see active duty,’” Lynn Spann told his brother in that letter. The letter arrived by mail on the same day that the family learned of his death.

Spann had returned to active duty two weeks before and been killed when he accidentally detonated a booby trap while on combat patrol. He was 21.

Johnnie Earl Smith

Exactly one week later, July 22, 1966, 40-year-old Marine Staff Sergeant Johnnie Earl Smith died in Quang Tri Province when his India Company was engulfed in savage fighting as part of Operation Hastings.

Smith was born in Pearl River County and attended school in Summit before enlisting in the Marines in World War II at age 17.

“He participated in 13 major battles in the South Pacific from Guadalcanal in the Solomons to Saipan in the Gilbert Islands,” his obituary in The Panolian stated. “He was twice decorated or cited for bravery during the Pacific campaign,” the account continues.

“A member of the now famous India Company which last week immortalized itself when fifty percent of its personnel were lost or wounded in combat with the Viet Cong, his death was reportedly caused by multiple shrapnel wounds,” the contemporary account stated.

By the time Smith died, his parents had returned to their native Panola County. Survivors included the late Mrs. Cliff Finch, his sister. Smith would not be the last Panola soldier killed who was related to the man who would later become governor.

Hazell Calvin Turner

The next year Hazell Calvin Turner, 20, of Batesville was killed in a night ambush on March 21. Elements of Turner’s 24th Infantry Division, including his Company C, were involved in Operation Sam Houston in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. He was one of 24 men killed in action during a night of human wave assaults after Company C was ambushed, according to a battalion journal, which records from minute to minute the desperate radio traffic reporting mortar fire, losing contact with Company C, enemy within 50 meters and running out of grenades. Helicopters used hoists to lift wounded through the canopy so thick that it prevented their landing.

Ralph Victor Dye

Six weeks later, again in South Vietnam’s northernmost province of Quang Tri, Ralph Victor Dye, 25, of Crenshaw was killed.

“I was in the same platoon as Corporal Dye,” fellow Marine Ron Albright recalled. “Most of us were around 19 years old, but Dye was older and married. Above Khe Sanh we took heavy casualties on May 2, 1967. No surviving soldier will ever forget the living nightmare of that day.”

Fellow Marine Jim McCann well remembers that day on Hill 881 North: “He (Dye) was a squad leader, 2nd Squad, 2nd Platoon. Our whole squad was the first squad to assault the hill. As we approached, him and I, we were trying to recover this one body. … The bodies were decoys; they were pulled over spider holes. A NVA guy jumped up from the hole. Ralph was shot in the head; I got hit with the grenade (but) I did kill that person,” McCann recalled in a telephone interview, 41 years after the deadly battle near the so-called demilitarized zone.

Johnny Lee Robinson

It was later that year — Dec. 28, 1967 — that Marine Corporal Johnny Lee Robinson, 20, died in a helicopter crash in Quang Tri Province. With Robinson began the dying of graduates and a former student from Patton Lane High School. Before the Vietnam War was over, four of Robinson’s classmates from the Class of 1966, and a younger classmate from the class of 1969, would die in the Asian war.

“He was a good student and he was very respectable,” Kathryn Hyde recalled. Her husband, the late Robert Hyde, was principal of the all-black high school that was closed in 1970.

Robinson was the uncle of Lawrence Hoskins of Batesville. “He lived with my mom and dad before he left,” Hoskins recalled.

The late Rev. W. L. Nash delivered the message at Robinson’s funeral at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church. It would not be the last funeral Rev. Nash would officiate for a Vietnam War victim.

Clarence Jones

Clarence Jones, 21, was serving with the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division when he was killed May 30, 1968, in Kontum Province. Jones was the second member of Patton Lane’s Class of 1966 to die in Vietnam. One of the 14 children of Joseph and Margaree Jones, he was known as “the Wolf Man,” his sister Minnie Jones Butts said, especially by close friends Quincy Willingham, Henry Perry, William Watters and Cordie Battle-Swearengen, the latter of whom was also his cousin.

“He was a good guy, a jokester, very studious but also fun,” recalled one of his brothers, Melvin Jones. When Clarence finished high school, he found a job at a Memphis wholesale grocer before he was drafted.

“I was just getting into radio then,” said Melvin Jones who would become known as WDIA radio deejay Melvin “Cookin’” Jones. Clarence had sent him a cassette tape with a message recorded in Vietnam.

“He said he came over as a boy and he would come back as a man,” Melvin Jones recalled. He said that his brother sounded “very optimistic” even though there was “serious fighting going on.”

It was early June when Army personnel arrived at his parents’ home on what was then called Stage Coach Road with the solemn announcement, Melvin Jones recalled. The following month, Clarence’s daughter, Teresa Jones, was born, his sister said.

Charles Watson Willingham

Patton Lane’s Class of 1966 lost its third alumnus on October 5, 1968, when the helicopter carrying Specialist Four Charles Watson Willingham crashed in Binh Duong Province. Willingham, 22, was one of four crewmen in the ubiquitous UH-1D “Huey” helicopter, a member of the Army’s First Aviation Brigade

“He left my home in July, 1968, and went to California,” his father, Ernest Willingham, said. “I got a letter from him on (October) the 5th; the 10th I found out,” he said.

Willingham’s body arrived home on October 17 where his family — mother Eva, father, two sisters, eight brothers — waited. The funeral was held at the New Bethlehem M. B. Church, his home church. Again, Rev. Nash officiated.

William Jewel Davis

That same year — 1968 — Army Private First Class William Jewel Davis, 19, of Como would die on December 3. He had been in Vietnam for little more than a month according to the Web site thewall-usa.com, serving with the First Cavalry Division (Airmobile). The Web site states that Davis died in in Phuoc Long Province from multiple fragmentation wounds during hostile ground action.

Davis’ name does not appear on the Batesville monument listing Panola war dead. (We’ve been able to learn nothing more about Davis in time for this publication. We would like to know more about Davis or any of the other men from Panola who died in Vietnam.)

William Wallace Ford

The following year — 1969 — Vietnam claimed two more from Panola. Major William Wallace Ford died in a mortar attack on his helicopter base on January 10. At age 41, Ford was the oldest serviceman from the county to die in the war. Like Johnnie Earl Smith, Ford had joined the Marines during World War II. After World War II, Ford graduated from the University of Tennessee, returned to military service in 1956 and became an Army pilot.

Ford had already served a tour of Vietnam during 1967 and 1968 when he returned in 1969. He had been there for one week when he was killed during the enemy attack on his base.

And like William Jewel Davis, Ford’s name also does not appear on the Panola monument. Ford had grown up in the Curtis community and attended Batesville High School, but he moved with his family to San Francisco where he finished school before joining the Marines. By the time Ford’s obituary appeared in The Panolian in January, 1969, the Ford family had been away from Panola for almost 30 years. His home of record on www.thewall-usa.com is Knoxville, Tenn.

Robert Shelton King Jr.

Robert Shelton King Jr. had joined the Marines in 1968 while he was still in the 12th grade at North Panola High School. The oldest of the seven children of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Shelton, he left for boot camp right after graduation.  

By February 1969, King was in Quang Tri Province serving as a squad leader in a 106 mm recoilless rifle platoon. Early on the morning of October 9, 1969, his squad’s position came under intense enemy attack.

“Unhesitatingly exposing himself to enemy fire, he fearlessly maneuvered across the fireswept terrain from one position to another, delivering ammunition and directing the fire of his men,” according to the citation which accompanied King’s posthumous award for the Bronze Star.

Lance Corporal King was 19 years old and had been scheduled to leave Vietnam five days later.

Lee Curtis Taylor

Army Specialist Four Lee Curtis Taylor, 22, of Como drowned in Vietnam the following year. Though Taylor lived in Como, his mother, Louise Taylor, was a teacher at Patton Lane High School  which allowed him to attend there. Taylor remained in Patton Lane through the tenth grade with classmates who would graduate in 1966, said his widow, Glendora Dugger of Como, who later remarried. When Taylor’s mother died, he transferred to North Panola Vocational High School at Como, finishing with the Class of 1966 there, Dugger said.

On October 1, 1970, Taylor, serving with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, “drowned while attempting to rescue a buddy,” according to the obituary in The Southern Reporter published under the headline “Panola hero buried Sunday.”

Taylor’s son, Carlos, would arrive a little more than a month later, on November 15, 1970, according to his posting at thewall-usa.com.

“Lee was not only my brother-in-law, he was my best friend,” wrote Larry Taylor in another memorial posting on the web site. “…We were in the ‘Nam at the same time, he was there a couple of months before I got there,” he continued. “No one told me of his death until I got home. I know now it was the right thing to do.”

Willie Clyde Kuykendall

The next year, 1972, would claim Private First Class Willie Clyde Kuykendall and Specialist Five Jimmie David Hinton, both 22. A member of the Class of 1969, Kuykendall is the fifth Patton Lane alum known to have died in the Vietnam War. Hinton had graduated from South Panola High School in 1968.

Like Taylor the year before, Kuykendall drowned. A trooper with the Army’s 196th Light Infantry Brigade, Kuykendall was assisting a tank crossing a stream, according to a cousin, James Whitten of Batesville.

“They had to cross this thing and they got stuck,” Whitten said the family was told at the time. Soldiers were attempting to attach cables to pull the tank out and, “the current took them under,” Whitten said. The date was August 18, 1971.

The irony was that Kuykendall was a strong swimmer. A couple of summers before his death, Kuykendall swam from the Cypress Point Beach across the Sardis Dam Lower Lake to the other side.

“They really got on him,” his cousin said of the Corps of Engineer Rangers who witnessed Kuykendall’s feat. But the crowd, “they gave him a round of applause.”

“We were like brothers,” Whitten continued. “He played football; he played basketball, too; he was a sports man but he was basically football.”

Jimmie David Hinton

The Panolian managing editor Rupert Howell recalled that it was during a lengthy recuperation from knee surgery during high school that Jimmie Hinton taught himself to play guitar. He soon found himself a place in The Rogues, one of many bands formed among local students in the wake of the popularity of British musical groups of the 1960s.

Hinton was a helicopter mechanic during his first Vietnam tour. When he re-enlisted for a second tour, he became crew chief/gunner on a light observation helicopter. Hinton also served with the Army’s First Aviation Brigade.

“Their job was to fly low over suspected enemy positions to either spot or draw fire from the enemy, and then they would call in the helicopter gunships to suppress the enemy fire and to try and kill them before our troops were inserted,” said David Brasher of Oakland, who survived two tours as a crew chief/gunner on a UH-1 Huey. Brasher had become acquainted with his fellow Mississippian when both had been stationed in Alabama.

On September 7, 1971, Hinton was killed when his helicopter was shot down in Kien Tuong Province.

Melvin Wayne Finch

The last Panola County Vietnam War casualty that we know about was Army helicopter pilot Captain Melvin Wayne Finch.

When Finch died on September 6, 1972, he was alone except for the company of a fellow prisoner of war, a South Vietnamese Army officer who would later provide the information about the lonely death of a Panola County soldier far from home.

Finch had attended Batesville High School through his tenth grade year, but he and his dad moved to Louisiana after his mother died. Former Panola resident Doug Fargo knew Finch then as a fellow paperboy, distributors of the afternoon daily newspapers from Memphis and Jackson then regularly distributed in Batesville.

Fargo next encountered Finch in Vietnam as a fellow soldier. Fargo was an infantryman, Finch a gunship pilot. Finch’s first Vietnam tour began in June 1968 and lasted 18 months due to a pilot shortage. He returned in March, 1972 and was shot down the next month.

“We called him ‘John Wayne’ Finch,” Fargo recalled.

A fellow pilot said that Finch flew so low that he seemed scared of heights. Others said he was scared of nothing.

When his helicopter crashed from ground fire in 1972 in Kontum Province, his co-pilot said that Finch, though wounded, initially followed him. However, when the helicopter exploded when they were about 10 yards away, Finch appeared to become disoriented and ran toward the enemy instead of in the opposite direction.

Intense searches in enemy-held territory failed to locate the missing gunship pilot, but after POWs were released by the North Vietnamese in 1973, intelligence officials were able to piece together the story of the rest of Finch’s life. Wounded and weak, Finch was left behind as their communist captors force-marched prisoners north. Finch died on September 9, 1972, according to the South Vietnamese officer who was a fellow prisoner at the time of his death.

58,000 Americans were lost in that long war. Their names are etched in the Vietnam War Memorial, The Wall, in Washington.

Of those, 637 were Mississippians. Their names are etched on the Mississippi Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Ocean Springs.

Of those, 14 were from Panola County or had close enough ties here to claim and to list on the downtown monument, etched in stone and in the memories of those who knew them and loved them.