Hawaii woman closes in on veterans project
When it comes to tracking down photos of Colorado’s fallen soldiers, Janna Hoehn has been a master sleuth.
As of February, the Hawaii-based volunteer for the Faces Never Forgotten campaign, which seeks to match every soldier listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with a picture, had tracked down photos for all but 29 Coloradans.
In the ensuing months, she winnowed that list still further with help from paid search services, libraries, media outreach and her own detective instincts.
But six Colorado names still remain.
“To get it down to this point is fabulous,” Hoehn says, “but we still want to find them all.”
The war claimed the lives of 626 Coloradans.
Half a century removed from the Vietnam war, many relatives of the dead have also died or moved or become otherwise difficult to find — especially in an era when fewer people are connected to land lines and cellphones can be harder to track.
She sends letters when phone numbers are no good, but she estimates that maybe one out of 20 elicits a response. And even when she does manage to reach someone on the phone, Hoehn battles another barrier: fear of fraud.
She says she has learned to talk fast so she can explain her purpose before the person on the other end of the line hangs up thinking she’s asking for money.
“I’m not asking for money. I just need a photograph,” she says. “But I understand why people are skeptical. There are a lot of bad things out there. People are just scared sometimes.”
She spends about 40 hours a week tracking down photos of the fallen, which are displayed in an online archive of the Wall of Faces that is searchable by name, state and military branch. Mostly, Hoehn devotes early mornings or late nights to the process, so she can still manage her florist business. Her close professional connection to funeral homes has proved handy in requesting help looking up obituaries for clues about possible family contacts.
But often, when Hoehn finds herself searching for the last few names in a given state — Colorado is the 12th she has tackled — she runs into another problem: The home of record listed on a soldier’s military documents may not actually be the place where they lived.
“There may have been young men in smaller towns that didn’t have a recruiting station,” she explains. “So when they got their draft notice, they had to go into Denver to enlist. When you get to the end of the list, a lot of times they weren’t from that big city, but from smaller towns. That’s probably my biggest hurdle.”
The six remaining names from Colorado, listed above, claimed Denver as their home of record. Readers who can provide photos to match any of the names, or can provide clues that would help connect with relatives, can contact Hoehn by e-mail at neverforgotten2014@ gmail.com.
“You just want to find every picture so badly,” she says. “We’re getting close, but not close enough.”
In addition to the six remaining names, Hoehn says she also is trying to confirm whether a photo currently listed under two separate names is William G. Mendenhall, who died in 1966 and may have relatives in either the Denver or Meeker area.