Touching History : Daughter of Soldier Killed in Vietnam Plans to Attend His Comrades’ Reunion to Learn More About Her Father

ANAHEIM — Susan Stokes never knew her father, the first Orange County man to die in the Vietnam War.

“I would always brag in class that my father was a soldier who died in the war. He was my hero,” said Stokes, who was only 2 years old when Sgt. Robert L. Stokes was killed in the battle of Ia Drang, the first major engagement of the Vietnam War between U.S. and North Vietnamese army units.

Still, she has spent a lifetime wondering about the parent who was taken from her while so young, who only existed in a few precious photos and yellowed newspaper clippings.

Sgt. Stokes was only 24 when he was killed trying to lead what became known as “the lost platoon” out of an ambush in the Ia Drang Valley on Nov. 15, 1965.

As the 30th anniversary of her father’s death approaches, Stokes and her 53-year-old mother, Helga, are planning to fly to Washington, D.C., for a dinner reunion of the soldiers who survived that fateful day in Vietnam’s central highlands.

“I want to meet these men who survived what my father didn’t,” Stokes said this week. “I want to know people who knew him, so he won’t just be a statistic.”

Stokes was invited to the dinner--to be held on Veterans Day--by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News and World Report and co-author with retired Lt. Gen. Harold G. Mooreof a book about the Ia Drang battle.

“For children of men killed in Vietnam, there is so much they don’t know and want to learn,” Galloway said this week. “To be able to put them together with someone who slept in the barracks with their dad, marched with him, held his head when he died--it’s a very important link for these children.”

In reading “We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young,” the 1992 book by Galloway and Moore, Stokes was able to learn for the first time details about the battle of Ia Drang and the circumstances surrounding her father’s death.

Sgt. Stokes, an artillery forward observer, was shot through the head and died almost instantly just after he assumed command of the platoon he was accompanying, which had been unwittingly led into an area where North Vietnamese regulars waited in ambush.

By the time Stokes took command, the platoon leader and his platoon sergeant had been killed by the North Vietnamese.

“Lt. Henry T. Herrick had led the platoon after a couple of North Vietnamese, chasing them into the brush,” Galloway explained. “This was a serious mistake because within a space of 10 minutes, 12 to 15 of the 29 men were killed. Sgt. Stokes figured it was his turn to take charge and lead the men out of this trap. He was shot as well.”

Galloway was a reporter for United Press International at the time and arrived at the battlefield the first night of the battle.

“(Susan Stokes) is not the first one to come forward from the book,” Galloway said. “There have been dozens, and I choke up over every one of them. Meeting and talking with these children is harder than combat. They never really heal.”

For Stokes, Galloway’s book was a revelation.

Stokes, 32, said her mother had been told by the military that her father was killed by a land mine, an explanation repeated in newspaper articles from the time.

The memory of her dead husband has haunted Helga Stokes for decades, her daughter said. The couple met in Berlin and had only been married for two years when he died during his second tour of duty in Vietnam. They had two daughters.

“My mother was never able to view the body, so there was no closure for her,” Stokes said. “She still has nightmares that she’ll see him in the street, or that he’ll walk in the door and say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come back.’ ”

Sgt. Stokes had joined the military at the age of 17 and had planned a long career in the Army.

“He did his job well,” Susan Stokes said. “This was a career for him. He wanted to get a degree, take home a pension and build his own business. There’s no telling what he could have been had he survived.”

But his death led to an estrangement between Helga Stokes and members of his family. This, coupled with her mother’s reluctance to talk about the war, left Susan Stokes with scant information about her father. But there are reminders of Sgt. Stokes all around the apartment that Susan Stokes shares with her two daughters, ages 8 and 11. Above the living room sofa is a color portrait of her parents, painted from their wedding picture. Her father’s numerous military medals--including the Purple Heart--are neatly arranged inside a frame.

And on her wooden coffee table is a red photo album that includes the only two photos Stokes has of her father, along with articles from local newspapers that reported his death, and other mementos, including letters of sympathy from President Lyndon Johnson and then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown.

The album also contains several letters her father wrote to his “dearest wife and children.” The last letter was written only a few days before the young sergeant’s death and reads in part: “I should be home by August, 1966. It’s going to be a long time between now and then.”

Pulling the letter from the album, Stokes begins to grow emotional. “I cried the first time I read these letters,” she said. “My mother really didn’t want me to see them, because they were so personal. But I had to see them. I look at them and I think, ‘That’s my dad.’ ”

Stokes has clung to most of her father’s possessions, including his military uniforms and a set of encyclopedias he purchased in Europe in the early 1960s. She reluctantly parted with the U.S. flag that was draped over her father’s coffin, giving it to her older sister a few years ago.

Although these items provide some solace, she hopes to learn of other details about her father during the visit to Washington.

Stokes, a single mother, could not afford to pay for the trip on her salary as a bank customer service representative.

But she found financial support after going to Veterans Charities of Orange County, a nonprofit organization that focuses on helping the homeless and disabled veterans.

The Santa Ana-based charity is seeking donations from the public to help pay for the trip.

“We’ve never had anyone come to us and ask for this,” said Deanne Tate, executive director of the organization. “Her story just really touched us, and we really wanted to send her back there. There’s been something in her life that’s been missing. She needs to have this closure.”