Cataloging the Veterans of Kern County - Bakersfield Californian Article
3/9/2007 8:36:18 PM
Cataloging Our Casualties, Bakersfield Californian, March 4th, 2007 by Stephen Mayer: Bakersfield High School senior Maria Fong is a detective of history. So is Kettisha Hardin, Matt Bergin and a few dozen other students in teacher Ken Hooper's history research class. Hooper's research class is looking for all military veterans who served from Kern County. Ken Hooper's research class at the high school is looking for the names of military veterans from Kern County who never made it home. Their latest project has local military veterans involved as the students scour Web sites and search media archives for information about Kern County residents who have been killed in action or were otherwise lost to the violence and vagaries of war. The information the students collect and the mysteries they solve will be used to create computerized biographical entries for the Kern Veterans Memorial, a $1.3 million interactive monument slated for construction in downtown Bakersfield later this year. When you see 71-year-old military veteran Wendell "Gus" Gustin working toward the same goal as 18-year-old seniors Carina Cuellar and Eric Noriega you might wonder what happened to the so-called generation gap. "These kids are the same age as many of those who served in the military and didn't make it home," Gustin said. "I think it's wonderful what they are doing." On any given weekday, the students can be found in the school's computer lab poring over lists of names and searching through layers of Web pages for such details as branch of service, age and rank, and the particulars of an individual's life and death. Helpful sites include the National Archives, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall page, Web sites for various branches of the military and other sites. It's no small task, fleshing out the stories of the approximately 700 servicemen from Kern County who have been listed as killed or missing in action. There's U.S. Marine Bobby Fields of Arvin, one of hundreds of local men lost in World War II, and Jesus B. Castro, a casualty of the Korean War. The Kern Veterans Memorial Foundation wants to include not just the names of the dead, but personal details about their tragically short lives. Was Vietnam casualty Billy G. Fry an athlete or an academic type? Was Bobby Holley, a Marine from Bakersfield, good at math or was he a whiz at fixing cars? Unfortunately, most of these men never had the time to develop the talents and gifts that may have lain dormant within them, ready to blossom at a later time in their lives. And it's not hard for the BHS students to empathize. "It can be emotional," 17-year-old senior Teresa Erickson said as she paused over a keyboard in the school's computer lab. "Especially with the ones who were killed just after they arrived," she said. "They might be in a transport helicopter that is shot down." To be alive one moment and gone the next, she said, never having seen your enemy -- it seems almost too sad to contemplate. Seventeen-year-old senior Adrienne Johnson said researching the lives of those killed in wartime personalizes the nation's history. The names of those killed become more than just statistics, and the events take on a reality that no textbook can duplicate. "It's not fiction. It really did happen," she said. Eventually, the students will reach a point where they may contact surviving family members of the dead and missing, Hooper said. But right now, it's enough just finding the fundamental details. "I think the best moments are when the students start to put together bits of (the soldiers') lives," Hooper said. "Every time they learn something new, they start to make a connection. "That's when they realize these men were flesh and bone."