My Adopted POW/MIA

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My Adopted POW/MIA

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Name: Jerry Don Dewberry
Rank/Branch: E4/US Marine Corps
Unit: Company D, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, 1st Marine Division
Date of Birth: 10 July 1948
Home City of Record: Ardmore OK
Date of Loss: 05 July 1968
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 164505N 1071143E (XD802409)
Status (in 1973): Killed/Body Not Recovered
Category: 2
Acft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground
Other Personnel in Incident: (none missing)

Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project (919/527-8079) 15 March 1991 from one or more of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews.
Copyright 1991 Homecoming II Project.
SYNOPSIS: Lance Corporal Jerry D. Dewberry was assigned to Company D,1st Battalion, 1st Marines in Vietam. On July 5, 1968, just five days shortof his twentieth birthday, Dewberry was part of a Marine unit sent on patrol in Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam.
During the patrol, the unit came under enemy fire and Dewberry was hit. He was apparently believed to be dead and left behind. Dewberry was officially listed Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered.

Jerry D. Dewberry is listed among the missing because his remains were never found to send home to the country he served. For his family, the case seems clear that he died on that day. The fact that they have no body to bury with honor is not of great significance.

For others who are missing, however, the evidence leads not to death, but to survival. Since the war ended, over 10,000 reports received relating to Americans still held captive in Indochina have convinced experts that hundreds of men are still alive, waiting for their country to rescue them. The notion that Americans are dying without hope in the hands of a long-ago enemy belies the idea that we left Vietnam with honor. It also signals that tens of thousands of lost lives were a frivolous waste of our best men.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to keep pushing this issue inside the Beltway... The need to get specific answers is more important now than ever before. If still alive, some MIAs are now in their 70s...They don't have much time left. We have to demand the answers from the bureaucrats and keep standing on their necks (figuratively speaking) until they get the message that THEY work for US and that we are serious about getting these long overdue responses.
Diplomatic considerations aside... We can no longer allow questionable protocols established by pseudo-aristocratic armchair strategists, to determine or influence the fate of the men who were in the trenches while the diplomats were sharing sherry and canapes and talking about "Their Plans" for the future of SE Asia.
If you'd like to see what some others are doing in addition to writing their congressmen, senators and the Whitehouse, check out some of these sites:
http://hawk.nji.com/~mred/mialist.htm
White House E-Mail by State
Senate E-Mail by State
White House
The Vietnam Veterans Web Wall-Index

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