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After almost 21 years, a hardworking group of volunteers—including Steve and Annie Delp of Culpeper County—has located a photo of every service member whose name is listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
That means each of the 58,281 individuals on The Wall has "at least one photo helping tell more of the story behind the name," said Tim Tetz, outreach director of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which founded the memorial. "We still have lots of work to continue with as we seek to improve the (quality of the photos) … but today, we celebrate the longest undertaking in our organization’s history."
Tetz sent out the announcement on Aug. 9 to the Delps and others who had made it their mission to find photos of those killed in action more than half a century ago.
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Steve Delp was thrilled, and shared the news with his wife, but she wasn’t able to grasp its significance. In what seems one of life’s cruel twists, the woman who worked so hard to find faces of the lost has become lost herself.
Annie Delp has dementia and has lived at Poet’s Walk, a memory-care facility in Fredericksburg, for two years. During a recent interview, she sat on a pillowed couch, near her husband, and cradled a baby doll.
If she knew the online Wall of Faces had grown to include images of everyone—albeit some are little more than Xerox copies or blurred faces—her husband can hardly imagine her response.
"Oh, God, she’d go crazy," he said. "She was a very strong, very open person and got in there and told people what to do."
Annie Delp took such a keen interest in finding photos of those killed in Vietnam because she is both the daughter and wife of Army veterans. Her father was a trainer in the cavalry, assigned to various stations in Europe before and after World War II. An early exposure to horses, in Salzburg, Austria, kindled an interest that last much of her life as she and her husband previously operated the Eagle Hill Equine Rescue in Culpeper.
Steve Delp commanded an engineering company in Vietnam, a unit that worked to build bridges one week, then had to fight as infantry the next when the Tet Offensive took place. He spent 20 years in the service, as an intelligence officer in Vietnam and military attaché in Korea, and another 20 years in the private sector.
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Soon after his second retirement, he started working as a senior advisor for outreach at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which built the memorial wall 40 years ago.
In 2001, the VVMF embarked on a new mission: an education center that would serve as home to the Wall of Faces, the thousands of photographs of servicemembers who died in Vietnam.
The silhouette of a visitor is cast on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, during Memorial Day celebrations. (STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
The Delps got involved in the years that followed and, on weekends, packed up their farm truck and headed to reunions for Vietnam veterans. They talked about the effort to find a picture of a fallen veteran and encouraged others to look through photo albums for images of their buddies.
"The more we got going on collecting pictures, the more interested the two of us became in doing it because there were so many holes that had to be filled," Steve Delp said.
On one of their road trips, someone gave them a pocket-sized New Testament that had belonged to Johnny L. Perkins, a company medic believed to have been from Texas. It’s dated Nov 29, 1965.
Inside the front cover are two columns, penned in blue ink. The first column lists 30 names—simple entries such as "Pfc. Musto," "Sgt. Doss" or "Lt. Hunter." A second column includes a date.
The Delps assumed the medic had kept track of those, either with his unit in the 4th Infantry Division or in his care, when they died. They researched every listing and found that 25 of the 30 men named were killed in action. All of them have at least one good picture on the Wall of Faces.
"I just got the biggest kick out of that, and so did she," Steve Delp said.
The Delps pursued their mission between 2013 and 2018. He was working for VVMF during that time and she volunteered. Annie Delp handed out her card everywhere she went, talking with people about the project and encouraging them to call her if they found photos. She visited local libraries and museums, poring over yearbooks.
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"When you start putting a face with a name, it just makes a huge difference," she said in an August 2015 story in The Free Lance–Star.
Norman Murray, a Vietnam veteran who lives near Buffalo, New York, attended a Veterans Day ceremony at The Wall in 2014 and met Annie Delp. She told him about the group’s effort to build a life story for every name on the wall, "to ensure that current and future generations can understand and honor the sacrifices of all who served," he wrote in an email.
"Ann and the work she was heading up was an inspiration to me," he added. "She made me feel the importance of remembering all those that we lost."
Murray discovered 451 names on The Wall belonged to people from eight counties in western New York, and at that time more than 150 had no picture. He started tracking down families and reading newspaper clippings, sharing his mission with a class at Buffalo State College, reporters at The Buffalo News and another researcher "who had been quietly collecting obituaries of the fallen," according to the VVMF.
Jim Knotts, president and CEO of the group, said the Delps were responsible for collecting thousands of photos—and Steve Delp processed many of them while he worked at VVMF.
"It is inspiring to see people who care so much, who commit themselves so wholly, who give of the time and talent and treasure to help others," Knotts said.
Steve Delp continues to fine-tune the assembled photos. He recently started going through the entries, looking at photos and bios of all those killed on a particular date. The evening after an interview with The Free Lance–Star, he went to his home in Culpeper and was reviewing the website when he came across the name Dennis John Bullock.
"Oh my God, he was two classes behind me at Montoursville High School in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, up in the middle of nowhere," Steve Delp said in a phone message. "I had forgotten that, and I’m looking at his picture right now, and it’s like, holy cow, Denny."
Steve Delp encourages those who lost loved ones in the Vietnam War to check the Wall of Faces at vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces. There’s an option to submit photos if people have better pictures than what’s shown or if they want to add more images.
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