Today is the birthday of two of the 167 men who died in
Vietnam on a Fourth of July. Both are Marines; they were only 20 when they
died.
PFC Jerry Norman Ellis of White Bear Lake, Minnesota,
died
July 4, 1968, when a recoilless rifle exploded. Also killed in the incident was
Lance Corporal Paul Laszlo Kapp, 21, of Cleveland, Ohio. One of PFC Ellis's friends,
Mike Plocher, posted this message online in 2014 with the title, “Finally Found
My Friend Jerry:”
Jerry Ellis and I were neighborhood friends in the newly
developed Interlake Park area of White Bear Lake, MN. We played together as
kids and as teenagers we were in the Order of DeMolay, our fathers were Masons.
I knew his father as well. I enlisted in the Navy in 1965. I spent 13 months in
Viet Nam. Yesterday I found Jerry's grave at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in
Minneapolis. Rest in peace my friend.
PFC James Robert Lunsford died July 4, 1967, aboard a Navy
hospital ship USS Sanctuary of
wounds from a land mine suffered June 25. He was
from Ridgely, Tennessee, a small town near the Mississippi River about 80 miles
north of Memphis. He is buried at the Rose Hill Cemetery in Humboldt,
Tennessee.
PFC Lunsford would be 68 today; PFC Ellis would be 67.
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