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Dziedzic's Death Rocked Community

Resident was second Oak Creek native killed in Vietnam in a month.

Editor's Note: Local author Tom Mueller presents the story of some familiar local names in a special Oak Creek Patch series leading up to Memorial Day. Today is the fifth and final story: Mark Dziedzic, whose name is part of the Meyer-Dziedzic VFW Post.

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When a pair of stone-faced Marines appeared at her home in the spring of 1968, Ella Mae Dziedzic knew that the news would not be good. Three of her sons – Mark, Jeff and Chuck – were Marines in Vietnam, and the bloody Communist Tet offensive had been under way for several weeks.

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So she merely asked who the news was about.

The bad news was about Mark, 21, the first of nine children of Robert and Ella Mae Dziedzic (pronounced JAY-jick), who lived on S. Burrell St. in Oak Creek, just off Howell Avenue and south of E. Ryan Road. The family was seven boys and two girls, and the oldest three were the Marines.

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Mark, a private first class, was killed on March 16, 1968, in Quang Tri Province,  which was just below the Demilitarized Zone, in the final weeks of the Communist Tet offensive. He was 21, having been born on July 12, 1946. He was in H Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division.

The family’s No. 7 child, Paula, was 9 at the time and tells what happened: “Two gentlemen in uniform walked up the driveway. My Mom was ironing and everything was blocking the front door, so she told them to go around to the other side of the house.”

When they did come in, she asked, “Which one?” as in, which one of her sons was gone?

“After she broke down and cried, she called my Dad to come home,” says Paula, whose last name is now Lewandowski and is a mother and grandmother, and still lives in Oak Creek. Her dad was the body shop manager for an auto dealer on S. 27th St. in Milwaukee.

All of this made quite a deep impact on a little kid. “When I hear ‘Taps,’ I can’t even listen to it,” Lewandowski says. “And my older sister fainted in the cemetery during ‘Taps’ and the gun salute.”

It also had a deep impact on Oak Creek because Dziedzic was its second son to die in Vietnam in merely a month. Marine Pfc. James Meyer, profiled earlier in this series, was killed Feb. 17, also serving in Quang Tri Province but in a different Marine division, the 1st Regiment of the 1st Division.

Repeating: Two young men. In one month. In a town of less than 14,000 population.

The grim toll of war had somehow not hit home in Oak Creek as U.S. involvement in the war escalated in 1965, 1966 or 1967. But it came with a vengeance in 1968.

Mark Dziedzic graduated in 1964 from Oak Creek High School, where his portrait and that of Meyer are the largest in a display case of pictures of military veterans and current service members who have attended the school. Hundreds of teens and staffers pass the display every hour on their way to class, but to one person who has worked there for 15 years – Lewandowski, a school aide – it has a Semper Fi meaning.

“I walk by his photo every day and say ‘good morning’ to my brother. How can you not? I would feel guilty if I didn’t. …

“My brother was very popular and a very nice guy,” she says. He played football and basketball for Oak Creek. He wore No. 22, just like his father had in high school, and his brothers later wore the same number.

Lewandowski says she cannot help but wonder what the dynamics of her family would have been had Mark come home from Vietnam. There were nine kids, but there became eight – meaning a birthday that would not come again, a wedding, extra grandchildren, etc. And because he was the oldest, he likely would have been first to be in all of the major events.

“In my heart I have all the pride of what all my brothers accomplished in Vietnam,” Lewandowski says. She was a member of the Auxiliary at the Meyer-Dziedzic VFW Post No. 8482, but the auxiliary has been disbanded over the years.

Dziedzic is buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery at S. Lake Drive and E. College Ave. in Cudahy.

The size of Quang Tri Province is 1,832 square miles, a little bigger than Rhode Island but not as large as Delaware. Those two states are the 50th and 49th biggest states in America, respectively.

Two other Marines were killed on the same day as Dziedzic and at the same spot, including Pfc. Dennis Zwirchitz, 20, of Abbotsford in Clark County, west of Wausau, who received the Silver Star.

VirtualWall.org is devoted to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and lists the other two deaths on Dziedzic’s page, and vice versa. It also has this account from the Marines’ Command Chronology for March 16: “Hotel Company made heavy contact while successfully extracting an eight-man recon patrol which earlier made contact with a large enemy force at YD 261659, the fortified village of Vinh Quan Ha. 21 enemy were killed while friendly losses were 3 KIA …”

The searchable database of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial shows a total of 45 other men killed in Tet fighting the same day as Dziedzic and the two other Marines.

Lewandowski says she did not understand much about Vietnam or the bitter divisions of the nation over the war until she was of high school age. As reported in the story on Meyer in this series, the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army included attacks in 100 cities and towns.

American forces smashed it in weeks of difficult fighting. Marines were under siege / attack for 77 days – until April 8 – at Khe Sanh in Quang Tri Province and in pitched battles at the old imperial capital Hue, some of the worst fighting of the entire war.

Tet was smashed but at a high cost in blood, and an even higher cost in domestic public perception and opinion.

It soon became known that Gen. William Westmoreland had requested 200,000 additional troops, a stunning turn of events to a nation that often been told that there was light around the corner. Protests on college campuses across the nation grew and grew and became uglier and uglier; President Lyndon B. Johnson nearly was defeated in the March 12 New Hampshire Democratic primary by Sen. Eugene McCarthy and withdrew from the presidential race on March 31, two weeks after Dziedzic was killed.

Tom Mueller, author of these reports, has called Oak Creek home since 1978 and has been writing for nearly 30 years about those who made the Ultimate Sacrifice. His two books are “The Wisconsin 3,800,” about men and women buried overseas or MIA from World War II, and “Heart of the Century,” about Korea and other events in the news and daily life between 1949 and 1951. His author website is www.warbooks.webs.com

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