Meyer Was First Oak Creek Resident Killed in Vietnam

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 part 3: James Fredrick Meyer, whose name is part of the Meyer-Dziedzic VFW Post.

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James Fredrick Meyer Jr., 19, arrived in South Vietnam on Dec. 31, 1967, as a Marine private first class. He was dead only a few weeks later.

Meyer was killed Feb. 17, 1968, in Quang Tri Province, along the Demilitarized Zone. This was during the Tet offensive of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, which had begun Jan. 30 and featured shocking attacks in more than 100 cities and towns, including a brief penetration of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

The Meyer family had moved from Milwaukee to a home on S. Shepard Ave. off of E. Rawson as James started at Oak Creek High School, from which he graduated in 1966.

The family had lived in Fort Atkinson, Wis.; in Kentucky and then on 27th Street in Milwaukee before moving to Oak Creek. A decade or so after James was killed, it moved to Racine to be closer to the families of his parents, Zada and James Sr.

The Marine had two siblings: David, 8 at the time of his death, and Sharon Gaulke, who was 25 and living in Hales Corners with three children.

“Jimmy was a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky brother,” says Gaulke, now of Milwaukee, who had two more children after James’ death and now has nine grandchildren. “He liked to tell jokes, and he loved sports. He was a wonderful brother. I couldn’t ask for more. He was so kind-hearted and so full of life; a neat guy; a gorgeous guy.”

David says his brother had a passion for cars, owning a dark blue Pontiac Tempest and a tan Volkswagen with a sunroof. They would ride together all over town, and often went to the State Fair to make a beeline for the Mousetrap ride, a kind of rollercoaster. “He showed me how to throw the football and baseball. I miss him still,” said David, who was in fourth grade at Edgewood Elementary School when the news from Vietnam arrived.

James also was an Explorer Scout and had oodles of merit badges, David says. James also did work with his father as an electroplater at Murray Metal Plating in Milwaukee.

He spent a year or so at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he was reunited with a friend from middle school, Jon Lenichek. Lenichek posted a remembrance message to Meyer on the website of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 2008, and discussed it via email this week.

“I knew Jim as a classmate and friend (albeit not my closest friend) from eighth grade into high school (Pulaski in Milwaukee). He was the only one of us who made the freshman football team, as I recall. A number of us stayed in touch even after he moved to Oak Creek, and then reconnected at UWM in fall 1966.

"I saw him pretty regularly then while we both were there as freshmen, and continued to write after he enlisted. Jim was very funny and a riot to be around. Not exactly the model serious student, but certainly not a goof-off either.”

The message that Lenichek posted was that he still had the last letter he sent to Meyer – returned unopened by the Marines because Meyer was KIA when it was received.

“I have no idea what my last letter says,” Lenichek says now. “I have never opened it, and could not. It would be like opening his grave. For years I kept it framed in my office at work, and anytime I thought I was having a miserable day, I just looked up and realized what a skate my life had been.”

While at UWM, Meyer knew he would inevitably be drafted, so he enlisted in the Marines. “He was very proud. You could see he was learning from the experience” when he wrote home and came back to Oak Creek on leave, Gaulke says.

David says his brother won a coveted award in boot camp for being the best in his unit, called the Blues Winner Honor Man. He had hoped to get into a special training program, but the Marines being selected for it had much more than James’ one year of college, and James lost out.

And in a final visit home, “He was uneasy and had a sense of ill-boding,” Gaulke says.

Meyer was the first from Oak Creek to die in Vietnam, and the community quickly mobilized to help the family. Gaulke says there was “a huge, huge, huge procession for his funeral” from the Molthen-Bell Funeral Home in downtown South Milwaukee, with total support from the American Legion post for anything the family needed. “One Marine stayed with us and walked us through everything, all the decisions” involved in the funeral, Gaulke said.

Meyer was in L Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, III Marine Amphibious Force. He is listed as a rifleman and as being killed in Quang Tri Province, with no hamlet or village named.

David says he was a machine gunner and had been near the ancient city of Hue and the Perfume River, and was one of two men who had the task of providing cover fire for an evacuation helicopter. The copter got hit and those on it were rescued, but the extra time needed for the covering fire proved fatal to James and the other Marine. Gaulke tells another combat scene, about Meyer being on point and the first to be shot. “We were told that because he got shot, the rest of them could scatter and survive. They wrote us a letter saying that.”

Tens of thousands of Marines and soldiers fought in Quang Tri Province before, during and long after the Tet offensive.

Tet was the lunar new year, a time when both sides observed a truce. The Communists broke it in 1968 – there were coordinated, concerted attacks all over the country. Here is a brief account from Battlefield: Vietnam:

“On the Tet holiday, Viet Cong units surge into action over the length and breadth of South Vietnam. In more than 100 cities and towns, shock attacks by Viet Cong sapper-commandos are followed by wave after wave of supporting troops. By the end of the city battles, 37,000 Viet Cong troops deployed for Tet have been killed.”

The offensive lasted through the end of March, and in terms of losses to the Communists, “Tet is nothing less than a catastrophe. But for the Americans, who lost 2,500 men, it is a serious blow to public support.”

The deep division in the United States over the war before and especially after Tet “was an awful experience to those fragile young men,” Gaulke says. “I was very torn for years, and angry. I’m not angry now. The worst thing was that we did not honor the veterans until much later. They deserved to be treated with respect. It broke my heart.”

The searchable database of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial shows 50 other men were killed the same day as Meyer. Taking a name and date of a particular man from there and then searching at Virtual Wall, another site devoted to the memorial, one can obtain his unit number. It thus was found a Marine from Milwaukee was killed the same day as Meyer: Pfc. Kenneth Wayne Radonski, who was in Headquarters and Service Company of Meyer’s 1st Marines, 1st Marine Division. Meyer was in Company L.

Gaulke’s daughter Tracy has been to the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C., and “couldn’t believe there were so many names (more than 58,200). They at first couldn’t find my brother,” who is Panel 39E, Line 75.

Meyer is buried in , Oak Creek, with his mother, who died in 1986, and father, who died in 1979.

David Meyer enlisted in the Marines in 1976, finishing in 1982 in the Reserves. His brother’s service was in the back of his mind – “at the time I enlisted, I probably didn’t think so, but there was a kind of ‘if Jimmy can do it, I can.’”

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