South Vietnam          Joseph S. Zawtocki
                        Dennis W. Hammond
                             (1042)
On February 8, 1968, Corporals Zawtocki and Hammond were captured
in South Vietnam during the 1968 Tet Offensive.  They were
initially held with other U.S. POWs who were present when Zawtocki
and Hammond died in captivity.  Hammond's name appeared on the
Provisional Revolutionary Government's died in captivity list, and
his date of death was recorded as March 7, 1970.  Both were later
declared dead/body not recovered.
In August 1985, the remains of American POWs who died in captivity
in South Vietnam in Quang Nam Province, the same prison camp where
Hammond and Zawtocki were held, were repatriated by Vietnam.
Zawtocki's remains were identified.  The remains attributed to
Corporal Hammond were determined to be the remains of a Southeast
Asian Mongoloid.  Based on all available information, the remains
of those who died in this jungle prison had been recovered by
Vietnamese officials during the 1970s.
----------------------------
                                                [ssrep3.txt 02/09/93]
Other Indications
After Operation Homecoming, U.S. officials and others looked to new
information about POWs' experience for additional leads. For many
years, POWs were not permitted to send or receive letters.  When
mail finally was allowed by the North Vietnamese, the U.S. gained
new information about its POWs.
Defense Secretary Melvin Laird recalled that about 5000 letters had
been received and, through them, about 470 POWs in Vietnam and five
in Laos had been identified.
Five individuals verified in captivity by war-time letters but did
not return at Operation Homecoming:
     Dennis W. Hammond (USMC) was captured on February 1968.  He
     wrote a letter that was never mailed by his captors that
     positively identified him as captured.  A 1968 Vietnamese
     radio broadcast indicated that Hammond made a statement.
     Hammond subsequently died in captivity; his death and burial
     were verified by a POW who returned. Hammond's remains have
     not been repatriated.
==============================
A LONG JOURNEY, A VIETNAM DOG TAG FINALLY RETURNS HOME
Foreign Affairs News Keywords: MARINE, DOG TAG, DENNY HAMMOND
Source: Glouchester County Times
Published: February 4, 2001 Author: JIM SIX
Posted on 02/04/2001 16:09:12 PST by Angelique
By JIM SIX,Staff Writer
Captured by the Viet Cong on Feb. 8, 1968, Marine Cpl. Dennis W. Hammond was
moved from one POW camp to another, deep in the jungle of South Vietnam. The
tough, athletic Marine was shot trying to escape, beaten, starved and,
eventually, died. His body was never recovered.
What his family did have were fragments of his young, short life and his
valiant service, stored in yellowing envelopes and dusty boxes: His prized
record collection, a handwritten description of his dream car, his letters
from Vietnam, two Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star. Nothing, though, to allow
those who loved him to mark his death.
Opal Hammond died in 1981, killed slowly but surely, her family believes, by
her son's capture, his death and the fact that his body was not sent home.
Before her death, Opal said, "I guess we never will get his dog tags."
But, on Jan. 20 -- 19 days before the 33rd anniversary of his capture -- I
traveled to Texas and handed one of Denny Hammond's dog tags to his sister.
>From the triple canopy jungle of Vietnam to a little shop in Da Nang to New
Jersey to Texas over a 33-year period -- it has been a long journey for one
small remnant of a young man's life.
In August, 1993, I was still the crime reporter for the Gloucester County
Times. I spent hours of every day in police stations. In Deptford, one day,
Ray Milligan, who was the police chief then, told me he'd just returned from
Vietnam. He mentioned that in the small shops that lined the street outside
his hotel in Da Nang, vendors were selling what appeared to be old, rusty
American dog tags as relics of the war that had ended almost 20 years
earlier.
I can't explain my strong reaction. The thought of dog tags taken from
captured, wounded or killed Americans being sold as cheap trinkets and grim
souvenirs instantly bothered me. I gave Milligan $100 and asked him to bring
back as many dog tags as possible when he came back from Vietnam in
November.
While he was there, he added some of his own money to the total and
purchased hundreds of dog tags from the shops in Da Nang and another hundred
or so out near China Beach. When he returned, he handed me a tattered
plastic bag containing approximately 450 dog tags.
If this pile of oxidized metal trinkets contained dog tags that belonged to
veterans of the war, maybe they'd want them back. Suppose there were dog
tags that had belonged to servicemen who had died in Vietnam? Would their
families want the tags after so many years?
It might be possible, I thought, to sort through all the dirty, corroded and
aging pieces of metal to see if any of the names matched those inscribed on
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. I sorted the tags by
branches of service and put them in small paper bags. I got a copy of a book
that had a list of all the names on the Wall.
It was apparent by now that this would be no small feat. The impossibility
of sorting through the names and numbers simply overwhelmed me. So I packed
the paper bags in a leather bag and put them away for a little while.
That "little while" was seven years. In March 2000, with the 25th
anniversary of the fall of Saigon coming a month later, I remembered the dog
tags, sitting in some corner of my office at home.
That column appeared on Tuesday, March 28. That day and the next, nearly 30
people called or e-mailed me, offering to help. One Marine veteran who
travels regularly to Vietnam on business called to tell me the dog tags were
probably phony. I knew that, I told him, but it was still worth looking
into.
Gloucester County Military and Veterans Affairs Director Angelo Romeo called
and, through him, I met two men who would become actively involved in the
project, Gene Lillie and Gene Timmons, both former Marines. Timmons had been
active in organizing the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans Memorial Project.
Lillie, a tax accountant, immediately took the bags of dog tags so members
of his office staff could create a computer database of all the names and
other information. We all acknowledged the tags might be fakes, but our
hopes that they were genuine were bolstered by the physical condition of the
tags. To manufacture tags that looked this old, this corroded, should have
cost their creators more than we bought them for. And, if they were phonies,
why were there no duplicates in the 450 or so tags?
Lillie insisted it was worth the effort. "It's the basic Marine Corps
concept. We don't leave anything behind. We bring it back and get it where
it belongs," he said. These guys really do believe in "Semper Fi."
Lillie's staff wasn't able to get the database done at the time. We should
have realized -- it was tax time! But then I got a telephone call from Col.
Kathleen Morrissey, who at the time was the assistant director of the state
Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.
Overjoyed that the project might get jump-started, we sent the tags to
Trenton with the colonel.While all this was going on, first attempts were
being made to verify some of the names on the tags. Some were immediate
matches to names on the Wall. We needed further verification. At the start,
I had asked a friend with a relative who works for the federal government to
see if any of his Pentagon contacts could assist us. The reply I received
was that it would not be in the Pentagon's best interests to help us.
Lillie, Timmons and Morrissey were reaching out for whatever contacts they
had who might be able to confirm names and numbers. I suppose you'd have to
say they were using back-channel contacts and weren't making official,
formal requests.
In early September, I got an e-mail from Morrissey. She'd forwarded the list
to the Department of Defense, but said the response so far had not been
encouraging. Then, in early November, Morrissey called with some really
exciting news. One of the dog tags had been a "hit," matching the name of
a Marine who was unaccounted for in Vietnam. She gave me the name and number
of the man to call in the DoD Office of Prisoners of War and Missing
Personnel.
I called immediately and the guy said one name on our list was that of a
Marine who'd been captured. It was believed D.W. Hammond died while a
prisoner of war, he said. At his suggestion, I contacted the Marine Corps to
see if they would contact Hammond's survivors for me. I called and spoke to
a woman there, telling her of the dog tag I had. "His name is D.W.
Hammond," I said. "Let me give you his service number."
"I assume you want to hold on to the dog tag until you can talk to the
survivors," she said. I said that was exactly what I would do. She
suggested I write her a letter with my request. I wrote it and faxed it the
same day, anxious for a quick reply.
As it turned out, the discovery of the remains of 19 Marines from World War
II on Makin Island in the Pacific occupied those in her office for most of
November and December.
When I returned to my office after the holidays, there was a message on my
voice mail from Dec. 26. "Mr. Six, this is Carlene Tackitt. I believe you
have my brother's dog tag and I'd very much like to talk to you."
Excitedly, I called Gene Lillie to let him know. He started contacting other
Marine vets to put together plans, so I could travel to wherever Carlene
Tackitt was to give her the dog tag.
That wasn't needed, although at every step of the way, Lillie and his band
of Marines announced they were ready to help in any way, with airfare,
lodging, car rental, food, whatever.
I called Mrs. Tackitt, who lives in Mexia, Texas. She was thrilled to think
that she would have her brother's dog tag at last. "It just made me sick
when I read that they were selling them," she said. "My mother always
said, "I guess we never will get his dog tags,"' said Mrs. Tackitt. "You
have no idea how much this means to us."
I spoke several times on the phone with Carlene Tackitt and her son, Charlie
Baker. He faxed me some documents and his wife, D'Anna, who's a teacher,
scanned some others and e-mailed them to me. Two weeks before my departure
date, I learned that the same woman who had forwarded my letter from the
Marine Corps to Mrs. Tackitt had now called her to question my motives and
reinforce the official position that the dog tag was most likely not
genuine. Carlene said the woman pointed out that most survivors are
reluctant to stir up old memories and revisit the painful past. But Carlene
assured the woman she knew there was a chance the dog tag was not real, but
said, if it was, she most certainly wanted it.
Dennis Wayne Hammond was born April 26, 1946 in Madisonville, Texas. He was
the baby of three children. His brother, Willie, was about seven years older
and Carlene was 13 years older. When Denny was 14 months old, Ernest and
Opal Hammond moved the family to Detroit, lured by the promise of good
income from the automobile plants. Ernest worked two jobs at two plants for
about four years, finally settling in as a foreman at General Motors. He
worked there for 34 years. During a visit back home, Carlene fell in love,
got married and stayed in Texas.
In high school in Michigan, Denny Hammond was an athlete. "He was a hunter,
a fisherman, a star hockey player, a football player out of this world,"
said his nephew, Charlie Baker, Carlene's son, who lives the next town over
from Mexia, in Wortham. "He had trophies. He was really athletic. If there
was anybody suited for the Marines, he was. He was rough and tough," said
Baker. "And smart. Real smart." "Dennis played Marines from the time he
was big enough to walk and talk," said Carlene. Denny graduated from high
school in May 1964.
Hammond went to Southeast Asia in 1966. He served two tours in Vietnam and,
in February 1968, in the heat of the Tet Offensive, he was a short-timer,
with just a few days left before going home. He was a member of a Combined
Action Program unit, which placed a squad of Marines and a Navy corpsman --
a medic -- in select villages in the I-Corps area of South Vietnam.
"I knew Dennis so well," said Mike "Tiny" Readinger, who served with
Hammond for 10 months in Vietnam and now lives in Terre Haute, Ind. "He was
very well-built, broad-shouldered, strong physically and mentally. He
believed in his country and what he was there for," Readinger said in a
recent telephone interview. "We were different than a lot of units because
we lived with the Vietnamese. Dennis loved the kids. Dennis loved the
dogs," said Readinger. "Once you got to understand the South Vietnamese
and the kids, it was almost like protecting his own family," Readinger
said.
He remembered that Denny Hammond loved to hunt and fish and was talking
about buying land in Canada and becoming a forest ranger or a hunting guide.
"Early one Sunday morning, all of a sudden, we heard a bunch of shotgun
shots. Everybody bails out of their racks and goes to the bunkers. There's
Dennis at the perimeter (of the camp.) He'd camouflaged himself and was
hunting ravens with double-aught buckshot," Readinger said, laughing at the
memory because Denny didn't bag any ravens.
"I should be leaving in a couple more weeks," Denny wrote in a letter
dated Jan. 16, 1968. Early on the morning of Feb. 8, 1968, a platoon of
Marines made a radio call for help. A reaction force was quickly put
together from three other platoons. Readinger was left behind to man the
radio. Hammond "didn't have to go with that reaction force, he had a short
time left," Readinger said. But Denny wanted to go, Readinger remembers,
because he felt he had not really accomplished anything constructive during
his two tours. "This will be my last chance," Denny said, according to
Readinger.
The 15-man reaction force walked off into the jungle -- right into an ambush
by nearly 300 enemy soldiers. In the heat of the ensuing battle, Readinger
recalls, the commanding officer of the reaction force radioed they were
"getting chewed up." Then came his chilling last transmission: "We ain't
gonna get out ... There are too many ... They're all over us ... No way out.
Don't send anyone else in here ... Tell my wife I love her ..."
When it was over, only three men came back. Denny Hammond and another Marine
had been captured. The rest had been slaughtered. Back home in Michigan,
they were expecting Dennis to show up any day. "That's what mama thought
when they knocked on the door, that it was him coming in," Carlene said.
"But it wasn't. The man was coming there to tell her he was captured."
"It was a Sunday morning," said Denny's brother, Willie, who still lives
in the Detroit area. "It was fairly early in the morning. I could hear my
mother kind of crying" as the Marine captain and the family's minister
spoke with her.
Denny had written that he knew the car would be expensive, but he wanted
something for the money he'd earned. Twenty days after being captured, Denny
wrote a letter home. He scrunched his normal handwriting down to about half
its size to cram his message on both sides of a small piece of paper. The
letter was never mailed. Denny hid it in a book and it was eventually found
by GIs after the Viet Cong had moved him and the other POWs to another
prison camp in the jungle. The Hammonds didn't receive the letter until
sometime in 1969, more than a year later.
"I know this letter will take you by surprise, as by now you have probably
received news of my missing in action by telegram," he wrote. "Since my
capture, I have been well treated, clothed and fed 3 times a day. I am not
wounded or sick. They say that sooner or later they'll release me."
Denny was concerned more with his family than himself. "I hope and pray
that I haven't caused the family a lot of heartbreak. I have to stress that
I am fine." He tells the folks that he was buying a hundred acres in Canada
and wants his brother, Willie, to keep up the $50-a-month payments for him,
using his savings. There was a balance of $750 due. Recently, Willie said
they did make all the payments and kept the property for years. It was
finally sold in 1979.
"Remember, don't worry about me. I'll be OK. Please take care of
yourselves. I'll be home before you know it," he wrote. "Give Mickey a big
kiss for me, too. HA HA." Mickey was his beloved hunting dog.
On April Fool's Day, 1968, Denny and at least one other prisoner tried to
escape from the POW camp. Memories shift and change shape over time, so
accounts of the events in the prison camps differ a bit. Hammond is
mentioned in at least three books written about the POW experience,
including Frank Anton's book, "Why Didn't You Get Me Out?" Anton, who
lived in Woodbury Heights when his father was stationed at McGuire Air Force
Base in the late 1950s, went to Paulsboro High School during his sophomore
year. The helicopter pilot was a POW for five years. For two of those years,
Hammond was in the same camp.
"It was pretty bad," said Anton in a telephone interview recently, from
his home in Florida. "We lived in the dirt, basically, with straw huts that
we helped build. We survived those first two years, which were the worst,
"68 and "69, on what I'd call semi rice ... It was vermin-infested and
very pinkish-red rice. We lived on two dry cups a day, small cups, tea cups
... "It was tough, because your body was violated," he said. He lost
almost a hundred pounds in his first six months of captivity.
Denny and a prisoner named Weatherman made their break for freedom on April
1. Hammond later said that after seeing Weatherman get shot in the face, he
made a run for it. "Denny tried to run up a stream bed and he got about 20
feet or 30 feet and got hit in the back of the calf with a bullet from the
same rifle that killed Weatherman," said Anton. "Then they dragged him to
a Montagnard village where they proceeded to beat the hell out of him all
night," Anton said. They carried Hammond back into the prison camp tied to
a pole. "He was scared to death ... He was bloody and he was scared ... He
had the bullet wound and they had a trial for him a day or two later. They
threatened if he did one more bad thing, they would kill him," Anton
recalled.
Dennis Hammond spent his 22nd birthday spread-eagled in wooden stocks in a
prisoner of war camp in South Vietnam, hungry, beaten, suffering from a
bullet wound in his leg.
"After two months, they pardoned him. They called it a pardon. They had
originally said it was six months, but six months would have killed him. We
were sneaking him food ... We weren't supposed to have anything to do with
him, but he was an American," said Anton. "The one guy who would never
have died in that situation was Denny Hammond, if not for what that bullet
did to him. It just took 90 percent of his strength away. He was never
treated properly. They took the bullet out and put some mercurochrome and
stuff on it, but that was the extent of the treatment," Anton said. "Denny
was one tough guy. I mean, he was beyond a Marine, he was just a tough,
street guy," said Anton.
The Hammonds eventually were notified of the escape attempt and of Denny's
wound, although the official letter from the government on Nov. 13, 1969
simply stated, "His wound was not serious and he made a complete
recovery."
"I had a dream one time," Carlene said. "It was when he was a prisoner
and I guess it was because I was worried about mama so, and I dreamed I was
over there in the jungles and I was going down this road and I was hunting
him. This little girl said, "I know where he's at.' I took hold of her and
I was shaking her and I said, "You tell me, you show me where he's at,' but
she wouldn't show me and I was just shaking her and shaking her and trying
to make her show me where he was."
In early 1970, Denny came down with a severe case of dysentery. He was too
weak to move, couldn't make it to the latrine. The strapping Marine who'd
weighed in at about 180 was now down to about 89 pounds. "I remember when
he and I were sitting in a spot of sunlight," recalled Anton. "That was
our biggest thing over there. Through the triple canopy, if you could find a
spot of sunlight, you'd sit in it and look up at the sun. It was a
pleasure."
Denny died either March 7 or 8, 1970. Some say that, as he died, he was
reciting the military oath of allegiance to the United States. "My mother
said she had a dream," Carlene said, holding her brother's dog tag in her
hand. "I may cry, but don't you pay any attention to me. She said she had a
dream one night and she was at her mama's house in Texas and there was an
old stock tank behind the house. She saw a horse, a white horse and it had
wings and Dennis was on it. His hair was just blowing and he was waving. She
went down and he was in the water. He went under and he waved one time. She
said she honestly believed that the time that happened was the time he
died."
At the time, however, no one at home knew Dennis was dead. It wasn't until
1973, when some repatriated POWs had a chance to tell their stories, that
the government notified the Hammonds their son was dead. The telegram on
April 14, 1973 officially changed Denny's status from "prisoner of war" to
"deceased, body not recovered."
After Denny's capture, Opal Hammond had started a fast downhill slide. She'd
be fine one minute and off in another world the next. She'd suddenly push
her plate away in the middle of a meal. "What's the matter, mama?" someone
would ask. "He's not eating anything," she'd say. The Marine Corps would
send her flowers at Christmas, but Opal would send them back. "I want my
son," she'd say. She collected grocery bags full of newspaper clippings,
anything that mentioned Vietnam. "She was trying to find her son, mama,"
her own son reassured her in a gentle voice.
"When the TV showed all the prisoners coming home, getting off the plane,
Dennis never got off the plane. (Mama) called me the next morning and told
me Dennis was dead," Carlene recalled. Opal's health continued to decline.
Carlene moved her parents to Mexia in 1980. Her mother died in 1981. Her
father, Ernest, died in 1994. "I told daddy one time, and I've told Charlie
this, that I honestly believe -- now, maybe I shouldn't say what I'm going
to say, but the government don't tell you the truth about everything, they
just don't. I honestly believe that if they had told my mother a deliberate
lie and sent her a coffin home and told her that (Denny's) bones were in it,
that my mama would be alive today. Because she would know he was back here
and not over there," Carlene said.
According to government records received from the Library of Congress, the
U.S. has made numerous attempts to recover Hammond's body, starting in 1975
and continuing through 1999. In 1995, a former POW who said he helped bury
Denny was taken back to the prison camps. He found the spot -- records
indicate the name "Dennis Hammond" and an arrow pointing to the earth are
carved in a tree there -- but no remains were found. Earlier, two sets of
remains were recovered. One was a prisoner who had died before Hammond did,
but the other set of remains turned out to be those of a Southeast Asian
person, according to the government.
For more than 20 years, there have been searches, negotiations, expeditions
and even excavations by the government for which he proudly fought and died,
but the location of Dennis Wayne Hammond's body continues to elude
investigators.
Carlene brought out the old letters, the telegrams and photographs and
spread them all out on her dining room table. She read aloud portions of
letters she has read thousands of times before. She pulled out the photo of
Dennis that shows him in the jungle, on his knees with his hands up "I
often wonder what he was thinking right there. You know he was scared. He
had to be scared," she said.
It was Jan. 20, 2001. Denny Hammond had been captured almost 33 years
earlier. On that Saturday afternoon, I had finally handed her the dog tag,
cushioned in a donated velvet box marked "Pitman Jewelry Shop." She
cradled the rusty tag in her hands and sobbed. She kept track of where the
dog tag was during our conversation, making sure that when her son, her
daughter-in-law or her granddaughter took it to look at it, she got it back.
"Keep that next to me. I want that over by me. I ain't never giving that
up," she said. "You don't know how much we appreciate this," she said.
"You have no idea."
Denny Hammond may have earned two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, but more
importantly, he earned the love and loyal devotion of his family and the
admiration of his fellow Marines, and somehow, just a tiny bit of that has
rubbed off on those who were involved in getting his dog tag back to his
family. I stood a little bit taller as I returned from visiting Carlene
Tackitt in Texas.
Gene Lillie has reworked the dog tag database to make it easier to work
with. He's trying to match names and Social Security numbers to existing
records. "We can relish our win," he said when I got back from Texas.
"But we have 449 (more dog tags) tomorrow we have to devote time to."
=================================================================
Subject: POW/MIA 3/1/01
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 17:05:27 -0600
Returned dog tag gives Mexia woman tie to brother killed in Vietnam
By MICHELLE HILLEN Tribune-Herald staff writer
MEXIA, Texas - The portrait of a proud Marine hangs on the wall of Carlene
Tackitt's Mexia home - one of a few reminders of the baby brother she lost
in  the Vietnam War.
Now, after receiving what she believes to be the dog tags he was wearing
during his capture by enemy forces, Tackitt said she feels like she has
finally gotten some closure to Dennis Hammond's death more than 30 years ago
in a prisoner-of-war camp.
"I can't tell you what it felt like," she said, her eyes welling up with
tears.  "Part of him was home and it just meant so much."
It is to Jim Six, a newspaper columnist for the Gloucester County Times in
New Jersey, and a one-in-a-million shot that Tackitt owes that sense of
peace.
The story begins on Feb. 8, 1968, when Hammond was captured by the Viet Cong
in Quang Nam Province, South Vietnam, eight days before his tour of duty was
to end.
"He was due to come home and he didn't have to go on this last mission, but
he just felt like he hadn't done anything worthwhile yet," Tackitt said.
"He firmly believed in what he was doing, so he went, and they were just
overpowered by 300 men."
His family, who had been expecting his knock on the door, were horrified to
receive a telegram saying that Marine Cpl. Dennis W. Hammond was considered
missing in action.
"That was what really did it for my mama," Tackitt said.
"Her children were always No. 1 to her, and he was her baby.  When she heard
he was captured, she quit eating because she knew he had stopped eating. She
never gave him up."
They didn't hear from him until receiving a letter he had written and hid
during his first couple of days of capture.  American soldiers found the
letter and mailed it after Hammond had already been moved from one camp to
another.
The letter, Tackitt said, is exactly what she would have expected from
"Denny," filled with reassurances for his family not to worry about him.
"I know you're worried sick about me," he wrote in the letter.  "But please
don't.  Let me do the worrying.  I am being treated fairly.  And like I
said, in no time at all I'll be home.  Playing my records.  Don't let
anything happen to them."  He went on to say he thought his parents would
likely have to stop delivery of the dream car that was going to await him on
his return, but asked that they keep up payment for 100 acres of property he
was purchasing in Canada.
"He wrote about things as if he didn't know what was going to happen to
him," Tackitt said.  "He knew, I think.  But he also knew us, and he knew
how we would worry, and he didn't want us to."
At the second POW camp, Hammond was shot trying to escape.  After that, he
was beaten and tortured in other ways until he finally died in March 1970.
Although camp survivors have taken military forces back to the spot where he
was buried, no body has ever been found, and the family was left with
nothing tangible to mark his death.  That is, until Six entered the picture.
In 1993, Six was the police reporter for the Gloucester County Times.  At
the time he was talking with the police chief who had recently been to
Vietnam on a medical mission.  Chief, Ray Milligan told of seeing what
appeared to be rusty, old American dog tags sold in a little souvenir shop
in Da Nang.
"It just ticked me off that someone would be selling those dog tags as
souvenirs," Six said.  "I told him, 'Here is a hundred bucks, bring back as
many as you can.' "
After adding about $20 of his own, Milligan came back with a rusty pile of
about 450 dog tags, some from Da Nang and others from China Beach.
Six's first step was to sort them out according to service branch and
compare names with those engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in
Washington, D.C.
"It turned out to be harder than I thought it was going to be, so I just put
them away," he said.  "They sat in the corner of the office for seven years.
. .
Finally, we got several other people involved, and we began to start taking
back doors because the front doors seemed to be shut to us."
They got warnings from military officials saying the tags were probably not
real, that fakes were floating around all over the place in Vietnam.
Finally, after involvement from the Department of Military and Veterans
Affairs, a name forwarded to the Department of Defense's Office of Prisoners
of War and Missing Personnel came up as a "hit."
That name was Dennis Hammond.  Officials contacted Tackitt about the
possibility of someone having found her brother's dog tag, and she
immediately called Six, leaving a voice mail message on his machine.
"She said, 'This is Carlene Tackitt.  I believe you have my brother's dog
tag and I'd like very much to talk to you,' " he said.  "Of all the people
that I could have had a first match-up with, I was so lucky it was her.  I
could have gotten a person who said, "To hell with you, I don't want that.'
Instead, I got this really nice lady who said, 'I want this back.' "
On Jan. 20, Six flew to Dallas from New Jersey and took a rental car to
Mexia to deliver the dog tag in person.  "I handed her the tag in a jewelry
box. She took it and cried," he said.  "She was so happy to have the tag, it
was just very moving.  They didn't have anything from his death, and now I
was able to give them what we hope is a real dog tag.  That was with him and
that is why it was important to them."
Maj. Tim Blair, a Pentagon spokesman, said it would be very difficult to
authenticate the tag, but if it brings some comfort to a family, then there
is no harm in the family receiving it.
"I think it is admirable on his part that he is taking a proactive measure
to try to marry up these (dog tags) with their rightful owner," Blair said.
"There is some nostalgia attached to them, so I admire him in his efforts."
Six said he plans to continue to work on matching the remaining tags with
owners or family members, but he wishes he had more time to spend on the
project.  "Nobody has been able to devote 100 percent of their time on
this," he said.  "With this kind of project, you do it here and you do it
there.  I just don't know when we'll be able to get another one."
For Tackitt's part, she wishes him great success, hoping he can give to
other families what he gave her: a tangible piece of her brother's life,
something to feel and hold, and to remind her of that person in the
portrait.