Vietnam 74 Lost Lives USS Frank E. Evans Not On Wall

Finding a place on the Vietnam wall for a local veteran and his shipmates
Buffalo News
By Michelle Kearns
News Staff Reporter
June 4, 2015

Randy Henderson vividly remembers the warm June night 46 years ago when his family got the news that his brother, Terry Lee, had died on a Navy ship during the Vietnam War.

It was 1969. He was 13 and in his older brother’s bedroom when the phone rang at their Westfield home. His father screamed and started to cry. When his dad told his mother as she arrived home from her night job at a drug store, she ran off up the street.

“It’s the type of thing that never leaves you,” said Henderson, who now lives in Mayville.

Worse, the June 3 collision of the USS Frank E. Evans that killed his soft-spoken, guitar-playing brother and 73 others didn’t lead to the kind of honor that most who died in the war received: Their names were not engraved on the black granite Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Now after decades of lobbying by families of the seamen, an effort to right that wrong has been making progress. Sen. Charles E. Schumer officially launched his push to add the names this week with a letter to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.
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USS Frank E. Evans (DD 754) Association, Inc.

Sep 11, 2009
A Short Documentary made in memory of the 74 US Sailors who died in a collision at sea, involving the USS Frank E. Evans and the HMAS Melbourne. The maritime accident happened on June 3rd 1969 off the coast of wartime Vietnam. The 74 dead were never recognized by the US government as dieing in "the warzone", and subsequently were never added to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC.