Now finishing her junior year at Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, Annakate Kelley is looking ahead.

Next year, she’ll be vice president of the school’s famed drill team, and her college search is ramping up, too. Having just returned from visits to 11 mid-Atlantic schools, she’s at a familiar stage: “I have no idea where I want to go,” she says.

Kelley’s future is calling, but in recent months she’s also taken time to ponder the past. As part of an AP English project, she created a video tribute, based on her research, to the life and death of a beloved �ֲ���ý alumnus, David Nash ’68, who was killed in Vietnam in spring 1970.

Along the way, she’s made contact with a slew of Nash’s friends from �ֲ���ý, catalyzing an unexpected round of conversation and memory-sharing 50 years after his death.

“Annakate was able to tap into a store of knowledge and sentiment from 50 years ago, and she’s done more to bring �ֲ���ý people together around David’s memory than she will ever realize,” said Bruce Stangle ’70. “We owe her a debt of gratitude.”

Annakate Kelley, a junior at Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, created this tribute video for her AP English class about David Nash ’68, killed in Vietnam in 1970.

Kelley’s project is rooted in her school’s AP English curriculum. Each year since 2009, junior AP students have read The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories about combat soldiers in Vietnam.

Then they research a person — assigned randomly — whose name appears on the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial and create a video tribute using quotes, photographs, and other ephemera, including letters home, plus the student’s own voice-over.

“It moved me,” said Mike Nolan ’69, a Vietnam combat veteran, after seeing Kelley’s video. Noting that it was created by someone encountering the war for the very first time, Nolan says that “her young age and time separation gives her a certain honesty without prejudice.”

Rebecka Stucky, a high school English teacher of 44 years, created Westlake’s Vietnam tribute program in 2009, gaining support from the school library . Since then, Westlake students have created an astonishing 4,292 tributes, including .

Annakate Kelley, a junior at Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, created a tribute video to David Nash ’68, killed in Vietnam in 1970.

For her 16- and 17-year-old students, reading O’Brien’s book and creating the tributes “helps make the war more real, more tangible,” says Stucky. “They are near the age that some of their soldiers died, so it makes a tremendous impact on them. They begin to refer to the person they are researching as ‘my guy.’”

Such is the case with Kelley. As she began her AP coursework, she recalls how “it felt hard to find a connection to the war. It seemed so long ago.” After reading the book and creating the video, “it feels close.”

That proximate feeling hit its height as photos poured in from Nash’s �ֲ���ý friends, including John Lanza ’67 and Bill Bensch ’67. In one, Nash is with a bunch of friends in Parker Hall. He’s grinning, a beer in hand, and more than a few of his buddies are flipping the bird at the camera. Did Kelley notice the gesture? “About the third time I looked at the photo, yeah,” she says with a laugh.

David Nash ’68 (standing at right, beer in hand) and bird-flipping friends pose in West Parker Hall in October 1965. (Photograph by Bill Bensch ’67)

Seeing him in his �ֲ���ý environment, with friends, beer, and laughter, changed her perception of Nash. “At first I thought of him as a tough soldier. But he was just a kid.”

O’Brien’s book is about the literal and metaphorical things that soldiers carried with them in Vietnam. Nash carried “love for his sister and his mother,” Kelley believes. “I think that’s what was getting him through, thinking of them.”

Nash’s mother died in 2010 (his father had died when he was 5 years old). His sister, Susan Rice, lives in Brewster, Mass., with her husband, Jonathan. She loaned Kelley letters that her brother wrote from Vietnam, letters filled with now-familiar sentiments of growing disillusionment, frustration, and fear.

It was hard to re-read his letters, says Rice, and the experience revived some regrets. Four years older than her brother and already married and living far from home, she “didn’t even get a chance to see him play baseball” in high school or at �ֲ���ý.

David Nash ’68 pitching for �ֲ���ý. (Photograph by Jim Ledley ’69)

That’s been the hardest part of this experience, says Kelley, and what made her tear up at times: realizing that “the war still affects people every single day. People live with the pain of the war every day.”

The pain does endure, says Rice, but so does hope and appreciation.

“Annakate’s high school is not allowing their students to forget about this very sad chapter of American life,” Rice says. “In that sense, I feel good about it, the same way I felt about watching Ken Burns’ Vietnam War. It’s hard to watch, but good to always keep bringing those lessons forward.”

For Stucky’s students, reaching out to family and friends to learn about “their guys” becomes “an amazing experience to guide them in their discovery.” Importantly, the students “are creating something for a very real audience.”

At first, Kelley’s �ֲ���ý audience numbered three. Reviewing Nash’s presence on various Vietnam tribute sites, including the , she saw tributes from Sal Spinoza ’68, Bill Penders ’70, and Charlie Buck ’70.

Buck lives not far from Nash’s hometown of Mountain Lakes, N.J., and as fate would have it, he’d recently visited a cemetery in Basking Ridge to find Nash’s grave. Then, he received an email inquiry from Kelley. “It almost knocked me off my chair,” says Buck.

After Kelley contacted the trio, they and others, including Lanza and Stangle, helped to widen the circle, which now includes well over 100 �ֲ���ý alumni, not to mention friends from Nash’s hometown that Kelley contacted for her project.

Rice says that the pain of losing her brother is also lessened by knowing that “classmates and �ֲ���ý friends still hold him in high regard.”

A pitcher for �ֲ���ý, David Nash ’68 adopts a serious expression for his baseball portrait in spring 1967. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

And do they. At �ֲ���ý, Nash played baseball, majored in history, and, in his senior year, served as president of the intramurals council. Friends told Kelley how Nash was a “really good kid,” a “�ֲ���ý hero,” and a “first-class guy.”

To Penders, Nash was “wonderful, loving, sensitive, and kind.” And a letter to his hometown paper after his death called him “well-mannered, decent, and polite…. He only wanted to ‘play ball.’”

The outpouring tells Kelley something about Nash’s college. “�ֲ���ý seems like a community where everyone is supportive,” she says. “�ֲ���ý people seem to hold their connections forever, and I don’t think that happens at all colleges.”

Shortly after graduation, Nash was drafted to fight in Vietnam. He underwent a new type of Army training at Fort Benning, Ga., one geared toward filling a pressing need for more noncommissioned officers who could lead troops into battle.

Nash was tapped as his group’s “Distinguished Graduate” and promoted to staff sergeant. In his familiar self-deprecating and ironic tone, he judged the honor to be the result of “a calamity of errors” by the Army.

By September 1969, Nash was in Vietnam, but rather than the infantry, he was surprised to learn that he would command an armored cavalry assault vehicle, or ACAV, in the 11th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Squadron, I Troop, 3rd Platoon.

In May 1969, David Nash ’68 is congratulated by First Sgt. Raymond Jenkins as a Distinguished Graduate of his noncommissioned officer training program at Fort Benning, Ga. (Photograph by Sgt. L. Herrmann)

“I know nothing about armor — its maintenance or operation,” he wrote. “I guess my first month will be ‘on the job training.’ It’s really typical of this ______ [sic] Army to train me to be an infantryman and then put me with armor. C’est la vie!”

For the armored cavalry in Vietnam, missions came fast and furious. Considered the Army’s jack-of-all-trades, armored cavalry units were tasked with barreling into the jungle to find and engage the enemy. Being an ACAV commander “is not always conducive to good health,” wrote Nash. “I will be sitting in the open turret…firing a 50-caliber machine gun in plain view of everyone.”

Nash wrote about the dangers of RPGs, or rocket-propelled grenades, that “will go through an ACAV like a baseball goes through a window. That’s how we get most of our casualties (along with mines), and they really scare me.” Twice, Nash’s ACAV ran over a mine, and each time he avoided injury.

He also wrote about his perplexing encounters with civilians, mentioning Stars and Stripes coverage of the My Lai massacre in one letter and expressing the familiar soldier’s lament: “You just don’t know who to trust.”

David Nash ’68 sits atop his armored cavalry assault vehicle, or ACAV, in Vietnam in January 1970. On the back of the photo, he wrote, “I have to do something about that beer belly.” (Courtesy of Susan Rice)

By December 1969, after heavy fighting near the Cambodian border, his platoon, which was supposed to have 40 men, was down to 24. “All three of my crew are 20 years old — fresh out of high school. My gunner is a medic. That’s how hard up we are for men,” he wrote to his sister.

Still, his “gung ho” platoon leader, a first lieutenant, kept volunteering for extra assignments. “We have now been in the field for 32 consecutive days,” wrote Nash. The lieutenant, he added, “doesn’t think of his men enough.”

For Kelley, the event that defined Nash’s character came the day he was mortally wounded. A new soldier had been assigned to check the perimeter for land mines. And Nash, perhaps because of who he was or perhaps because of what he didn’t like about his platoon leader, or perhaps both, volunteered to take the new soldier’s place. During the patrol, on March 26, 1970, he stepped on a mine.

He survived the blast and the loss of his leg, but complications set in. On April 17, he dictated a letter to a Red Cross worker from his hospital bed in Japan. “My wounds have healed but I picked up intestinal problems, malaria, and other assorted problems,” he wrote to his sister. He was fed intravenously. “At this point I think I’d pay ten dollars for a cheeseburger.”

Nash died 26 days later, on May 13, 1970. He was 23 years old.

David Nash ’68 (second from left) and fellow Bobcat hurlers gather with their baseball coach, Chick Leahey ’52 (right), in the Gray Athletic Building in spring 1967. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

The next spring, his �ֲ���ý baseball coach, Chick Leahey ’52, announced the creation of the David R. Nash Memorial Baseball Award, an effort spearheaded by Mike Morin ’68 and supported by teammates and friends of Nash. In recent years, his �ֲ���ý friends have also endowed a scholarship fund in Nash’s name.

Leahey’s widow, Ruth Leahey, has seen Kelley’s tribute video. “I wish Chick were here to see it,” she says. “I remember when the call came that David was injured, and then a second call that he had died. Chick was deeply sad and frustrated by the loss of David’s life in the war.”

Years later, the Leaheys traveled to Washington, D.C. There, Chick went to the Vietnam wall, found David’s name, and knelt in prayer.

In the summer of 1972, Rocky Wild Mossman ’67 and several other Navy wives fly to Hong Kong to meet their husbands’ aircraft carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk. Except for one bash with the officers and wives, Rocky and Harry Mossman ’65 spend their days and nights with just each other.

Rocky gives him cookies that she and their sons, Tom, 4, and Bill, 2, made together. At one point, Harry shows her — but doesn’t give her — a sheaf of handwritten pages, a letter to be delivered to the boys if Harry, an A-6A bombardier-navigator, is killed in action.

“I read it briefly,” Rocky recalls. “But I remember not wanting to deal with the possibility of death that they were dealing with every day.”

A month later, the possible has become real.

Harry and his pilot, Roger Lester, are reported missing after their fighter-bomber, call sign Viceroy 502, disappears the night of Aug. 20, 1972, over heavily defended Haiphong, North Vietnam. A radio transmission is heard: “Let’s get the hell out of here.” An explosive flash illuminates the clouds.

In 1972, members of the VA-52 Knightriders, including Harry Mossman ’65, seated third from left with glasses, prepare to depart Naval Air Station Cubi Point in the Philippines for combat operations off North Vietnam aboard the USS Kitty Hawk. Roger Lester, pilot of Mossman’s ill-fated A-6A fighter-bomber, is at the steering wheel. At far left, in aviator glasses, is Mike Smith, who would be pilot of the doomed space shuttle Challenger in 1986. (Photograph by Greg Wood)

Back in Oak Harbor, Wash., near Whidbey Island Naval Air Station where Harry’s VA-52 squadron is stationed, Rocky prepares to tell her two boys.

“In Oak Harbor it just wasn’t unusual for a father to be missing,” she recalls. “I was trying to be the stoic New Englander, so I just told these two little kids, ‘Our daddy won’t be coming home with the ship. He’s missing, like Jerry and Terry’s daddy.’”

She’s told that Harry is almost certainly dead. But a year later, when the POWs come home, the Navy puts Rocky and other wives of missing airmen on alert in case their names come up during debriefings. But no one speaks of Mossman or Lester.

“I feel bad that I was silent about their father,” she says. “But I strived not to be the pitiful widow.”

In 1975, Rocky remarries; so that the wedding can occur, the Navy makes a finding of death in Harry’s case. (Her second husband, Terry Moore, will later die in a car crash, and years later she marries a third time. That’s the last name she uses today — she is Rocky Harvey.)

The memory of Harry recedes. Rocky doesn’t try to keep it alive. “I feel bad that I was silent about their father,” she says. “But I strived not to be the pitiful widow, and I didn’t want to perpetuate a myth that [Bill and Tom] were poor children because they lost their father.”

Rocky later corresponds with other Vietnam widows and sees a pattern. “We didn’t talk about our husbands or Vietnam. You just didn’t know what kind of reaction you might get.”

Harry Mossman ’65, Rocky Wild Mossman ’67, and their first son, Tommy pose in September 1968.

Harry’s entire side of the family seems to fade away. His parents, Julian ’27 and Eleanor Seeber Mossman ’27, are dead by 1967. Harry’s only sibling, Carol, dies relatively young.

But there is Harry’s letter, 25 pages of lined tablet paper, filled on both sides. Reluctant to read it in Hong Kong, Rocky’s first thought after Harry’s plane goes down is: Get that letter. Harry’s roommate, Larry Yarham, sends it to her.

Their son Bill first reads the letter in his Central Washington University dorm room. “It was like going through 20 years of his hopes for me in one sitting,” he says. “Some things I agreed with. Some I didn’t. And some made me cry. I knew he was trying to do the very best he could as our father.”

Harry — the quiet, clear-thinking English major, the determined if undersized football player nicknamed “Harry the Horse” for how he kept on keeping on — would write to his sons: “Many persons have learned things from the dead individual…. In some small way, living persons share parts of his soul, conscious or otherwise.”

Then a �ֲ���ý sophomore, Harry Mossman ’65 poses with other football halfbacks in fall 1962.

He expresses the conflict between military duty and his belief in rational thought. “The saddest part of the job I have undertaken is that the armed services represent… the last resort, when rational solutions… have failed.”

For Bill and Tom, growing from boys to men, the fact that his remains never come home is the yeast for unwelcome fantasies. “It was always in the back of my mind,” says Bill, now 34. “What if he somehow was alive? What if I’ve met him, but his memory is gone and he doesn’t know me?”

By the 1990s, the closure isn’t perfect, but Rocky doesn’t participate in the call for “full accounting” by MIA families. For one, she long assumed that Harry went down over water, making recovery of a body impossible. And there dewas a memorial service and other Navy ceremonies and dedications.

“I had no idea about the grim reports I would get.”

“I just braced myself to go on, and I felt like I’d done enough of those things,” she says. Trying to be a rock, however, takes its toll and she suffers bouts of depression. “Being stoic didn’t work.”

Then the letters begin to arrive.

In 1994, an A-6A crash site is found east of Haiphong. With each discovery at the site, elder brother Tom receives a terse military letter detailing the findings.

Looking back, Rocky is today awed by the military’s scrupulous efforts to find and identify remains of lost soldiers. ( directs those efforts, and according to its Web site 78,000 Americans are missing from World War II; 8,100 from the Korean War; 1,800 from Vietnam; 120 from the Cold War; and one from the Gulf War.)

But at the time the letters are unsettling. “I had no idea about the grim reports I would get,” says Rocky. “Bits of flight suits. A report from a neighboring village about a boot. It felt macabre. The Navy was doing this in an entirely honorable way, doing what the military has always done. But for me, it felt 25 years too late.”

But, in a sense, it was just in time. As the letters arrive, Tom asks his mother about Harry, and she puts together an album: Harry’s �ֲ���ý report cards and papers, drawings he’d made of their dream house, photos. She writes a note to Tom: “Thank you for asking to know more about him as a man.”

In 2003 a Joint Accounting Command team recovers bone fragments. Next comes DNA analysis, which in this case requires a blood sample from a relative besides Tom or Bill. Harry’s only sibling, Carol, is dead, but fate lends a hand: Carol’s daughter has reconnected with Rocky in the past year, after her son finds a Web page tribute to Harry as part of a genealogy project. “You start being a believer when something like that happens,” Rocky says.

“I didn’t think this would strike me as it did. Yet this has been very — very — good for us.”

In May 2004, using a blood sample from Harry’s niece, his remains are ID’d. (No identification has been made for Roger Lester.) In August, Harry’s burial takes place in Kent, Wash., and : “There had always been a part of me that wondered — and even hoped — ‘What if they got out of that plane?’ That little part of me is now being put to rest with my Dad’s recovery.”

As for Rocky, a woman who always tried to look ahead, she is stunned by the impact on her life of this final chapter of her and Harry’s story together, one that began with a chance meeting in the Bobcat Den more than 40 years ago.

“I am more settled and peaceful than I ever thought I would be,” she says. “I didn’t think this would strike me as it did. Yet this has been very — very — good for us. We are a close family. But we are now closer.”

The A-6A Intruder

Displayed at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Wash., is a painted in the scheme of the plane, call sign Viceroy 502, that flew from the USS Kitty Hawk and was shot down in August 1972, killing Harry Mossman ’65 and Roger Lester.

Their names appear on each side of the canopy.

(Photograph by John Lanza ’67)

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Dr. Phan Thi Phi Phi, one of three Vietnamese plaintiffs in a lawsuit against American chemical manufacturers, and Susan Hammond, deputy director of the New York-based Fund for Reconciliation and Development, will discuss this historic case in a lecture titled “Agent Orange: A New Vietnam War” at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 3, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave., �ֲ���ý College.

The event, free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by Maine Campus Compact, an organization of college and university presidents committed to the civic purposes of higher education, the �ֲ���ý College history department, and Women of Color at �ֲ���ý.

During the Vietnam War, the United States used the chemical to kill trees that gave cover to the enemy and to cut food supply. Western experts believe that more than 40 million liters of the dioxin-containing Agent Orange were sprayed in Vietnam.

While Hanoi claims that as many as two million Vietnamese are thought to be suffering several health effects including cancers and immunodeficiency from Agent Orange, the U.S. federal government insists that there is no proof linking Agent Orange with any illnesses. These differences over the Agent Orange issue have been a source of contention between the two governments since they renewed diplomatic ties in 1995.

filed a lawsuit at the U.S. Federal Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Jan. 30, 2004, against more than 30 U.S. chemical companies, seeking compensatory and punitive damages. The first hearing took place on Monday.

The New York Times has described the Agent Orange lawsuit as “an important test of the reach of American courts, drawing worldwide interest and setting off a fierce debate among international-law experts,” after the U.S. Justice Department urged the court to dismiss the suit.

Dr. Phi Phi, one of the Vietnamese plaintiffs, studied epidemiology at Hanoi University of Medicine, and has been investigating the link between rates of cancer and exposure to dioxin in Vietnam. Having served as director of Hospital No.1, a mobile facility in the heavily sprayed provinces of Quang Nam and Quang Ngai, Phi Phi believed that she was a victim of dioxin herself.

Susan Hammond has lived in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, working on projects that help build mutual understanding and respect between the United States and these three South East Asian nations. Hammond has coordinated projects that examine and address the effects of Agent Orange and unexploded ordinances. She is currently working with other organizations to develop an educational and fundraising campaign that aims to address the long-term health and ecological consequences of the use of Agent Orange, including a U.S.-wide traveling art exhibit starting in fall 2005.

Sponsored by the Department of History, the discussion will start at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 20, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, Campus Avenue.  The public is invited to attend free of charge

Leading the session will be Chris Beam, Trang Nguyen, Oliver Wolf and David Emery.

The current conflict in Iraq invites comparisons with the Vietnam War, says Beam.  “Numerous commentators on the Iraq war routinely refer to Vietnam to drive home their points, and the 2004 presidential candidates are engaged in a ‘battle of biographies’ over their respective military records during that divisive struggle,” Beam says.

A veteran of the Vietnam War and a native of Brunswick, Beam served in the Marine Corps from 1967 to 1970.  He is the �ֲ���ý College archivist and a lecturer in history, who teaches a course on the Vietnam War.

Trang Nguyen is from Hanoi.  A �ֲ���ý sophomore who plans to major in economics, she attended two years of high school in the United States and transferred to �ֲ���ý from St. Norbert College in Wisconsin.

Oliver Wolf, a �ֲ���ý junior, is a political science major with a double concentration in U.S. political processes and international studies. He is president of the �ֲ���ý College Republicans and vice chair of the Maine College Republicans, in which he helped build statewide membership to 19 chapters with more than 1,300 members since September 2003. Originally from Pittsburgh, Wolf is currently an active volunteer with the Maine Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign.

David Emery represented Maine’s First Congressional District from 1975 to 1983, service that included a stint on the House Armed Services Committee. In June 1983 President Reagan appointed him deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, a position he held until June 1988.  He is president and owner of Scientific Marketing, a public opinion consulting firm, and resides in Tenants Harbor with his wife, Carol, and son, Albert.

Each commentator will offer his or her perspectives on both conflicts. The panel will then invite the audience to participate in a general discussion.

Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran and former U.S. senator from Georgia, discusses veterans’ issues and the impact the Bush administration has had on American military veterans in a speech at 5:30 p.m. today in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, �ֲ���ý College, Campus Avenue.

Cleland’s talk, sponsored by the �ֲ���ý Democrats, is open to the public at no cost.

“We need to improve dramatically [Veterans Adminstration] healthcare for all of our veterans instead of cutting the requested VA budget by $6.5 billion as President Bush has done,” Cleland, an outspoken critic of Bush administration policies, told an audience in Atlanta last June.

Since 2002, Cleland has served on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a body examining the facts behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and charged with making recommendations to prevent future acts of terrorism.

Cleland is a distinguished adjunct professor at American University’s Washington Semester Program and serves there as a fellow in the Center for Congressional & Presidential Studies. A former senator from Georgia, he began his public service as an officer in the U.S. Army, volunteering for duty in Vietnam in 1967, where he served until a grenade attack in April 1968 cost him both legs and his right arm.

After recuperating from his injuries, Cleland was elected to the Georgia State Senate. In 1975, when he was 34 years old, President Carter appointed him administrator of the Veteran’s Administration, where he instituted the revolutionary “Vets Center program,” which for the first time offered psychological counseling as well as physical care to combat veterans.

Cleland was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996, where he served as chairman of the Personnel Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, and was a member of the Senate Veteran’s Affairs Committee. In the Senate, he earned enormous respect for his work in such areas as health care and education reform, bio-terrorism preparedness, homeland security and fiscal responsibility.

Cleland is the author of Strong at the Broken Places (Longstreet Press, 2000).