Part IV · THE YEAR THE FAMILY BROKE APART · Chapter 16

Vietnam, Twice

Vietnam · Portland, Oregon · c. 1966–2024

In the record Al Krewson (1943–2006) · Marjorie Krewson (d. c. 2024) · Earl W. Krewson (1905–1990) · Gen. Frederick J. Kroesen (1923–2020)

On 12 September 2026, while this book was being written, a search of the Department of Veterans Affairs' Nationwide Gravesite Locator turned up forty-three people named Krewson in the national and state veterans' cemeteries of the United States [1]. The list runs from a private of the First World War buried at Long Island to a sergeant of Vietnam buried at Portland in 2024. Most are not this line; the name is not rare in Missouri and Pennsylvania. But one of them is, and his entry is the only government document this family holds for the man whose letters made Part IV:

Seaman, United States Navy, Vietnam. The birth date is the one he gave Michael himself; this is the first paper that agrees with it. The death date is a year and three days after the morning he sat down and wrote two long emails about 1946. His wife Barbara — born, by the same record, on the same day of the year twelve years after him — followed him into the same grave in September 2007 [1]. Between the Navy and the grave there were forty years in Portland, six children, thirteen grandchildren, a piano, and a war he mentioned to his nephew exactly once.

The second service

The last chapter left Al in California in 1965, back with "my brother and sisters," and then, in his own three words, "eventually went into the Navy" [2]. That is the whole of what he wrote about it. The grave record adds the rank — SN, a seaman, the Navy's E-3 — and the war period, which is a legal term: the VA counts a veteran as Vietnam-era if he served anywhere between 5 August 1964 and 7 May 1975, in-country or not [3]. Al's own word was stronger. Explaining in 2002 why Grandpa Mitchell never spoke of his medals, he wrote: "Now that I myself am a war veteran from Vietnam, I know what she means. It's not an issue of pride to not talk about the battles, but one simply doesn't want to be reminded of them" [2]. A man who chose that sentence had been reminded of something. A seaman in the Navy between 1966 and 1970 was most likely aboard a ship of the Seventh Fleet — a carrier, a destroyer on the gunline, an amphibious ship off the coast — or in the riverine forces in the Delta; which, the family does not know, and the book will not guess further than that. His service record, in the National Personnel Records Center at St. Louis, is a one-page request away, and the request has been drafted [4].

What is known of the forty years after is thin and warm. He wrote to Bill Krewson from Ottawa in September 1969 — so he was out of the Navy by then and, for a while, in Canada — and moved to Hammond, Indiana, where Bill "looked over me like a father would his son"; then to Portland, where Earl W. Krewson "and his son, Glenn, helped me get established and working here … and always treated me and my family with a lot of love and respect until he died" [5]. A son, Edgar, in December 1977; then marriage to Barbara Dahlin, and five more children — Khristina, Laura, Patrick, Cheryl, Paul — the last in 1985 [6]. Somewhere in there a piano, and a nephew of sixteen at it. He became the family's genealogist, the one who found Bill and Earl and the Centerville cousins and wrote it all down for Michael between 2000 and 2005, and he died at sixty-two, before the book he was writing it for existed.

The nurse

Marjorie's war the archive holds in three sentences, and they are Michael's, spoken on 11 September 2026: "My aunt Marjorie, who was Uncle Al's sister, was a medic nurse on helicopters in the Vietnam War and had a boyfriend who was killed by Agent Orange, and she was never the same after that war. She just died a couple years ago" [7]. No letter of hers survives in the archive; she never married and went by Krewson all her life; her birth date is not on the family's record [6].

The book can say what those sentences would have meant. About five thousand women served in Vietnam as nurses of the Army Nurse Corps, most of them under twenty-five, on twelve-hour shifts in the evacuation and surgical hospitals — Cu Chi, Long Binh, Chu Lai, Pleiku, Da Nang — where the helicopters brought the wounded within an hour of the wound, and the nurses did the triage [8]. The helicopters themselves, the Dustoff ships, flew with a crew of four: two pilots, a crew chief, and a medic, who was an enlisted man; a nurse on a helicopter in the Army was rare. The Air Force, on the other hand, had flight nurses — women who flew the aeromedical evacuation aircraft out of Vietnam to Japan and the Philippines and home, hundreds of them, and "nurse on helicopters" is also what a family might remember of a woman who flew the wounded out on a C-130 or a C-141 [8]. So "a medic nurse on helicopters" is one of three things: an Army nurse in an evacuation hospital receiving the Dustoff flights; an Air Force flight nurse on the evacuation aircraft; or, if she was enlisted, a medic. Each is a different service and a different set of records, and the SF-180 will say which. What is not in doubt is the age. The four children of Galen and Margery were born between 1943 and about 1946; a Krewson daughter in Vietnam was there between twenty and twenty-seven.

Agent Orange was the herbicide — two-thirds of the twenty million gallons sprayed on Vietnam's forests and crops between 1962 and 1971 — whose dioxin contaminant the government spent twenty years denying and then, in the Agent Orange Act of 1991, conceded, disease by disease: the lymphomas, the soft-tissue sarcomas, the leukemias, the cancers of the lung and prostate, the diabetes, the heart disease [9]. "Killed by Agent Orange" is what the family of a man who came home from Vietnam and died young of one of those says, and by 1991 the government said it too. Who he was, the archive does not record. Nor what "never the same" looked like across fifty years — only that her nephew, who knew her the whole of that time, chose those words.

She died, Michael said, "a couple years ago," and was buried "somewhere off Highway 205" in Oregon, with a military funeral [7]. Interstate 205 climbs Mount Scott on the east side of Portland, and on that hill are two cemeteries side by side: Willamette National Cemetery, where Al and Earl lie, and Lincoln Memorial Park, the private cemetery beside it. She is not in the VA's locator under any spelling of her name [1]. So she is most likely in Lincoln Memorial Park, where a veteran is buried with military honours as readily as in the national cemetery next door — a folded flag, the rifle volley, a bugler — or she lies under a name the family has not given the record. A telephone call would settle it. The book leaves her where her nephew put her: off the highway, on the hill, with the honours.

The roll

Uncle Al's diagnosis, in the sentence that opens this book, was that the Krewsons never built up what other families did because of rifts nobody would name. The book has now followed the line through eleven generations and can offer a second observation beside his. Whatever else this family did not do, it went to the wars.

Henry³ Kroesen, captain of a Bucks County company in the French and Indian War, 1755. John⁴, lieutenant of the Flying Camp in 1776, and Garret⁵, who drew a Revolutionary pension. Lewis, eighteen years old in April 1861 in a county that sent its sons to Ohio's regiments — the one war the record is blank on, and the blank is the book's largest single debt [10]. Herbert Mitchell, by marriage, wounded in South Africa and decorated in a war the family misremembers. Earl W. Krewson, sergeant, United States Army, Second World War — the man who wrote the names on the photograph, whose own service the book learned only from his grave [1]. General Frederick J. Kroesen of the cousin line: the Colmar Pocket, Korea, Vietnam, the four stars [11]. Glenn, on the Robison. Al, in Berlin and then at sea. Marjorie, on the helicopters. And the other forty-two Krewsons in the government's list, whoever they were to this line — privates of 1918 at Los Angeles and Long Island, a pharmacist's mate of 1944, sergeants of Korea, a seaman and a specialist and a sergeant of Vietnam — the name itself, spread across the country's cemeteries, a kind of record [1].

Two things stand out in that roll, and the book states them without drawing a moral. The first is that the family's wars, like its farms, were mostly lost to it: no one kept the papers, and the book has had to recover Lewis from a census, Earl from a headstone, Al from a database, and Marjorie from three sentences. The second is that the two people in this chapter did what Herbert Mitchell did and Granny explained: they came home and did not talk about it. "One simply doesn't want to be reminded." It is the one family tradition this book can document in every generation it touches.

The ground it happened on

Period-general, as always. A Seventh Fleet destroyer on the gunline in 1967 fired her five-inch guns at targets called by spotters ashore, day and night, for weeks at a time, rearming from ammunition ships in the Tonkin Gulf; a carrier's deck crew worked eighteen hours in a hundred degrees; a riverine sailor in the Delta rode a converted landing craft under the mangroves [3]. An evacuation hospital was a compound of Quonset huts and sandbags at the edge of an airstrip, the helipad a hundred feet from the emergency room, the smell of the red dust and the diesel and the blood; the nurses were lieutenants and the wounded were nineteen [8]. Mount Scott, where the story ends, is a volcanic butte of the Boring Lava Field, 1,090 feet, on the southeast edge of Portland; the national cemetery was opened on its slopes in 1950 and holds well over a hundred thousand graves in rows on the grass, with a view north to Mount Hood on a clear day [12].

1. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration, Nationwide Gravesite Locator (gravelocator.cem.va.gov), queried 12 September 2026 by surname Krewson: 43 decedents. Alfred Krewson (SN US Navy, Vietnam, b. 02/02/1943, d. 01/24/2006, Willamette National Cemetery, Section LL Site 241); Barbara Hildegarde Krewson (b. 02/02/1955, d. 09/03/2007, same site, "Wife of Krewson, Alfred"); Earl W. Krewson (SGT US Army, World War II, b. 11/03/1905, d. 04/18/1990, Willamette, Section D Site 1055) and Lelah Mae Krewson (b. 07/04/1911, d. 02/07/1991, same site); no Marjorie, Margery or Margie Krewson under any spelling. Cross-checked against interment.net's Willamette National Cemetery transcriptions. Written back to the family record the same day.
2. Al Krewson to Michael, 26 June 2002, the two emails (family-history-uncle-al-2002-06-26.htm; great-grandpa-and-grandpas-history-uncle-al-2002-06-26.htm): "then eventually went into the Navy"; "Now that I myself am a war veteran from Vietnam, I know what she means."
3. "Vietnam era" as defined for VA purposes: 38 U.S.C. § 101(29) — service between 5 August 1964 and 7 May 1975 (28 February 1961 for in-country service). Seventh Fleet operations 1965–72 (the gunline, Yankee and Dixie Stations, the Mobile Riverine Force): general naval histories; period-general, not a record of Al's ship, which is unknown.
4. Standard Form 180, Request Pertaining to Military Records, to the National Personnel Records Center, 1 Archives Drive, St. Louis, MO 63138. For a deceased veteran, information releasable to the general public without next-of-kin status includes branch, dates of service, rank, assignments, awards and place of entry/separation. Al's Army file (1961–64) post-dates the range destroyed in the 1973 NPRC fire (Army, 1912–1960); Navy records were not affected. Drafted for Michael's signature 12 September 2026, not yet mailed.
5. Al Krewson to Michael, 21 January 2005 (the first email): the September 1969 letter from Ottawa, Hammond, Bill; (the second): Earl and his son Glenn in Portland. See chapter 12.
6. The family record: Al's children and grandchildren as given by Michael 20–21 August 2026 (Edgar, b. December 1977, by Judy Psyklo; Khristina, Laura, Patrick, Cheryl and Paul, b. 1 February 1985, by Barbara Hildegarde Dahlin, b. 2 February 1955); Marjorie's card (never married, went by Krewson; no dates).
7. Michael to Claude, 11 September 2026 (Marjorie's service, the Agent Orange death, "never the same," her death "a couple years ago") and 12 September 2026 (the military funeral "somewhere off Highway 205"). Quoted as spoken; nothing documentary yet.
8. The Army Nurse Corps in Vietnam (about 5,000 nurses; the evacuation and surgical hospitals; eight women's names on the Wall; the Vietnam Women's Memorial, 1993); Dustoff crews (two pilots, crew chief, medic — enlisted); Air Force flight nurses of the aeromedical evacuation squadrons: general histories; period-general. Which of the three Marjorie was is unknown.
9. Agent Orange: c. 20 million gallons of herbicides sprayed under Operation Ranch Hand, 1962–71, about 11 million of them Agent Orange; TCDD contamination; the Agent Orange Act of 1991 (Pub. L. 102-4) and the VA's list of presumptive conditions as expanded since: general histories and the VA's own publications; period-general. The identity and cause of death of the man Michael describes are not on record.
10. Henry³ (1755), John⁴ and Garret⁵ (1776–83): chapters 7, 10 and 11 of this book and their sources. Lewis (1861): chapter 11 — the blank.
11. Gen. Frederick J. Kroesen Jr. (1923–2020): the family record's card and chapter 1's note on the Tributes page of Cruise, Vol. I; his service from his published obituaries.
12. Willamette National Cemetery (est. 1950 on Mount Scott; c. 270 acres; well over 100,000 interments) and Lincoln Memorial Park adjoining it; Mount Scott (Boring Lava Field, 1,090 ft): the National Cemetery Administration's cemetery page and general references. The military funeral honours (flag, volley, Taps) are provided by law (10 U.S.C. § 1491) at any cemetery on request.