Every Sunday, “Back in the Day” looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.
The Star-Bulletin and Senator Daniel K. Inouye joined forces last week to help a worried Honolulu mother who had this problem:
» She lost one son in Vietnam last July.
» Another son has flow Air Force combat missions over Vietnam.
» Two other sons are in the Army and one of them, age 19, has received orders sending him to the war zone.
The mother, who asked that her name not be published, desperately wanted the orders changed.
She appealed to the newspaper and to Inouye. Both made inquiries of the Department of Defense. As a result the 19-year-old son’s orders have been changed. He will be assigned to Hawaii instead of Vietnam.
It turned out that although the mother had lost one son, and has a second flying missions over Vietnam, Defense Department regulations do not automatically exempt another son from being sent to Vietnam.
Inouye now has a bill pending in the Senate to clarify the situation and make it quite clear that no family shall risk losing more than one son in a combat zone.
The Hawaii House of Representatives has endorsed Inouye’s bill.
Pentagon policy is now less specific than Inouye would like it to be. Present policy was outlined for the Star-Bulletin as follows:
1 The sole surviving son in a family will not be sent to a war theatre or assigned to combat duty if he requests not to be.
2 While one member of a family serves in South Vietnam, another member will be deferred from assignment there if he so requests.
3 If a member of a family has been killed or died in Vietnam service, other members of the same family will be deferred from Vietnam duty upon request for at least six months after that death.
The third point in this policy was issued this year; the other two were issued last year.
(The Army here gives this interpretation to the term "sole surviving son": He is the only son in the family, and he has had a brother, father or sister killed or lost or completely disabled from military service.)
