By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
The most extensive database on Vietnam War causalities was the passion of a man from Hays.
The late Richard Coffelt, a longtime Hays attorney, spent years and his own money researching and amassing the Coffelt Database, which is now available for free through the National Archives.
Although others contributed to the database and Coffelt wanted the record source named something more accessible, the database was named in honor of him.
Jo Ann Jennings, Coffelt's wife, recounted information about the database during a lecture at the Hays VFW on Feb. 16.
Coffelt was a U.S. Army veteran who served during the Korean War. He had no connection with the Vietnam War.
However, in 1980, he became acquainted with the mother of Gary Lee Binder of Hays. Gary Binder, who served with the Navy, was killed in action in 1967 in Vietnam, and Coffelt wanted to learn more about the circumstances of Binder's death.
Jennings explained this was before the rise of personal computing and Google, which meant hours spent at libraries, especially the Presidential Library of Lyndon Baines Johnson in Austin, Texas. She said she spent many vacations accompanying Richard on research trips, sometimes at his side in study rooms.
Johnson sent a letter of condolence to every family of a service member killed in Vietnam during his administration. Those letters included the unit numbers of the service members, which made them valuable in Coffelt's research.
Jennings said Richard spent countless hours taking notes on yellow legal pads.
Coffelt saw the need to connect soldiers with other soldiers. The men who served wanted to know what had happened to their buddies.
Jennings said Coffelt was interested in working on the research because the federal government didn't keep track of the units the men who were killed in action were from.
He said having a unit designation was the most important thing to know if you wanted to know what happened to your friend.
“I felt that if I just looked long enough, hard enough, I would hit the mother lode,” Coffelt was quoted as saying in a story published in the February 2012 edition of the VVA Veteran magazine.
“I still felt that there had to be some government source that would have all this information. It became kind of a game to try and locate the information in some government repository somewhere.”
In 1993-94, after PCs had become commonplace, Tom Holloway (Emory University, Atlanta) changed the landscape by obtaining the Department of Defense's casualty database and the Army Adjutant General's database in digital form, according to the database's website.
"Using the university's mainframe computers to read the reel-to-reel computer tapes, Holloway integrated the two databases and converted the information into a commonly used small-computer format. The "Holloway Database" effectively became the public's sole source of information regarding all American Vietnam dead," the database website said.
The database website said that in the late 1990s, others joined Coffelt's effort, contributing information and collating the collected material into digital form using the Holloway database as a baseline, the database said.
"The additional resources allowed the project's scope to expand to include units of assignment information for all service branches," according to the database's website. "In 2002, an early version of the Coffelt Database was deeded to the National Archives, which made it available online as a searchable database," the database said.
Jennings said Coffelt amassed a library that filled a room floor to ceiling with more than 300 books on Vietnam. She said her husband had read every book.
She said her husband had an almost photographic memory of the information. She recalled a person from Australia writing Coffelt, asking him if he might know what happened to his uncle.
Without the need to look at any source, Coffelt was able to write him a page of the entire account of the battle in which the man's uncle was killed and what happened in that battle.
"He had super-detailed information just from his remembrance," Jennings said.
A Vietnam veteran who worked on the database with Coffelt spoke at his funeral and said, "Richard knew more about what happened in Vietnam than any soldier that was there, and he wasn't there."
Today, the database contains more than 60,000 names and more than 1 million pieces of information.
Gary L. Noller, Co. B, 1/46th Infantry, Vietnam 1970-71, called the database a gift to and for Vietnam veterans and their families.
He said in a letter on the database, often, the child or grandchild of a Vietnam casualty wishes to contact a veteran who served with their deceased family member.
Prior to the Coffelt Database, a search of this kind was often overwhelming. The official record listed casualties by unit at the division or brigade level, Noller said in his letter.
Coffelt's research expanded the casualty database to list the company and battalion-level casualties, Noller said.
"This effectively reduced the search for a veteran from a magnitude of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100. It can be said that the Coffelt Database made the search at least 100 times easier to conduct," Noller said.
Vietnam veteran Dick Arnold worked on the database with Coffelt.
In a 2011 letter published on the database's website, he said, "I consider my participation in the creation and continued improvement of The Coffelt Database to be one of the proudest parts of my life. I also consider it a singular honor to have known and worked with Richard these last few years. All of us Vietnam veterans owe him a huge debt ..."
Although Coffelt and the others who contributed to the database were offered money to privatize the data, Coffelt and his fellow researchers insisted the database remain a free, open-source of information, Jennings said.
By 2009, Coffelt developed Lewy body dementia. He died on Jan. 25, 2012.
Hays VVA Chapter 939 dedicated a plaque at the Hays Regional Airport to honor Coffelt's work in creating the database.
Not only is the Coffelt database still available and in use today. But a story on the database sparked an unlikely friendship between Jennings and a WWII veteran who read a story on the database in a veterans magazine.
Frank Malizia, who was 92 at the time, read that story and recognized Hays as a familiar place. He had been stationed in Great Bend during the war and was familiar with Hays and Ellis County. This led him to contact Jennings.
Read more on Malizia and Jennings' long friendship and correspondents at NWester: WWII soldier laid to rest next to 'love of his life' in Antonino.
You can access the Coffelt Database online for free. Click here for a link.