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Casualty Info
Home Town Rich Hill, MO
Last Address Rich Hill, MO
Casualty Date Apr 12, 1969
Cause KIA-Killed in Action
Reason Artillery, Rocket, Mortar
Location An Xugen (Vietnam)
Conflict Vietnam War
Location of Interment Green Lawn Cemetery - Rich HIll, Missouri
Back home, LTJG Droz' wife was notified of his death - incorrectly, according to his daughter, Tracy:
"The telegram the Navy sent on April 13, 1969 told us that my father had been killed while on PCF 51. "On March 16, 2001, while I was surfing the internet, entering my name and family members' names into a search engine to see if anyone had become famous yet, I made a gut-wrenching discovery. I found an article entitled, "The Death of PCF 43." It was an account of the last day of my father's life - with information no one in my family had ever known - written by a man who had been there, on my father's boat in the Mekong Delta, and who had witnessed him die."
Tracy Droz Tragos (held by her father in the photo above, taken while LTJG Droz was on R&R) is an accomplished member of the filmmaking community. She also is the writer, director, and producer of a film, Be Good, Smile Pretty, "a first-person documentary that tells the story of one daughter's struggle to know and grieve for the father she never knew, the father who died in Vietnam when she was three months old."
The film is one effort by the Orphans of War Foundation and is fully documented on the Orphans of War site.
The Virtual Wall staff wishes Tracy Droz Tragos and her colleagues fair winds and following seas. God bless.
