Richard Coffelt’s Mission:
Developing a Database of Vietnam War KIA’s

BY ROBERT WILHELM

Why were Americans who died in Vietnam ignored?

That was the question uppermost in the mind of Richard Coffelt. A lawyer in Hays, Kansas, and a U.S. Army veteran who served during the Korean War, Coffelt had no direct connection to the Vietnam War.  However, he had become acquainted with the mother of Gary Lee Binder, a Hays resident who died while serving with the Navy in Vietnam, and Coffelt wanted to learn more about the circumstances of Binder’s death. 

There must be some book, Coffelt thought, in which he could find something. He began his search in the early 1980s at the Hays Public Library and the library at Fort Hays State University, but few sources were available. So he began to collect books, hoping that one might list the Vietnam War dead. He quickly amassed a library of hundreds of titles, but still there was no one source with all the information. But Coffelt persevered. “I was about half mad to do this,” he said, “but it became a personal thing, something I wanted to do.”  

As his database slowly grew, Coffelt decided that he wanted more than just names and dates. He began to gather information on unit identifications down to the company, battery, and troop level. He began a long association with the National Archives.

“I felt that if I just looked long enough, hard enough, I would hit the mother lode,” he said. “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.”

Richard Coffelt was still practicing law but would spend anywhere from fifteen minutes to fifteen hours at a stretch, working at night and on weekends, gathering information from microfilm and microfiche. After ten years of study, he finally realized there was no single source. By then, though, he was on a quest, something he had to do.

In the 1990s he began to use the Internet for research, just as many veterans also were beginning to conduct their own online searches. Two of these men were Dick Arnold, a veteran of the 35th Infantry, and David Argabright of the 9th Infantry Division. Each was conducting his own independent research on KIAs in his unit. Each also had heard about Richard Coffelt through the Internet grapevine and contacted him via email. In 1998 the three researchers joined forces. From then on, it was a team effort to correlate and integrate information from such disparate sources as the National Archives, mortuary records in Hawaii, and tombstones in cemeteries across the country.

The Presidential Library of Lyndon Baines Johnson contained the most helpful records. “I wasn’t any great fan of Lyndon Johnson,” Coffelt said, “but his library had copies of letters of condolence.” The president had sent a letter to the family of every servicemember who had died in Vietnam. His term of office, 1963-69, saw some of the heaviest fighting—and the majority of casualties—of the war. The letters were filed alphabetically by last name and included the unit.

The Army sustained about two-thirds of the Vietnam War KIAs, and that is where Richard Coffelt concentrated his research. Casualties of the Marines and Navy were compiled by others. With Arnold and Argabright’s help, Air Force KIAs were integrated into the database. Combining all these sources covered nearly all of the 58,245 American Vietnam War dead. 

In 2001 an archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration approached Arnold about making the database part of the Archives. This surprised Coffelt. “I didn’t think anyone would want it,” he said. But the document that Coffelt, Arnold, and Argabright had compiled preserved historical records that might otherwise be inaccessible. The team agreed to deed the document to the Archives. But they had one condition: They did not want anyone to have to pay to get this information. It had to be offered free of charge. 

So, in June of 2002, in a ceremony at the NARA reception center in Washington, the database was deeded to the National Archives. Officially, the database is known as the Vietnam War Combat Area Casualty Database. But when Michael Kurtz, Assistant Archivist of the United States, asked what the database was to be called, Arnold and Argabright quickly replied, “It should be called the Coffelt Database.”  This was a surprise to Coffelt, but one he humbly accepted. 

Coffelt is retired now and doesn’t do much research anymore, but the hard work has already been done. He and his wife of thirty-two years, Jo Ann Jennings, live a less hectic life on a quiet, tree-lined street in Hays. When asked what his thirty years’ worth of research accomplished, what he hoped the legacy of this monumental task would be, Coffelt paused for a moment. 

Then, as a tear rolled down his cheek, he softly replied: “I hope that Vietnam veterans will be treated with respect.”

This project has come to mean much more than Coffelt had envisioned. He has become the source of the information he had hoped to find so many years before. His work is for the families and descendants, as well as the veterans of the Vietnam War. It was personal at first, something he wanted to do. Then it became a quest, something he felt he had to do. In the end, it was a mission, something he was born to do.

Hays VVA Chapter 939 honored Richard Coffelt with a plaque “for his dedicated service in preserving the history and truth of the Vietnam War through his many years of work” at its January 2011 meeting. March 24, 2011, was proclaimed “Richard Coffelt Day” by the city of Hays, Kansas.

Accessing The Database

The Coffelt Database is on the National Archives website, aad.archives.gov/aad. Scroll down to “Records with Unit Information on Military Personnel Who Died During the Vietnam War” and click on the “Search” button next to the line that reads “The Coffelt Database, December 2005 Update.” This will display a page labeled “Fielded Search.” It contains a search field, in which can be entered a name, unit, location, or home of record. Once the search results come up, click on the “View Record” icon to read the entire record.

Robert Wilhelm is a U.S. Air Force veteran of Vietnam and a life member of VVA Chapter 939 in Hays, Kansas. He can be reached at rjwilh@gmail.com