Wall To Honor War's Fallen

The Desert Sun - Palm Springs, CA, USA

BY Aldrich M. Tan • aldrich.tan@indiosun.com • January 1, 2009

A memorial wall in the Coachella Valley Cemetery will honor soldiers who are missing in action or prisoners of war.

The Indio-based East Valley Memorials Foundation has launched a search to find those soldiers. They will join the more than 300 names already at the cemetery's Veterans Memorial.

“I felt that these people should be picked up and accounted for like everyone else,” said Joe Zelazny, president of the East Valley Memorials Foundation.

Zelazny, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, said he understands the importance. Zelazny was a prisoner of war during the Battle of the Bulge on Dec. 21, 1944.

“We're like an endangered species,” he said. “When we are gone, we are gone.”

Zelazny said he has had success with a similar Wall of Honor in Tacoma, Wash. His search for MIA/POW soldiers, which started in April for that specific wall, led to 83 names within 60 days.

The East Valley Memorials Foundation already has one name that will go up on the Veterans Memorial on Saturday. It's of 19-year-old Ralph Leroy Wallace, who has family members living in Palm Desert.

Wallace died Dec. 7, 1941, on board the USS Arizona with 1,176 other people during the attack on Pearl Harbor. His body was never recovered.

Wallace's niece, Janene Milis, 56, of Palm Desert, never met her uncle, a U.S. Navy third class fireman from Bellfountain, Ore.

She does know he was a thin man of average height, and that he received the Purple Heart posthumously.

Milis said it is the worst feeling knowing that her uncle's body can never return from its watery grave at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

The memorial, however, will be something tangible that her family can see to remember his sacrifice.

“I want to have something that I can take my grandchildren to and tell them, ‘This was your great-grand uncle,'” she said.