How these vets plan to honor Tarrant County residents who died as result of Vietnam war

The dream of a handful of Vietnam-era veterans to establish a memorial with the names of Tarrant County residents who died as a result of the conflict is one step closer to completion.

Jim Hodgson, executive director of the Fort Worth Aviation Museum, and a group of like-minded friends established the Tarrant County Vietnam Memorial Foundation at the end of July to raise funds and bring more people into the project.

Hodgson, the foundation’s president, said it was time to get more people involved.

“This is never going to happen if it’s just three or four people doing it,” Hodgson said. “I mean, that’s kind of where we’ve been the last few years on this.”

Bruce Zielsdorf, the foundation’s vice president and communications coordinator, said he’s been reaching out to local veterans groups to make them aware of the project. He’s also been contacting veterans group members individually and asking them if they would be willing to serve on a committee.

“It’s going to be a lot of sweat equity and we need all the help we can get,” Zielsdorf said.

Zielsdorf said the foundation recently established three committees: Communications, Design and Construction, and Development and Fundraising. They need help in all of those areas.

The foundation may be new, but the project itself has been more than five years in the making.

Hodgson, who served stateside with the Marines the last few years of the Vietnam War, said he realized local memorials for other wars often didn’t include the names of the fallen. He envisioned something that would keep those names before the public.

“As time goes on, it’s meaningless to say this is a commemoration of all of those who served in Vietnam,” Hodgson said. “Well, how impersonal is that? So that’s why we wanted to have people be able to look at that and know who these people were who ... made the sacrifice.”

Hodgson said there are 221 names on the list of Tarrant County residents who died as a result of the war. The names include those who were killed during the actual conflict as well as those who succumbed to injuries or war-related illnesses years after the fact.

“We wanted to try to be as inclusive as possible,” Hodgson said. “And we still are. We’re still open to more names.”

In 2020 students from Fort Worth area schools submitted designs for the memorial. White Settlement Brewer High School student Ryan Scieneaux created the winning sculpture — a tree to represent life.

Fort Worth sculptor Michael Pavlovsky is finalizing the design to fit the requirements of Fort Worth’s parks department.

The memorial will be installed in Veterans Memorial Park at 4120 Camp Bowie Blvd. Sandra Youngblood, assistant park and recreation director, said the site within the park was chosen based on where the memorial will get the best visibility but not distract from the other monuments.

“Veterans Memorial Park has numerous other memorials or plaques for honoring various of the wars’ Medal of Honor recipients,” Youngblood said. “And so ... it was appropriate for us to honor them with this memorial.”

Hodgson said pinning down the projected cost for the project has been a major challenge.

“It becomes a moving target on the cost,” Hodgson said. “Because a couple of years ago the costs were one thing, and during COVID the costs became another thing, and the costs are just all over the place.”

Hodgson said he is hoping to get the memorial installed by 2026.

“[We] really need this organization that we are now just forming to be able to push this thing across the finish line,” he said.