Essay submitted by Christine Cordero
My grandfather, William Edward Cordero, was born on July 20, 1935. A native of Santa Barbara, California, my grandfather was an eighth generation Californian. My grandpa was instilled with a sense of pride and love for his country at an early age, so it was no wonder that he joined the ROTC once he began school at Loyola University in Los Angeles. Not long after beginning his military career, he met and began dating Kathleen Carroll. Within that same year, they were wed and immediately began a family. Soon after my grandparents had their fourth child, my grandfather was deployed to Bien Hoa as an advisor to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam. While there, he helped establish an air commando school and flew in B26 bombers on reconnaissance missions.
After his first tour of duty, his family joined him in the summer of 1964, where they were stationed at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. Over the next ten months, my grandfather periodically traveled back to Vietnam to fly on bombing missions over the Ho Chi Minh trail and North Vietnam. Over Father's Day weekend 1965, my grandfather?s B57 disappeared while on a bombing mission over the Vietnam/Lao border. Four years later, his remains were recovered and returned to the United States for burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
My grandfather's death greatly affected my father's family. My grandmother was forced to raise five children by herself, the youngest of whom never met his father. The pain and loss that my grandmother felt was eased by the help of my paternal great-grandparents. My father and his siblings spent a lot of time in Santa Barbara with their grandparents, learning about their own father. The love and support that my father, his siblings, and his mother received from their extended family and community helped them to overcome this terrible obstacle.
As my father got older, he worked very hard not to let his father's death overshadow everything he did. He did his best to live a normal life with his siblings and mother, but nothing he could do could remove the feeling of pain he felt about losing his father the way he had. Although my father knew that there were others who felt the exact same way he did, he only knew his brothers and sister. Soon after having his third child, me, my father decided that he wanted to meet the other people who understood his situation: the children of those men who lost their lives fighting for freedom. This was when my father started Sons and Daughters in Touch, an organization made up of those children who lost their fathers in the Vietnam War. About every four years, over Father's Day weekend, this organization meets in Washington D.C., on the lawn of the Washington Monument, and holds a ceremony honoring those men. SDIT now has almost 2,000 members.
My father's accomplishments and work toward connecting so many like him is a great inspiration to me. When I attend the SDIT ceremonies, I see how many lives the organization has touched. I aspire to be like my father in this sense: using my experiences to better the lives of those around me. My father tells me almost every day to be a faith-filled leader and patriot, but he does not just speak these words, he lives them out every day through his work with Sons and Daughters in Touch.
