In Touch With Past--At Last : A national support network links the children of those who died in the Vietnam War and helps them contact men who served with their fathers to answer long-unanswered questions.

BUENA PARK —  Jeanette Chervony was only 13 months old when her father, Army Sgt. Eddie Chervony, was killed in Vietnam, just three days short of his 21st birthday.

She knows most of the details of his 1968 death. She’s read them countless times on the citation that accompanied his Distinguished Service Cross: In an “extraordinary” act of heroism during an enemy attack, he voluntarily carried wounded men from overrun positions to safety. He made five trips. The citation says 100 meters each way, open terrain, under hostile fire.

It was while he was carrying the sixth man that he was hit by an attack of grenades and satchel charges. He covered the injured man with his body, and that’s when he received the mortal wound.

Chervony--now 25, living in Mission Viejo and working as a community service officer with the Costa Mesa police--may have been too young to remember when the news of her father’s death arrived, but a piece of her died that day.

“It’s that piece that isn’t there,” she says. “And you spend your life wondering. . . . My life changed right at that moment, yet I didn’t know that at the time.”

No one knows exactly how many children the more than 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam left behind, but they number in the thousands. And, like Chervony, they bear the same emotional scars and have many of the same questions:

* What was their father like during the toughest time of his life?

* What time of day did he die?

* Was he in pain?

The war that took their fathers from them is what binds Chervony and the other members of Sons and Daughters In Touch, a national support network formed to link the children of those who were lost in the Vietnam War and help them get in touch with the men who served with their fathers.

The organization held its largest national gathering--more than 300 people attended--at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., during Father’s Day weekend in June, and earlier this month several dozen Southern California members gathered for their first picnic at the Moving Wall, a touring replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial erected at Knott’s Berry Farm.

Sons and Daughters In Touch--an offshoot of the Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s In Touch locator program, which helps families, friends and fellow veterans of those lost in Vietnam connect--was formed in 1989 by Tony Cordero of Portland, Ore.

Cordero’s father, Air Force Maj. William Cordero, crashed his B-57 on the Vietnam-Laos border in 1965, leaving behind four children and an expectant wife.

“My brother felt it was time to start the healing process for the children,” explained Bill Cordero, 33, of San Pedro, a Sons and Daughters member. “He saw the In Touch program was the beginning of healing for Vietnam veterans, but there there were no support groups to help the children deal with the grieving process.”

The idea behind getting the children together, Cordero said, “is so we could all talk with each other and see that we were going through the same feelings. And also to link us up with the Vietnam vets who served with our fathers so we could learn more about them from a different perspective instead of just from our families.”

Vets, Cordero said, “are now coming forward and looking for sons and daughters they were asked to get in touch with in Vietnam.”

*

At the Sons and Daughters gathering in Washington in June, Cordero said, “a Navy corpsman met the daughter of one of the guys he had held in his arms as he died. He always wanted to meet her. I remember they just held each other and cried. There were a lot of stories like that.”

That weekend, Cordero also met a man who knew his father. There is, he said, a “different kind of connection” when a son or daughter meets someone who knew their father in Vietnam.

“To me, it’s like when you have family members always telling you about your father, at times it tends to get sugar-coated,” he said. “But if you can sit down with someone who served with your dad it gets down to the nitty-gritty.”

The oldest of the five children, Cordero was 6 when his father died.

“Of course, we all had the same emotional scars and feelings, but we never talked to each other about it,” he said. “A lot of us (sons and daughters) haven’t been able to deal with our fathers’ deaths.”

*

Mike McCoy of Riverside, who was 5 when his father was killed in Vietnam in 1964, said most new Sons and Daughters members had never even met anyone who had lost a father in Vietnam.

Growing up, he said, many of them suffered the same stigma as the returning Vietnam vets: The war was something that people simply didn’t discuss.

McCoy recalls that when teachers would ask the students what their fathers did for a living, his reply that his father had been killed in Vietnam would be met “by dead silence, and nothing more was said.”

It was the same for Harvest Gulevich, 42, of Fountain Valley, who was 19 when her father, a Marine Corps helicopter pilot, was shot down. Just out of high school, she said, she couldn’t talk about it with her friends, many of whom where protesting the war.

But, according to McCoy, it was especially difficult on the sons, many of whom were never allowed to grieve. As young boys, he said, they were told to be strong, that “you’re the man of the house now.”

Frank Armstrong of Irvine, who was 5 when his fighter pilot father was shot down in 1967, said people have often said to him, “you were only 5; weren’t you lucky?”

“The implication being,” he said, “that it was not that much of a loss” because of his age.

Armstrong said he joined Sons and Daughters In Touch a few months ago, “mostly to meet people who had a common background and are willing to talk about the war.” He also plans to use the In Touch data base to help track down veterans who knew his dad.

“I can only remember so much about him,” he said. “The more impressions you have from different people the better.”

*

For Jeanette Chervony, the search for veterans who knew her father began even before she joined Sons and Daughters In Touch. It started, she said, when she came of age and felt a need to know more about her own identity.

She knew it was wrapped up in a man she was too young to remember.

Chervony says she was born when her father was in basic training. In fact, she had a snapshot, which she has since lost, of her dad holding her in his lap, “so he did see me, he did hold me.”

Growing up, she often thought of her father. She would put on his medals and look at his photographs, “knowing he’s my father by title but not knowing him as a person. My mother hasn’t really given me any details. I don’t think she’s dealt with it.”

Chervony remembers carrying a picture of her father when she was in junior high school and writing about him in eighth-grade English class, but it wasn’t until she graduated from high school that she began to seek more information about her him.

She wrote requesting information from Army records but never received a reply. And when she arranged to visit his mother in Puerto Rico, the woman died before they could talk.

On her 21st birthday in 1988, Chervony visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the first time, where it struck her that she was now older than her father had been when he died.

In 1989, the letter she had sent the Army requesting information on her father paid off in an unexpected way.

The association representing her father’s old artillery outfit found the letter in his records and wrote to inform her that a building at Ft. Knox was going to be dedicated in honor of Sgt. Eddie Chervony, the unit’s highest-decorated member.

A month later, on the anniversary of her father’s death, she received a call from her father’s former captain, Ron Weiss.

Weiss told Chervony that her father had shown him a picture of her when they were in Vietnam and that he had always wondered what became of her.

They talked for two hours.

“That was the first time I was able to ask what time of day it was” when her father had died, she said.

A few months later, after more phone calls and letters between the two, Chervony spent 10 days with Weiss and his family at his home in Montana.

Chervony has since talked to six men who knew her father in Vietnam, three of whom she has met. She has the names of five others but hasn’t contacted them.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “I almost feel content with what I know.”

*

What she now knows is that the battle in which her father was killed was so intense that Medivac helicopters couldn’t land and that her father was one of nine men killed within a 24-hour period.

“I’ve met the medic who took care of him, who said they didn’t have sterile bandages and had to use shirts,” she said.

She also learned that her father lived a few hours after his left hand and part of his buttocks were blown off. She’s not sure exactly how long. “I’ve heard different stories--two to four hours,” she said.

But more than learning the facts of her father’s death she has learned the facts of his life.

“I know he made an impact,” she said. “And these are not just family members saying he’s a good person. These are the men who were with him during the roughest times of his life, and they are the ones who were with him when he died. These men said he’d go the extra mile.

“I’m told that in a wartime situation there is a bond you form, and they’ve shown me another side of him, caring for people he didn’t know, but eventually grew to love. He had to.”

She is, she said, “very proud” of her father.

“I wish I could have gotten to know him. But in a way I have.”