Local Vietnam Vets to honor sacrifice of a fallen soldier

Mattie Brown remembers the sequence: first came the knock, then came the news and then came the closed-casket funeral.

Sgt. Preston Tribble, her husband and high-school sweetheart, had been hit by an enemy shell during a night attack by communist commandos in the Quang Nam province of South Vietnam.

Brown said she warned off viewing her husband’s body. It would be better for memories, she thought, to have her last image of him in one piece.

The closed-casket carried a price. For 18 years, Brown, 63, didn’t remarry, unable to shake the hope that somehow the man she had buried wasn’t her husband.

“His aunt kept telling me I had to let go,” Brown said. “Not seeing his body, I thought they might have just thought he was dead.”

The nation in 1982 recognized Tribble’s sacrifice by including his name with 58,194 others on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington but otherwise left him in anonymity.

Today, a local group of Vietnam vets plans to honor the 22-year-old by placing a monument to him at the Millennium Gate at Atlantic Station.

“He died defending his position,” said Mark Steele, who is overseeing the memorial for the Atlanta Vietnam Veterans Business Association.

For the last 23 years during the week before Memorial Day, the organization has erected a plaque to a single soldier, sailor, airman or Marine who died in combat in Vietnam as a way of honoring their families for their sacrifice in what had been one of the country’s most unpopular wars.

Steel notes that 418 Atlantans were killed in Vietnam. His association has erected plaques in their honor in places such as the CNN Center and Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and as far away as Cartersville.

But he said the association eventually would have to rethink the mission.

“The whole idea of honoring the veteran and honoring the family is becoming harder because there aren’t as many family members left,” Steele said. “Ultimately the board of directors will have to come to grips on how to deal with it.”

Tribble died on May 12, 1969, during his second tour in Vietnam. He had joined the Army in 1965, Brown said, to better provide for his family but he also was driven by patriotism.

“The war wasn’t over and he was going to go back and then he didn’t come back,” Brown said. “He said this country needs all the good men it can get.”

They had a son and made plans to adopt a niece before he shipped back to Vietnam in October of 1968. The following February, he signed the adoption papers his wife mailed him.

He died three months later as a radio operator, the soldier who transmitted coordinates during combat. She wishes he had kept the job he had during his first tour of duty: the head cook for a kitchen off the battlefield.

“Maybe then he would have come back alive,” she said.