Almost as soon as The Wall went up, families came to Washington to find their sailor’s name.
They’d find Panel 23, a black granite slab of the Vietnam War Memorial — widely called The Wall — that held the names of Americans killed in the conflict in June 1969.
And time after time, family after family, shipmate after shipmate, the names weren’t there.
How could that be? When the USS Frank E. Evans sank in the South China Sea in June 1969, it was one of the deadliest single events for U.S. service members during the entire Vietnam War. Struck by the bow of an Australian aircraft carrier, the American destroyer split in two. The bow of the Evans — with the bridge and much of the berthing quarters, where crew were asleep — sank in nine minutes.
The disaster killed 74, including 3 brothers who were serving together on the warship, and the son of the ship’s senior chief.
Since World War II, only three other Navy disasters have killed more sailors than the sinking of the Frank E. Evans: a 1952 collision that sank the USS Hobson, and the 1963 and 1968 losses of the submarines USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.
Of those, only the Frank E. Evans was lost at war.
Except on June 3, 1969, the Frank E. Evans wasn’t “at war,” Navy and defense officials quickly decided.
The 74 men who died on the ship were not included in the weekly lists of Americans killed in the Vietnam War, lists that eventually became the rolls used for names on The Wall. Pentagon officials determined soon after the ship sank, and continue to maintain today, that the ship was outside of the declared war zone, and the crew was neither in combat nor supporting forces that were, despite engaging in direct combat just weeks before.
There are 58,318 names of service members etched on The Wall, according to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, a central non-profit chartered by Congress in 1980 to design and build the memorial, and which maintains it today. The 74 men who died on the Frank E. Evans are not among them, and efforts by survivors in the decades since to add them have been turned away by Department of Defense officials.
“We all assumed we were in the Vietnam War,” said Bill Thibeault, who was on the Evans the night it broke apart. “Why the hell wouldn’t they be on The Wall?”
From firing line to tragedy
To tell the story of the sinking of the USS Frank E. Evans and the fate of its crew, Task & Purpose spoke with surviving crew members and family members of sailors who died on the ship. Task & Purpose also reviewed interviews and witness statements of crew members who have since passed away, as well as the Navy’s official investigation of the collision, the ship’s official history compiled by Navy historians, and a 30-minute training film produced by the Navy on the mishap.
By June 1969, the Frank E. Evans was in its fifth year of Vietnam combat duty. An Allen M. Summer-class destroyer, it had been built in six months in 1944, just in time for a combat tour in the Pacific before the end of World War II. It had also seen action in Korea, providing naval artillery support to troops on shore, and did the same in Vietnam on four different deployments.
In May, the crew had fired almost 2,000 shells from its five-inch guns into the Vietnamese jungles, according to a detailed history of the ship’s service kept by the Navy. Its guns supported amphibious landings by U.S. Marines, jungle firefights of 101st Airborne Division paratroopers, and provided fire support to repel assaults on jungle camps during the Tet Offensive.
The ship’s first action in the war came in August 1966, when it responded to calls from a forward controller known as Afterburn 26-Oscar with the 1st Marine Division. The Marines faced a dug-in force in the coastal mountains of Qu?ng Ngãi Province, just south of Da Nang. The ship fired almost 100 rounds in the battle, with 95% hitting the enemy positions, Afterburner reported.
In early 1967, the Frank E. Evans broke off to rush closer to shore and fired over 40 rounds into an enemy force north of Da Nang that was assembling to attack a Marine unit. Spotters on shore called back that the ship’s gunner had delivered “perfect rounds.” When the NVA force regathered and struck the Marines that night, the ship came within three and a half miles of shore to fire illumination rounds over the firefight.
In early 1967, the ship supported the 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, at Phan Thiet, in fighting so intense that the Army spotter, Salted Flakes 26, called for “danger close” rounds and walked the Frank E. Evans’ shells to within 100 meters of his troops.
The Evans returned to Long Beach, California, in 1968, but in 1969 was back in the South China Sea, firing over Operation Daring Rebel, an amphibious Marine landing. The ship fired close to 2,000 rounds during the operation in early May.
Low on ammunition after Daring Rebel, the Evans returned to Subic Bay in the Philippines — a re-supply stop that would turn out to be pivotal in the decades ahead.
Close to 20 new crewmembers came aboard, less than 10% of the ship’s complement, but a point of contention as recently as 2024, according to crew members and a government report on the ship.
Many of the new crewmembers were brand new sailors who had never been inside the legal war zone of Vietnam, Pentagon officials later concluded. Of the 74 crew who died in the sinking, the newcomers with no Vietnam experience accounted for 16 of the lost — a number cited in later Pentagon decisions to keep the crew’s names off The Wall.
The Frank E. Evans replenished its ammunition at Subic Bay and sailed in mid-May back toward Vietnam, where it was scheduled to return to combat on the firing line in June. But before it did, the ship was detailed to an exercise halfway between the two countries.
Operation Sea Spirit brought together 40 ships from seven nations, none of which, besides the U.S., were involved in Vietnam — another fact later cited in determining the status of the Frank E. Evans’ crew as not active combatants in the war. But the audience for the exercise was North Vietnam’s Chinese and Russian sponsors, and the ships engaged in genuine military operations: at least one New Zealand destroyer hunted an eavesdropping Russian submarine during the exercise, according to the Navy’s investigation of the accident.
The exercise was also a sloppy mess. Ships collided at least twice in the early days, according to Navy reports, and delays and mistakes plagued the multinational crews and their vessels.
In the early morning of June 3, the Evans was one of five ships sailing as escorts to the HMAS Melbourne, one of Australia’s largest aircraft carriers.
The captain of the Frank E. Evans, Cmdr. Albert S. McLemore, was sleeping in his quarters, leaving the bridge to two junior officers. The two were putting the ship through sweeping zig zags, tactics used to screen submarines away from the bigger ship. Around 0300, the Evans was ordered to change its sector to the rear of the Melbourne. In preparing to move to the rear of the bigger ship, one officer, investigators later found, misread the bigger ship’s heading as 160 degrees rather than 260, and adjusted the destroyer’s course to this incorrect heading.
In fact, they were headed directly toward the bigger ship. In the final seconds, the Evans turned hard to port, a maneuver that only opened up its side for a direct t-bone hit from the carrier.
It was 0315 in the morning. Much of the crew was asleep.
The sinking
Steve Kraus saw it coming.
A petty officer cook, he was on watch on the ship’s signal bridge, the platform above the pilot house.
“I was trying to spot where the ships were,” Kraus told Task & Purpose. “When we started to make our big turn leaving our sector, at least where the Melbourne was, I started looking directly behind us, but I didn’t see them.”
He moved to the front of the cabin to confer with the gun director, and saw the Melbourne closing in.
“I could see the ship coming straight at us,” he said. “I ran into our little signal shack and hit the intercom button, and said ‘we’re gonna get hit.’”
Seconds later, the massive roar thundered through the ship and the entire body rolled over.
“We went over 90 degrees on starboard,” Kraus said. “Our signal shack was lying in the water, and I was lying on my back. I just simply kicked the door open and I swam out.”
Today, Kraus is the president of the USS Frank E. Evans Association, a non-profit formed by former crew members to lobby for inclusion on The Wall. He still remembers looking back as he swam away as the ship began to right itself. The deck he’d just stepped out of into the water rose back in the air, as the forward section of the ship began to sink. He would be one of just a handful of crew from the front half of the ship to survive.
As the Navy’s official investigation and narrative history of the ship make clear, the few minutes that the front half stayed on the surface were filled with chaos and terror.
One sailor who made it into the water swam back to the sinking ship and climbed up the twisted metal to a closed hatch, behind which perhaps 30 men were trapped. The man pulled the hatch open, allowing many to escape. One of the last sailors through the hatch was Chris Dewey. In a 2003 interview, Dewey said his moments in the ship were a desperate race from his bunk, where he’d been asleep. He leaped from table to table across a dining hall as water poured in. Shipmates slipped and fell around him.
As he slipped through the hatch, water rose under him so fast that the man behind Dewey had to swim to the surface.
In the Navy’s official history, Terry Baughman said “everything let loose. The ship just took a brief roll to starboard. I just said ‘we’re dead.’”
In one of the oddest stories of survival from the night, a sailor who was on the roof of the highest lookout post when the ships collided was thrown in the air — directly onto the Melbourne’s flight deck. Australian sailors escorted him to their sick bay.
Lt. Cmdr. George L. McMichael, the executive officer, was thrown from his bed and onto the deck. “I was momentarily disoriented,” he said in the official report on the incident. “I stood up and took a step towards what I thought was my desk, and instead stepped through the doorway of my state room. At this point, the ship was already heeled over, I would estimate at least 70 to 75 degrees, so that the bulkheads had become decks. The water was already up to a point where it was half-filled. So I swam across the wardroom, went out the port side after door of the wardroom and ended up coming out through a hatch on the side of the ship.”
Now in the water, he thought back to stories of ships sinking and sucking people under, and of boilers exploding, so he turned on his back and started backstroking away.
Swimming on his back, he watched the Frank E. Evans sink lower in the water.
Heroism was everywhere
Hospital Corpsman Charles Cannington gave his penlight to another man to find an escape hatch as the chief’s berthing compartment filled rapidly with water. The man found a hatch and opened it, and directed as many as 15 out to safety. As the survivors found each other, they realized that Cannington was the only man from the compartment lost.
One of the men who had followed Cannington’s light to survival was Chief Petty Officer Larry I. Malilay, 42. Asleep when the ships collided, Malilay was thrown from his rack. After escaping through the hatch, he swam for an hour before an Australian helicopter fished him out of the water.
Joe Mulitsch, a machinist mate fireman, was just finishing his watch when the ships collided.
“I decided to go up to the upper level. I grabbed the ladder with one foot on the bottom rung. All at once, the ship rose up and the lights went out,” he later wrote in a witness statement. “Water began rushing in from everywhere. I was swept up in the darkness, under the water with whatever last breath I had taken. My mind was working with so many thoughts simultaneously. I was looking for the hole where the ladder went up and onto the upper level. I was looking for an air pocket where I could get more breath, all the while thinking of what my family would think about me being gone, my girlfriend, what happened?”
A sense of peace settled over him, he said, until — “wooossh!” — he popped to the surface.
Still inside the ship, he wrote, “The loud sounds of the engine room had given way to some sobbing and whines of pain. There was a slight hissing sound and the air was dank with the smell and taste of steam.”
He spotted a dim light of an open hatch.
“Here it is, here is the way out!” he yelled. As he went through, a tug on his belt pulled him back. A chief had grabbed him, panicking to get out. Mulitsch pushed him ahead and the two rolled out onto the open deck. There he found a friend named Michael Peacock, an electrician.
“He was smiling. I’ll never forget that smile!” Mulitsch wrote.
Even in the rear of the ship — which, incredibly, floated steadily — men scrambled for their lives.
In the engine room, a steam pipe broke, leaving the entire crew on duty with first and second-degree burns.
Among the dead were family tragedies
Three men aboard the Frank E. Evans were brother — Gary, Greg and Kelly Sage, ages 22, 21 and 19. Farm boys from Niobrara, Nebraska, their father, Earnest, had been in the Army in World War II and encouraged the boys to join the Navy. According to Greg’s wife, Linda, Earnest Sage saw the Navy as “safer.”
The young couple “got married at 19, had a baby at 20 and Greg died at 21,” Linda told Task & Purpose. She remarried in the years after the crash and is now Linda Vaa.
When Kelly graduated from basic training, the three boys met up to take a portrait in thier uniforms as a Mother’s Day gift to their mother, Eunice. They sailed together on the Frank E. Evans days later.
Earnest, said Linda, was out in the fields as news broke of the Evans sinking.
“Earnest came in from farming and it was on the news on the TV,” Vaa said. “Earnie let out a scream. Eunice passed out.”
President Richard M. Nixon, a Navy veteran, sent the family a personal note of condolences, delivered by an admiral, according to the Navy’s history of the ship.
Elsewhere, Lawrence J. Reilly Jr. was a new sailor on his first deployment. His father, Lawrence J. Reilly, was a Navy chief set to retire, but took one last deployment to spend with his son. While the chief survived, Reilly Jr. did not.
In the sinking’s aftermath, the Sages and Reillys played in media coverage as a modern version of the five Sullivan brothers of World War II, who died on the same ship. Secretary of the Navy Melvin Laird considered outlawing the practice of having family members serve in the same unit, but eventually decided against it.
“Although multiple deaths in a single family in a single disaster are a matter of deep regret,” the secretary wrote, according to the ship’s official history. “it would be less compassionate to say that members of the same family may never voluntarily serve together.”
The bow of the Frank E. Evans took the bodies of 73 sailors to the bottom. Of the dead, only the body of Seaman Kenneth Wayne Glines was recovered.
The Wall
The crew of the Frank E. Evans and the families of sailors who died on the ship have lobbied for over 30 years to see their shipmates added to The Wall. The ship’s foundation was formed in 1992 and holds annual reunions for survivors of the collision.
The group has also convinced lawmakers in several states to support local memorials for the ship.
But while legal efforts to get the crew onto the Wall came close in 2018, 2022, and 2024 with support from members of Congress, they fell short. Several lawmakers have vowed to try again this year.
On May 14, U.S. Senators Adam Schiff, a democrat, and Kevin Cramer, a republican, sent a joint letter to Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, asking him to meet “with members of the USS Frank E. Evans Association, including survivors from the accident, so they can convey to you first-hand the importance of listing the names of these 74 sailors and correcting this long-standing injustice.”
Tim Wendler, who was 2 when his father, a radioman, was killed on the Frank E. Evans, and who has led the foundation’s legal efforts, said the group has recieved help from both political parties.
“For one thing, it’s kind of rare in these times, right?” he said. “So if you have an issue where you can have people supporting you from both sides of the aisle, that kind of sends a signal that that this is, you know, something worth paying attention to.”
In 2024, Senator Chuck Schumer ordered the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, to look into the crews’ case for inclusion on The Wall. The report found that, as of June 2024, 380 names had been added to The Wall since it was dedicated in 1982. Over 200 of those were added in the first four years, most in either straightforward cases of eligible service members left off lists by mistake, or veterans who had died after returning to the U.S. from injuries sustained in the war.
But there have been large groups added.
The names of 53 Marines who died in a 1965 plane crash in Hong Kong while on a rest and relaxation trip were added to The Wall in 1983. Another 110 names were added in 1986 when the Pentagon relaxed the mandatory geographic policy for troops — mostly pilots and aircrew — killed “in support of direct combat missions,” according to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.
Still, the pace of new names added to the Wall has dwindled, with just five names added between 2019 and 2024.
The Pentagon has maintained the same criteria for inclusion for over 40 years, the GAO found. A service member must have died in the Vietnam combat zone during the war, or have been “participating in, or providing direct support to, a combat mission immediately en route to or returning from a target within the defined combat zone.” That combat zone was defined in Executive Order 11216, an April 1965 memo signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, which drew the war’s borders.
The coordinates in the memo extend about 100 miles off the coast of what was then South Vietnam. The Frank E. Evans sank about 200 miles southeast of Saigon, well outside the zone.
“The DOD has consistently determined that the circumstances of the collision that killed 74 members of the crew on June 3, 1969, do not meet the criteria for addition to The Wall,” the GAO found. The new crewmembers, it noted, were also a hurdle. “One of DOD’s considerations when examining the circumstances of the Evans collision was that some of the ship’s crew, including 16 of the 74 fallen crew members, joined the ship after it had left combat and had no prior service in the combat zone.”
Wendler hopes the GAO report is a chance to revisit the underlying rules of The Wall.
“Our focus is to really go back to the Department of Defense and take a fresh look at the criteria that they’ve used to add people to the wall,” he said. “Our read on it was really just that it’s time to kind of work and collaborate with DOD and find a solution that would cover this situation that, you know, common sense tells you that those are people that should be on The Wall.”
When plans were announced for The Wall in the early 1980s, Linda Vaa said a fundraising letter arrived for Earnest and Eunice Sage, asking for donations.
“Earnie said ‘if they’re asking for $100, give them $200,’” remembers Vaa. She asked that the family be sent the list of names for The Wall. A nearly 2-inch book arrived in response, the full list of names to be inscribed.
After endless looking, Vaa said, she realized Greg, Gary and Kelly weren’t included.
“I wrote them back and said, ‘I’m sorry, you forgot the three Sage brothers,’” Vaa said. Another letter came in response: there was no mistake, the Sages would not be included. The news devastated Earnest.
“Eunice was able to move on because she had a strong Christian faith,” said Vaa. “She would say ‘I’m gonna see the kids again.’ Earnie never got to where he could feel that way. He sank into a depression after that. He felt a terrible guilt, like it was his fault.”
After promising Eunice that they would make it together to their 50th wedding anniversary, Earnest died in 1996, two months after the anniversary passed. Eunice died in 2010.
For Linda, the years of struggle to get the names on the wall has been for sailors like Greg and his brothers, family like their parents, and for her own son, Greg Sage Jr.
“We’ve all gone on with our lives,” Linda said. “But Greg, he doesn’t know his father. He wants to be able to prove his father died for his country.”
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