http://www.latimes.com/news/state/20010502/t000037029.html
Wednesday, May 2, 2001
Daughter at Last Hears Tale of Soldier's Death
Combat: For decades she knew little of how her father died during a Vietnam War battle.
By H.G. REZA, Times Staff Writer
A card sent from Vietnam in 1968 for her third birthday is one of the few mementos Kathy Mueller has of a father she never knew. It arrived after her father, Staff Sgt. Lloyd "Frenchy" Mousseau, was killed in a battle that is now one of the tales of the Green Berets.
Mueller, an Irvine resident, is in Texas today, the 33rd anniversary of the battle, to meet with Special Forces veterans and learn more about a man who until recently was nothing more to her but a mystery.
The Texas Legislature will honor Master Sgt. Roy Benavidez, who earned the Medal of Honor in the battle, with the Texas Medal of Honor. At the same time, Vietnam veterans will honor Mousseau as the wounded soldier draped over Benavidez's shoulder in a bronze sculpture commissioned to recognize the men's courage.
Painful memories of the Vietnam War were stirred last week by reports that former Sen. Bob Kerrey's squad killed 21 civilians in a 1969 mission. Americans have sought to put the war behind them for decades, but Mueller, 36, has been trying for just as long to learn more about the battle in which her father died.
For Mueller, who was invited to the ceremony in Austin by the Benavidez family, it will be an opportunity to meet a ghost who was only a name and face in a few old photographs until last May, when she found her father's name on a Web site of Vietnam dead.
She left a message on the site, asking if anybody knew her father. Mueller felt it was time to meet the man she had only known as a hero but not as a person. All she had was an incomplete story about how he had died a hero's death.
In December, she got a reply--from a former Green Beret who had served an earlier tour in Vietnam with Mousseau.
"In my head, in a movie moment, my father's dying words were, 'Tell my daughter I love her.' But that didn't happen, because he was so badly wounded he couldn't talk. I've learned all this since December," Mueller said.
Mousseau, two other Special Forces troopers and nine Nung tribesmen fought a six-hour battle against a Communist force of at least 400 troops. Benavidez volunteered to be a one-man relief force and was dropped into the thick of the fighting without a weapon.
While rescuing the trapped patrol, Benavidez was shot seven times and suffered 28 shrapnel wounds. In addition, while he was carrying the mortally wounded Mousseau to a medical evacuation helicopter, a North Vietnamese soldier clubbed Benavidez in the head, smashed him in the face with a rifle butt and bayoneted him. But Benavidez still managed to kill his enemy.
Benavidez and Mousseau were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's second-highest award for bravery. But Special Forces veterans mounted a campaign to have Benavidez's award upgraded to the Medal of Honor, and the decoration was presented to him by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.