CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A man working on a documentary called “Bring Them Home” focused around tracking down West Virginia MIA Vietnam War Veterans and their families says he’s making some headway with the project.
Calvin Grimm came on 580 Live recently to discuss the progress being made with the film project and the attempt to locate the 17 missing in action Vietnam vets from West Virginia.
He said he was happy to finally locate Sergeant Jimmy Taylor and his family in Indiana and will be going out there this week to get an in-person interview with them.
Sergeant Taylor, who is from Nitro, went missing in Vietnam in 1966. He’s now 83.
Grimm said up until just the other day, the effort to find Taylor’s whereabouts seemed to be going nowhere.
“We were just kind of hitting dead ends left and right, we knew that he had five brothers, but there’s only one left now, and that’s why we were having such trouble tracking them down,” Grimm said.
Finally, however, he said he received a call from one of Taylor’s relatives who is still living in the Nitro area and they got him in touch with Taylor and his family in Indiana, who relocated there between 20 to 30 years ago.
Grimm said he had to talk to Taylor’s wife for the majority of the conversation over-the-phone, as Taylor has been battling health issues.
He said his wife shared how Taylor’s mother took the news that Taylor went missing and it was tragic.
“She put it that she died of sadness,” Grimm said. “Jimmy Taylor went missing in 1966, she passed away by the next summer of 67, and she was in relatively good health, it just screwed her up that bad.”
He said most of Taylor’s brothers were in the military as well, and one of them happened to be home on leave when the family got the notification that he was MIA.
Grimm said Taylor deserves the ultimate badge of honor for everything he’s been through during the war.
“There were two other veterans at that battle where he went missing who earned the Medal of Honor,” he said. “I think Taylor should have gotten the Medal of Honor from what I can tell.”
Grimm said one of the Green Berets with Taylor at the time, who later received the Medal of Honor, Bennie Adkins wrote a book called The Tiger Among Us where he describes the events surrounding Taylor’s MIA.
While he said Adkins unfortunately passed away a few years ago, Grimm is currently working on trying to contact some of the few surviving Green Beret members for an interview who were there at the time as well.
Earlier, Grimm said he got to interview the niece of Airman First Class Marshall Pauley who went missing in Laos also in 1966.
Grimm said ten years ago, Pauley’s aircraft wreckage was located and recently, his dog tags were found. However, he said they have not yet found his remains, so he is unfortunately still left unaccounted for.
He said they are also in the process of trying to track down a couple other veteran’s families who were from the central West Virginia region as well.
One is Lietenant John Albright of Huntington who went missing in 1968. Grimm said his aircraft also went down in Laos.
He said Sergenat James Duncan is another whose family they are still working on trying to locate.
“He was Army, he was Infantry, they were reinforcing a South Vietnamese unit,” Grimm said. “From all accounts, he was killed in action and they buried his body at the battle site, but they were never able to recover it for whatever reason.”
Grimm said people can find updates regarding the documentary on its Facebook Page, “Bring Them Home: The Stories of Our Missing in Action Vietnam Veterans.” He said they will have a website up for the film project very soon.
