Following in his father's footsteps, Richard B. Fitzgibbon III joined the United States Marine Corps and also served in Vietnam, where he was killed in September 1965.

[7] This was because President Lyndon B. Johnson had declared in a speech that Army Security Agency technician Spec/4 James T. Davis, who died in a Viet Cong ambush near the village of Cau Xang on December 22, 1961, was "the first American killed in the resistance to aggression in Vietnam."

Fitzgibbon's family lobbied to have the start date changed, and their cause was taken up by U.S. Representative Ed Markey (D, 7th District, MA) of Malden, Massachusetts.

[9] With this new date, Fitzgibbon became chronologically the first person to be listed on the memorial, preceding Harry Griffith Cramer Jr., Dale R. Buis and Chester M. Ovnand.

Fitzgibbon's name was added to the Vietnam Memorial Wall on May 31, 1999, and Today Show host Katie Couric interviewed members of his family for the occasion.

[8] The DoD had previously moved the date of the start of the Vietnam War to include the death of Captain Cramer, who was killed at Nha Trang in a training accident on October 21, 1957.

[10] His name was added to "The Wall" in 1983, after successful efforts by his son, Lt. Col. Harry G. Cramer III USAR, then an active-duty Army officer, to get DoD to acknowledge his father's death, as well as the presence of MAAG forces in Vietnam years prior to the officially recognized date of 1961.

Lieutenant Colonel Albert Peter Dewey was mistakenly shot and killed during an ambush by Viet Minh troops on September 26, 1945, in the early aftermath of World War II.