Cool story

[Danger731]

May 6, 2006

Eleven years ago, Tanna Toney-Ferris was walking along the shore in Imperial Beach, looking for seashells, when she spotted a rusted piece of metal sticking out of a fist-sized rock.

“That's somebody's dog tag,” she remembers telling herself.

Tanna Toney-Ferris found this sediment-encrusted dog tag on Imperial Beach and cleaned it with a wire brush so she could see the name.
She knew because of the notch in one end. Friends who had fought in the Vietnam War had told her ghoulish stories about the notch being used to wedge the tags in the mouths of dead soldiers so they could be identified later. It's not the kind of story you ever forget.

Toney-Ferris picked up the rock and took it home. She scrubbed the tag with a wire brush until she could make out a name, HUEBNER, and a first initial, J. She learned from the tag that he was in the Navy and that he was Catholic.

She figured the sailor probably had perished at sea. She thought his family might want to have something that had been with him at the very end. She said she would have wanted it, if she were in their shoes.

At first glance, the 47-year-old Chula Vista woman might not look like someone with much of a sensitive side. She has tattoos on her arms. She rides a Harley.

But she's long had a soft spot, she said, for the forgotten. So she started looking for survivors. “I probably could have just sent it to the government and let them deal with it,” Toney-Ferris said. “But I didn't want it to get lost in the bureaucracy.”

In the beginning she floundered. She spent a lot of time on the computer but wasn't very savvy about the Internet. She made some wrong turns.

Three years ago, she came across a Web site for an organization called Operation Just Cause. It works to gather information about soldiers who remain unaccounted for in U.S. conflicts, especially Vietnam. Toney-Ferris contacted the group and asked for help.

Tanna Toney-Ferris gave John Huebner of Wisconsin a sneak peek of the dog tag yesterday at a hotel in Chula Vista.
Operation Just Cause sent out feelers to various military contacts, including an association for sailors who were stationed aboard minesweepers. That group had a John Huebner who had just joined, and sent Toney-Ferris his e-mail address. A brother, she wondered, or a son? It was worth a shot.

Toney-Ferris sent him a note, explaining what she had found and what she was trying to do. The reply stunned her.

“Yep,” the e-mail said, “that's me.” The man whose name was on the dog tag was alive.

“I started crying, I was so happy,” Toney-Ferris said.

Huebner lives in Wisconsin. He's 62. He spent more than 25 years in the Navy, retiring in 1987, and now drives tour buses for a charter company.

In 1969, he was stationed at Point Mugu in Ventura County. The Navy sent him to Coronado for final combat-support training before he was shipped out to Vietnam. He said his tags were on a chain with a small screwdriver and some keys. He lost them all in the surf.

“I was raised in Montana, where joining the military was a big thing, a patriotic thing,” Huebner said. “These were the tags they gave me out of boot camp, July of 1961. It was a big deal to me when I got them.”

The Navy replaced the lost tags, and the years passed. He said he hadn't thought much about the old ones until he received the e-mail from Toney-Ferris. Later she sent him a picture of the rock, with the tag sticking out. Somehow it (and the keys and the screwdriver) got embedded in sediment over the course of almost three decades.

“She could have given up on this a long time ago,” Huebner said. “It blows me away that somebody cared enough to try to find me.”

Toney-Ferris first offered to mail the tag to him in Wisconsin. But the more the two traded e-mails, the more they wanted to make the exchange in person. “It just feels like the appropriate way to do it,” Toney-Ferris said. She envisioned meeting on the beach where she had found the rock.
Huebner said he was struck by parallels in their lives, including how her first name (Tanna) is similar to his wife's (Anna), and how her husband was also in the Navy. “She has just become a significant part of our life,” he said. “It became important for us to meet.”

The problem was neither one of them could afford the airfare to make it happen, Toney-Ferris said. She tried to raise money through veterans groups. She contacted the media.

Several months ago, Toney-Ferris started coordinating a motorcycle escort for the Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall, a traveling replica of the Washington landmark. It is on display in Balboa Park this weekend, at the Veterans Museum and Memorial Center.

A friend offered to help with the event any way he could. She said he had asked her: Do you know anyone who might need a motel room or an airplane ticket?

She did.

Today at 3 p.m., Toney-Ferris is scheduled to formally hand over the dog tag to Huebner at a ceremony in front of the Vietnam Wall. Talking about it earlier this week, she got emotional. Her eyes filled with tears.

“It's been 11 years in the making,” she said. “I can't really find the correct words.”

[BrewmasterZ28]

That's just awesome. Nice to see there are still good hearted people out there!