The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

46 MAY 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL In 2007, Jason Vorderstrasse was an entry-level FSO serving in Hong Kong. When a colleague mentioned visiting a local cemetery where he had seen the grave of a U.S. diplomat whose name was not inscribed on the AFSAMemorial Plaques, Vorderstrasse was intrigued. He visited the cemetery, found the grave- stone and conducted internet and archival research that established that Consul F. Russell Engdahl had died in 1942 while a prisoner of the Japanese military. Additional research identified two U.S. envoys who had died of disease in Macau in 1844. Vorderstrasse nomi- nated all three for inscription on the plaques. Their names were added on Foreign Service Day 2009. Vorderstrasse continued his research. In a March 2014 Journal essay, he reported documenting an additional 32 names of earlier diplomats and consular officers who died overseas due to tropical diseases, violence or accidents while in official transit. By December 2019, the number of names Vorder- strasse documented had risen to 39, with nine addi- tional historical names documented by other AFSA members. The AFSA Governing Board voted to add those 48 names “if and when funding is available” to install and inscribe additional marble plaques. For now, the names are memorialized on a virtual plaque on the AFSA website at afsa.org/memorial-plaques. —J.K.N. Parting the “Veil of Time” –Historical Names– As work progressed, the Executive Committee grappled with a question that would arise again and again: Whom, exactly, should the tablet honor? the Journal printed a full-page statement from Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who appeared to criticize that decision. Taking note of the tablet as “an appropriate and impressive reminder of what the work of the Service involves,” Hull said that the consul’s death “in the performance of his duties as a member of the For- eign Service ... deserves more notice than it has received.” Despite the Secretary’s appeal and the original congressional intent in authorizing the memorial, AFSA Executive Committees in the late 1930s and early 1940s continued to reject candidates for inscription who died from tropical diseases and during official travel. They added only two names (one murdered and the other killed in an earthquake), reasoning that honoring those whose deaths were not “peculiarly” heroic or tragic “might tend to diminish the profound significance” of the memorial. During the 1940s AFSA began using the term “Memorial Plaque.” In 1946 the Executive Committee sought advice from AFSA’s membership on two proposed changes to the crite- ria. The first would expand eligibility beyond Foreign Service officers to include Foreign Service staff members (today’s Foreign Service specialists). This was prompted by passage of the Foreign Service Act of 1946, which accorded Americans working overseas in clerical and administrative positions full professional status as members of the U.S. Foreign Service. The second would explicitly exclude those who died abroad of tropical diseases (with exceptions in extraordinary cases) or of other causes that did not constitute “peculiarly heroic circum- stances in the performance of acts abroad beyond and above the accepted high standard of duty in the Foreign Service.” AFSA’s annual general meeting in 1948 “revealed consider- able divergence of opinion,” the July 1948 American Foreign Service Journal reported, but adopted the two changes. In a 1949 report to members, AFSA noted that it had approved the inscription of only one of 15 names of Foreign Service mem- bers who had died abroad under tragic circumstances since 1942. After the State Department moved to new headquarters at 21st Street and Virginia Avenue NW in 1947, the plaque fol- lowed in 1954. Only six additional names had been inscribed since 1933. One was the first Foreign Service specialist on the plaque: Robert Lee Mikels, who died trying to save colleagues during a fire at Embassy Pusan in 1951. In 1961 the plaque was moved to its current location in the west end of the C Street lobby when the New State Extension completed today’s Harry S Truman Building. Open space remained for additional inscriptions. The names of 39 colleagues killed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between 1965 and 1975 filled that open space, but only after a mysterious delay. Even as the death toll mounted in Southeast Asia, no inscriptions were made between 1963 and 1972. “The extended delay,” as the late David T. Jones recalled in the October 1999 FSJ , “engendered suspicions among FSOs that the department was attempting to con-