KAILUA-KONA — The road there may have had some unexpected turns, but the end destination was just the same.
Janna Hoehn has a match.
Finally.
“Hawaii’s still finished,” said Hoehn, a volunteer with the Wall of Faces, the nonprofit that seeks to match a photograph with every one of the more than 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam.
She found a photo for every one of the 276 people from Hawaii killed during the Vietnam War, thanks to a little luck and determination.
But she had to do that twice for Staff Sgt. Steve Freddie Johnson, who was stationed in Kailua-Kona, as the original photo — the one she obtained after asking for help from the public through an article in West Hawaii Today — turned out to be incorrect.
“It’s not the first time,” she said. “Unfortunately, we are given the wrong photos sometimes.”
Still, the mission is complete. And here’s how it happened:
Back in January, Hoehn realized she’d never contacted WHT about her quest. There were two men left without images on the island and she’d had good success elsewhere having newspapers run a story detailing the young men she was looking to match with photos.
And that worked. Don Jackson, a childhood friend of Johnson, read the story in his Kona retirement home he’d recently moved into. Contacting Hoehn, he set her on the path of Johnson’s life in Southern California, including the high school Jackson believed Johnson had graduated from before moving to Kona.
That tip gave Hoehn enough to start digging for her own photo. She found a digital version of the yearbook photo and sent it to Jackson.
Being certain was hard, as time had altered Jackson’s memory. The nose and eyes are similar, he said, but the hair was darker and the person was bulkier than he recalled.
There was a Steve Freddie Johnson who had graduated from the high school, but there was a sticking point: The high school, which turned out to be the incorrect school for the Johnson the two were after, wouldn’t confirm the identity, citing privacy reasons.
“Sometimes, we have absolutely nothing to go on,” Hoehn said.
She submitted the photo, although she was “not 100 percent sure that we have the right Steve,” and WHT wrote a follow-up article saying she had done so. Hoehn declared matching all of Hawaii’s fallen Vietnam veterans with pictures complete.
But then Chris Johnson, Steve’s sister, saw the article and contacted Hoehn.
“The photos you have on the website are not my brother,” Chris told her after calling her up and introducing herself.
Chris sent along a replacement photo showing a very different person than the Steve Johnson they thought they had found previously.
The first photo showed a dark-haired young man with glasses and an almost military haircut. The correct image had a blond man, with his hair parted on one side ending in a dramatic arc. His smile creates deep dimples on the sides of his face.
“He was a great big brother, helped with school projects and made them fun, took me places with him when many others wouldn’t have bothered,” Chris Johnson wrote WHT about her brother. “Before being drafted, he worked at the Kona Steak House after high school, was always working on some art project or juxtaposing unexpected items toward some outcome he needed or wanted to accomplish. I remember one time, well before Vista Print or home printers made business cards quick to create, he hand printed cards on a large sheet of paper and brushed Elmers glue on both sides, let it all dry and cut them out the size of business cards! He was clever. He was handsome. He’s ‘never forgotten.’”
Chris, who resides in California, added that her brother was on his second tour when he was killed.
“The call went to my father’s office in town,” she wrote. “The military notified my father at his office at the point that Steve was still MIA. I’m not certain how long he harbored that information before the next visit when they told him the crash site had been discovered and that he was then considered KIA.”
His story, despite the unexpected route to get there, now has a picture to match on the Wall of Faces.