In Loving Memory of.. Corp William Kapena Alameda.

You may be gone, no longer living on this earth; but you will live on - in the memories of your family and friends. There will always be a part of you living in me, your brother, sisters and those who knew you and loved you. You will live on because we remember you!


WILLIAM KAPENA ALAMEDA - Army - CPL - E4
Age: 24
Race: Malayan
Date of Birth Jun 19, 1944
From: WAIMANALO, HI
Religion: ROMAN CATHOLIC
Marital Status: Single - Parents: Father, George F. Alameda of Waimanalo, Hawaii. Has Daughter, Sarah Michel. Has Brothers that live in Hawaii. Army DA2496 Shows NONE for children. He left behind 10 brothers and sisters.

***** Dear Eddieb, thank you for the amazing job you've done on bringing together all the public information about my father-in-law, William Alameda, who died 2 months before my wife Sarah was born. You have found all the news articles from Hawaii when she first found out about her Hawaiian family and we first visited them.
One piece of additional information, is that W.K.Alameda was mentioned, together with about 20 other heroes from the War, in the book "Heroes from the Wall" by John Douglas Foster.
You can find it on Amazon - it will be a very good read for you.
http://www.amazon.com/Heroes-Wall-John-Douglas-Foster/dp/1469155400/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1430858238&sr=8-1&keywords=heroes+from+the+wall
If you can send me your information privately, I would like to give you a book, as an appreciation for all the great work you're doing.
Added by pie254 on May 05, 2015 2:39 PM

***** Photo - Sarah Michel held a photo of her father yesterday during a family party at a Makapuu beach. Michel, of San Diego, recently learned her father was Hawaiian and that she has family on Oahu. Her father was a U.S. soldier who was killed in Vietnam in 1968, two months before she was born.

***** Michel....long lost daughter Posted on 1/16/06 - by Just another VN Vet
I just read the story of Michel on the website of the Honolulu Advertiser.www.honoluluadvertiser.com She was born of a Vietnamese mother 4 months after he was KIA. For years she searched for her father who gave her life. She never gave up!She finally found her long lost Hawaiian family. Please read this touching story which brought tears to my eyes. May God Bless William Kapena Alameda and all his wonderful family. Mahalo for your service!
Welcome home Michel!Aloha Nui Loa!

***** Dear Daddy, It has been 37 years since your passing. I never felt your touch, but I feel your presence spiritually. I miss you dearly. Over the past two months I have learned about who you are as a brother, a friend, a soldier, and mostly as a father and a hero. I know your spirit has guided me to find the answers I have been longing for. I have only heard wonderful things about your life and I am proud to be your daughter, no one else could be a better father. There are tears in my eyes as I write this. I love you. I want to tell you that you have two wonderful grandchildren who you would be proud of. Your brothers in Hawaii have embraced me as their daughter. You can also be proud of your brothers from the Big Red One who have taken me in as their own. I made a trip to Los Angeles to see and touch your name on the moving wall, it was a beautiful day and I felt your spirit all around me. I miss you deeply but know you are in God's hands. I love you always and forever.





CPL - E4 - Army - 1st Infantry Division
Length of service 1 years
His tour began on Mar 26, 1968
Casualty was on Nov 1, 1968
In TAY NINH, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY
ARTILLERY, ROCKET, or MORTAR

Body was recovered
Panel 40W - Line 70


On November 1, 1968, Corp William Kapena Alameda died from wounds received while at night defensive position when area came under hostile mortar attack.

Body was Recovered.



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Family found

A child born in Vietnam discovers her family in Hawaii after years of seeking
By Mary Vorsino

He had no face, no hometown, no family and only a first name: William.

Sarah Michel would dream about him, though, wearing his Army fatigues, fighting the Viet Cong, wooing her mother. He was out there somewhere, she told herself, and one day he would find her and make up for all of the lost time.

"For most of my life, I had this empty feeling inside of me," Michel said, closing her eyes to hold back tears. "I've been longing for him. I've been dreaming about him."

After so many years of wishing and searching, the 36-year-old San Diego resident finally found her father. And yesterday, in a quiet moment with her fiance, she placed flowers on his gravestone at the National Memorial Center of the Pacific at Punchbowl.

Cpl. William Kapena Alameda, who was born in Hilo and grew up in Waimanalo, died in the Vietnam War when he was 24 years old. He left behind 10 brothers and sisters -- and an unborn child, whom his family never knew about until getting a call from Michel in August.

All seven of Alameda's surviving siblings have since welcomed Michel into their lives. Family members on Oahu met her for the first time on Friday night and gathered at a Makapuu beach park yesterday for a Hawaiian-style potluck. They are already urging the San Diego resident to pack up and move to the islands. They want her to get to know her big extended family, which includes 75 cousins and 175 second cousins on Oahu and the Big Island.

"To know that my brother lives, even though he's dead -- that's the best thing," said Waimanalo resident Gordon Alameda as he sat next to Michel with his arm around her shoulders. "In a way it was kind of hard to believe. I couldn't figure it out."

Michel's mother, a Vietnamese woman who now lives in San Diego, met William "Billy Boy" Alameda in 1967. She was working on an Army base in the Vietnamese province of Tay Ninh, where Alameda was stationed. They fell in love despite a language barrier. At one point, Alameda hired an interpreter so the two could talk, Michel said.
When Michel's mother found out she was pregnant, Alameda took a picture of her -- which Michel carries -- and took it with him onto the battlefield. When he died on Nov. 1, 1968, a fellow soldier returned the photo to Michel's mother, who knew the father of her baby's child only by his first name.

As Michel sat under a tent on the beach with her fiance and members of her family yesterday, she pulled out the photo from a thick binder full of memorabilia gathered during her search. She pointed to the wallet-size picture gingerly, knowing her father had taken it on a sunny, happy day in Vietnam with war all around him but only love and hopes for the future in his heart.

When she was 4 years old, Michel was put up for adoption. Her mother worried that her American looks would get the child in trouble. The safest thing, she reasoned, was to ship her off to an orphanage, where she was quickly adopted by a couple in Michigan.

Until she was 16, Michel had big question marks for biological parents. She also thought she was half African American. But one day, her adoptive parents got a call from their adoption agency: Michel's mother was looking for her daughter.

Their first conversation, which was over the phone, consisted of little more than crying. They met a few months later, and Michel learned she had three half siblings, two by a Vietnamese father and one by an American doctor.

When Michel got older, she gradually gained interest in her father. Who was he, she would ask her mother. What did he like to do? What did he look like? Many times, Michel's mother clammed up at the questioning. But sometimes she would talk about him -- his dashing good looks; his sweet, lilting voice; his knack for music.

Michel's mother did not know where Alameda was from or whether he had family. She, too, thought he was African American. In fact, Alameda was Portuguese Hawaiian. Finally, Michel stopped asking about her father. "I gave up on the search," she said. But her fiance, Johan Oeyen, did not. He was intent on finding her father and for more than two years searched military Web sites and discussion boards for clues.

The breakthrough came all at once -- and purely by mistake. For years, Michel's mother had been saying Alameda's middle name was something like "Alan." At the dinner table one day, Oeyen spelled the name out and asked, "Like this?"
No, Michel's mother said, it was A-L-A-M.

At first, Oeyen thought the name was Middle Eastern. Then, he went to an Internet listing of those whose names are on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. When he typed in the four letters, three names came up: two Alamos and one Alameda.

When Michel saw her father's name, she said, she was certain she had found the man who had fallen in love with her mother and died before she was born.

They found out Alameda had been in Vietnam about the time that Michel was conceived and was based in Tay Ninh, where Michel's mother had worked and where Michel was born. When Michel and Oeyen contacted the Alamedas, they were skeptical at first. But, they said, they were soon convinced. One uncle in Hilo told Michel when he saw a photo of her that she "looked like one of us. Welcome to the family."

A DNA test completed a week before Christmas confirmed Alameda was Michel's father. Now, Michel is learning everything she can about the family she never knew.

She plans to stay in the islands until Wednesday, visiting her dad's old stomping grounds and learning more about her heritage. And even though she never got to meet her father, meeting his brothers and sisters makes her feel complete.

"Just touching him," she said, putting her hand on her uncle Alfred's back, "I feel my dad."

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With mystery solved, 'I feel complete now'
Posted on: Monday, January 16, 2006
By Loren Moreno


MAKAPU'U — Sarah Michel leaned her head on her uncle Alfred's shoulder and instantly broke into tears.

"Just touching him, I feel my dad," Michel, 36, said yesterday as the San Diego woman met her father's side of the family for the first time and completed a journey of self-discovery.

Michel, who was born in Vietnam and raised by adoptive parents in Michigan, is the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and a U.S. serviceman from Hawai'i, the late William Kapena Alameda.

"Most of my life there has been this empty feeling inside me," Michel said at the family gathering at Makapu'u Beach. Now, having met her father's family, she said that void has been filled.

Her mother worked on a U.S. Army base during the Vietnam War, washing soldiers' uniforms. There she met Alameda, a 23-year-old Hawai'i soldier who wooed her with laughter and the 'ukulele.

Just months into their relationship, Michel's mother discovered she was pregnant and told Alameda the news. Before Michel was born, Alameda was killed in action.

Raising a daughter in the war-torn country was too much for her mother to handle, Michel said. She was put up for adoption. A Michigan family adopted her when she was 4 years old. It wouldn't be until she was 16 that she would see her mother again.

Michel was reunited in 1984 with her mother, who was living in Utah with Michel's three half-siblings. "At that time I wasn't really focused on knowing who my father was," she said. "I was just 16 years old."

Michel moved to San Diego and so did her mother. She began to have more questions about her father, but answers were hard to find.

"My mother really didn't want to talk about my father. It was really difficult to get information," Michel said.

But she was able to get some information that would eventually lead her to her family.

"The information I got about my father was that at one time he went to Hawai'i," Michel said. "His name was William or Alan, I heard. It wasn't always clear because of the language barrier (between mother and daughter)."

Michel's search for her father again turned up nothing, and she became discouraged. Her fiance, Johan Oeyen, soon took up the search and was determined to help unite Michel with her father.

He searched military Web sites and databases for any Alan, Allen or William he could find. He found nothing. Then last August, Michel's mother told him he was searching for the wrong name. It wasn't Alan; it was Alam.

"That one letter changed her (Michel's) whole life," said Oeyen.

On a Vietnam veterans Web site, Oeyen did a search for "Alam" and turned up two last names: Alamos and Alameda.

"I said, 'William Alameda, that's my dad,' " Michel said. "I just had a feeling. I knew it instantly."

The man they had found, William Alameda, was listed as a native of Hawai'i, serving in the same province in Vietnam, and same time frame, where Michel was born.

Immediately, Oeyen began calling members of the Alameda family living in Hawai'i. One of the first to receive a phone call was Gordon Alameda, one of William Alameda's brothers.

"I told him, 'There's a lot of Alamedas on this island,' " Gordon Alameda said. "You must have the wrong Alameda." Gordon Alameda, 48, had never heard of his brother having a child or even a girlfriend while in Vietnam.

But a few phone calls later, there could be no mistaking Michel's lineage.

"Every time she called, I'd say, 'Eh, she sounds like Auntie Leo,' " Alameda said. Michel and the Alameda family began swapping pictures and became convinced Michel was a relative.

Michel received the first picture she'd ever seen of her father from an aunt in Hawai'i. "It was very moving for me. I was at work and I cried," Michel said. "I'd never seen anyone that looked like me before."

Michel continued calling family members in Hilo, Hawai'i, and even those on the Mainland. Through phone conversations, Michel began to discover family traits, including her artistic inclinations and her daughter's musical abilities. She even traced her craving for liver back to a dish her father's mother had cooked every week.

In December, Michel received DNA test results that confirmed she is a member of the Alameda family.

This past weekend Michel came to Hawai'i to visit her family. After only two days in Hawai'i, she said it already feels like this is home.

Twenty of her uncles, aunties and cousins met Michel at the airport on Saturday, and yesterday more gathered for a family picnic at Makapu'u.

"I feel complete now," said Michel, surrounded by her new family. "I had this longing for my father, and now I feel complete."

Gordon Alameda told her: "You found your family — you know where you belong."

Alfred Alameda, 53, said he never needed any convincing, DNA test or otherwise, that Michel was indeed his niece. "There wasn't a doubt in my mind," he said.

Never knowing who her father was and barely knowing her mother, Michel grew up thinking she was half Vietnamese, half African-American. Now she knows she's actually Hawaiian and Portuguese.

Yesterday morning Michel visited the grave of her father at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.

Gordon Alameda said the whole family has a feeling of completeness as well. "This brings us closer," he said. "With her as a new (addition) to the family, it brings us together."


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