Telltale Objects
This series shares the stories of interesting artifacts at Willamette.
A returned military dog tag traditionally signals a soldier’s death, but Patti Nopp ’59 considers the battered piece of metal a link to her husband’s life.
During the Vietnam War in 1966, Army Lt. Col. Robert Nopp piloted a plane for a classified night surveillance mission over Laos — and never returned. In March, 52 years after he was declared MIA, the U.S. Department of Defense called Patti to inform her Bob’s remains and dog tag had been recovered at the foot of a cliff. “For the first several days, I cried a lot,” she says. “When they told me they had the dog tag, I finally realized it was true.” Bob had served in the war just four months when his plane lost radio contact during bad weather over mountains. He left behind Patti and their boys, a 5-year-old and 5-month-old, in Salem. The couple married in
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1959 after meeting at the Oregon State Capitol; he was a page in the House chamber, and she was a secretary for her uncle, a state representative from Eugene, during college. The last time Patti heard Bob’s voice was on her 30th birthday. Two days before he went missing, she received a cassette recording of his warm wishes as a gift. They’d begun trading cassettes to stay in touch. In the weeks and months following his absence, Patti informed the military whenever she left town so they would know where to reach her if they had news to share. “I’m sure they got tired of hearing from me,” she says, “but I knew they were going to find him.”
Years passed. Her children grew up and moved out of the house. Patti moved on with her life, too, hoping Bob died in a plane crash rather than as a prisoner of war. In 1979, the military arranged to hold a memorial service in Salem. But Patti was right, after all — they did eventually find Bob. Now she holds his dog tag — crumpled, but his name and blood type still legible — in the unopened evidence bag in which it arrived. In October, Patti and several members of her family traveled to Arlington National Cemetery, where his remains were buried. The cause of his crash is still a mystery, but the tag completes the story of Bob’s life.