Our Arklahoma Heroes: A 1961 graduate of Heavener High School died as a result of wounds in the Que Son Valley
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Freddie Leon Sonaggera was born on July 18, 1943, into a railroad household in Heavener. His father, Silvio Anthony Sonaggera, called Sonny, had been born in 1918 at Wilburton, in neighboring Latimer County. His mother, Pauline Louise Ratliff, had been born on March 8, 1921, at Gowen, to Edward and Myrtle Ratliff.
Pauline finished Hartshorne High School, and on November 15, 1942, she married Silvio at Fort Smit. . A hometown notice spelled his name Silvia and said the couple would live in Fort Smith, where he was then working. They soon made their home in Heavener, where Silvio hired on with the Kansas City Southern.
Heavener was a division point on that line, set against the Ouachita foothills a few miles from the Arkansas border, with the county seat at Poteau. The name Sonaggera is uncommon in the county. Surviving notices do not carry the immigrant generation behind it.
The boy was called Freddie, and Fred. A sister, Sylvia Lynn, called Bobbie, was born on November 7, 1944, in Poteau. Another sister, Donna, came later. The house was a Kansas City Southern house in the practical sense: the father’s work was the railroad, the mother’s life was First Baptist Church in Heavener, where she would teach, volunteer, and keep a missions habit for seventy years.
Pauline gardened, sewed, quilted, cooked, and late in life painted. None of the public records describe Freddie’s childhood in any closer detail than the schools he finished and the town that claimed him.
He graduated from Heavener High School in 1961. He started college at Eastern State in Wilburton, the old mining-country school a short drive from his father’s birthplace, and finished at Northeastern State College in Tahlequah in 1966.
His sister Sylvia followed a similar path, Heavener High in 1963 and Northeastern for elementary education and art, with time at Eastern as well. No record in the casualty file or the family notices names a wife or a child of his own.
After the degree he enlisted in the Army of the United States. Basic training was at Fort Dix, New Jersey. He was selected for Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry. His service number was 05342338. His specialty was 1542, infantry unit commander. The casualty file lists one year of service and no promotion beyond second lieutenant.
He reached South Vietnam in mid-February 1968. The casualty file dates the start of his tour as February 12. The Heavener cemetery note and the later memorial account say he arrived on February 14. He was assigned to the reconnaissance platoon of Company E, 1st Battalion, 46th Infantry, the Professionals, in the 198th Light Infantry Brigade of the 23rd Infantry Division, the Americal Division.
The 198th had been stood up for Vietnam and was working the country south of Da Nang, in I Corps. The 46th Infantry’s lineage ran back to 1917 and to men drawn from the 10th Infantry. In the spring of 1968 the brigade was sent into the Que Son Valley to replace the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division.
Operation Burlington Trail opened on April 8, 1968, a security operation meant to open and hold the ground along Route 533 southwest of Tam Ky. Companies of the 1st Battalion, 46th Infantry were among the first troops landed on the hills above that road.
Four days into the operation, on April 12, a grenade exploded near Sonaggera’s position. The memorial account places the fight in the Que Son Valley, on the northern edge of Quang Tin Province, about fourteen miles northwest of Tam Ky. The official casualty record lists Quang Tin Province, a hostile ground casualty, and multiple fragmentation wounds.
He was evacuated. He died of those wounds on April 17, 1968. He was twenty-four. His body was recovered. The operation ran on until November and, by the published count, cost 129 American lives against a reported 1,931 enemy dead.
His name is one of the early losses.
Memorial records credit him with the Combat Infantryman Badge, the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal with two bronze service stars, the Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal, the infantry blue cord, and the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross unit citation with bronze palm.
The Silver Star is recorded for gallantry in action. A full citation text was not found in the open award indexes checked for this account, so the particular act is not restated here beyond the wounding already in the casualty file. He is carried on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Panel 50E, Line 33, as Freddie L. Sonaggera of Heavener, LeFlore County.
The body came home to Heavener Memorial Park. His father, Silvio, died in Heavener on November 22, 1975, at fifty-seven, and is buried in the same town. Sylvia died of breast cancer on June 14, 2006, and was buried at Broken Arrow. Pauline lived to ninety-six.
She died on the morning of February 19, 2018, after three years at Baptist Village in Broken Arrow, and was buried on February 24 at Heavener Memorial Park after a service at First Baptist, the church she had served for seventy years.
Her obituary named the son lost in Vietnam in the same sentence as the daughter lost to cancer. Donna Sonaggera Brooks of Broken Arrow survived her. The grandchildren named in that notice are the children of the sisters, not of Freddie. No children of his appear in any of the records.
On May 11, 2009, Oklahoma designated the bridge on State Highway 128 east of Heavener as the U.S. Army 2nd Lieutenant Fred Sonaggera Memorial Bridge, and ordered permanent markers. It is a two-lane concrete and steel span about 2.3 miles south and east of town, over a creek in the same county that sent him.
