SUNNYSIDE -- The names of 25 men are engraved in granite on a war monument in Lower Valley Memorial Gardens.

Al Heffron knows them.

He knows their middle initials, when they were born and the dates of their death. He knows their units. He knows where surviving family members live. He knows where they are buried.

He knows how they died.

Now he does, anyway. But he didn't seven years ago when he began his quest.

The names represent all 25 men with ties to Sunnyside who died in World War II. Twenty-five men, from a sleepy farming town with a population at the time of 4,000.

Heffron's motivation for wanting to learn more about them was simple:

"What the hell happened to them all, that's the question I have," Heffron, a 70-year-old self-described World War II history buff, recalls asking himself in 2001.

Heffron grew up in Sunnyside, too. He still lives there.

He calls the 25 soldiers a "microcosm" of the world at large. World War II recruits came from rural communities all over the United States and died in places they had never heard of.

"They're kind of spread all over the map," he says.

In 2001, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion built the $150,000 War Veterans Memorial in Memorial Gardens, a cemetery north of town. It lists the men from the area who have died in battle.

Since then, Heffron has been researching the World War II stories.

For a man who knows so much about the war and the local sons it claimed, he remembers precious little.

He had just turned 4 when America entered the war on Dec. 8, 1941. He was old enough to know the men's families but too young to remember any funerals. He was old enough to listen to war reports on the radio but too young to understand them. He vaguely recalls an alarm whistle sounding at the old Carnation plant, warning residents to turn off their lights in fear of Japanese spy planes. Nothing ever happened.

"When we were kids, at least my parents, they didn't talk about it," Heffron recalls.

So the cherry orchardist looks through the lens of history. He keeps volumes of books and videos about World War II and keeps his television tuned to the History Channel. He frequents air shows with 1940s bombers, often purchasing rides across the Northwest.

And in a neatly organized, expandable file box, he keeps details of each of those 25 soldiers. He also uses a zippered portfolio that's not so neatly organized.

"I would like to write it up sometime," he says.

However, he has questions first. There are blanks on a spreadsheet that serves as an index.

He has every date of death and branch of military, but a surprising number of birthdays are missing. He also lacks three units, many high school graduation dates and possibly some medals.

But the most frustrating hole is a question mark at the very top of the column titled "Cause of death."

That's for Joseph O. Deatherage, a member of the U.S. Army's 161st Infantry, 25th Division, who died in Hawaii on Jan. 27, 1942, more than a month after the Pearl Harbor bombing. Heffron doesn't know how he died and has yet to find any family members. He heard rumors it was a heart attack.

Heffron says his research may require a trip to the Washington, D.C., archives.

"We can go there," says his wife, Joyce.

Joyce Heffron tolerates and sometimes helps with her husband's research. Three years younger, she also recalls listening to radio war reports. She also remembers spending the first few years of her life under the care of her older sisters taking care of the family farm near Shohomish while her parents worked long hours in the Everett shipyards.

She believes her husband likes the fact-finding.

"I think the chase is what you enjoy," she tells him.

Al Heffron spends his winter months on his project. He and his family own a cherry orchard on the north slope of Snipes Mountain just west of Sunnyside. His summers are still busy with work.

Many of the men's families helped Heffron's research. Some stories already were well documented.

Take Dr. Simon Warmenhoven, a Sunnyside-born physician for the Army's 32nd Division who scrambled to keep men healthy in New Guinea, one of the lesser known battle arenas of the war.

Warmenhoven is a central character in "The Ghost Mountain Boys," a 2007 book about the New Guinea theater by James Campbell. In it, Campbell describes men dying by dozens from enemy mortar and diseases such as from malaria in New Guinea and Australia, where they were sent to recover. For his bravery in treating them, Warmenhoven received a District Service Cross from Gen. Douglas MacArthur and was featured on the front page of the New York Times.

The book also reports that a combination of atabrine and quinine, given to malaria patients, led to psychosis in Warmenhoven and other soldiers. On May 5, 1943, he shot himself in the head.

Warmenhoven's younger brother, Cornelius Warmenhoven, served in the Navy as a baker in Alaska and lived in Sunnyside until 1994, when he moved to Kennewick. His family knew of his brother's suicide months after it happened, but the book, published last year, finally detailed why. He finds it "quite accurate" and believes the story.

The 25 lost men sound like a lot now, Cornelius Warmenhoven says. But at the time, the community mourned each death one by one.

"Everybody feels sad when a soldier or sailor loses his life," recalls Cornelius. "But you're in a war and life goes on."

The total didn't really mean much.

"I imagine the feeling was the same as it was all over the United States."

* Ross Courtney can be reached at 930-8798 or rcourtney@yakimaherald.com.