Eventually, they will all come home

  • Published
  • By Capt. Ken Hall
  • 47th Flying Training Wing Public Affairs
LAUGHLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Texas (AFPN) --  On this third Friday in September, we recognize and honor those servicemembers who suffered as prisoners of war, and those still missing. 

We do it for them. More important, we do it for their families, and we do it so every man and woman in uniform today can truly believe in their heart should they fall in battle, we will bring them home. 

Those missing have become a distant memory to some in America, but resolution and closure remains the focus for those families whose loved ones still lie on distant battlefields. Giving them resolution and closure remains the primary mission for many people in units like the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii and the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office in Washington, D.C. These units' members are responsible for bringing home the missing. 

What most of them will tell you is they have the most gratifying job in the U.S. military. What most of them won't tell you is they risk their own lives daily while deployed around the world in austere locations to make sure their fallen comrades are returned to their families and to a final resting place on American soil. 

I can tell you what it was like serving in the unit charged with bringing home the missing -- it was the most rewarding assignment I have ever had. 

It was certainly the one where I most felt I was doing something that mattered, and that's considering my deployments to Operation Desert Storm, Bosnia and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. During my tour with Joint Task Force-Full Accounting and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, we brought home more than 225 missing American heroes and laid them to rest with the honor they so long deserved. 

The distant memory of those missing may just be a number or statistic to some, but the 88,000 missing heroes represent 88,000 real-life stories of loss and pain to 88,000 wives or husbands who will never grow old together, whose children will never know their parent, or whose parents outlived their child. During my deployments to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, I saw firsthand where we believed more than a dozen of these heroes lay lost, and I learned their stories, too. 

My first deployment to Laos took me to the thickly jungled Ho Chi Minh Trail in Salavan Province. From the air, the landscape looked like moonscape from the innumerable bomb craters still evident 30-plus years later. There, I learned the story of not one missing hero, but five. 

Jolly Green-23's HH-3E crew was searching for a downed Marine pilot who had just been shot down while providing close-air support to troops in the Ashau Valley.
 
The enemy had captured the downed, injured pilot and then used him as bait to attract and then attempt to shoot down would-be rescuers. This was the fate that found the crew of Jolly Green-23. Among them were Capt. Richard Yeend, co-pilot; Staff Sgt. Elmer Holden, flight engineer; Sgt. James Locker, pararescueman; and Coast Guardsman Lt. Jack Rittichier, an exchange pilot. During my tour, we saw them all laid to rest in American soil. 

In the mist-shrouded mountains of what was once North Vietnam, on what had once been an escape route for Navy pilots returning to their carriers after dropping their bombs on Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor, lay the crash site of Lt. j.g. Roderick Lester and his bombardier/navigator Lt. Harry Mossman. They had just completed a bombing run in August 1972 and were returning to the USS Kitty Hawk when their A-6 Intruder crashed into the side of a mountain. 

In Lieutenant Mossman's son's eulogy, he recalled: "My dad wrote, '...I have made government service in the Navy my career. I hope I can help the people who are this nation in some small way by trying to make the part of the armed forces in which I serve use its vast power as wisely as possible in the preservation of this nation.'" 

In addition to taking media to cover our teams at recovery sites, the singly most-rewarding part of my duties included meeting and briefing the families of those servicemembers we recovered and identified. 

During their visits, the families' emotions ran the gamut, from nervous happiness at finally knowing what had happened and their loved one had indeed perished, to silent sobbing because it was finally "over." Afterward, we would always adjourn to the identification laboratory where the family would be given some time alone with the remains of their loved one, and the remains would then be prepared for their final journey home. 

I don't have room for all of them in this writing, but I will always remember the stories of those whose recoveries I had visited.

Their names are: Navy Cdr. Lynn Doyle, whose F-8 was shot down in Vietnam in 1965; Marine 2nd Lt. Donald Matocha, who in 1968 was lost in ground combat on Dong Ha Mountain near Khe Sanh in Vietnam and who has been laid to rest; Army Warrant Officer Walter Wrobleski, lost in a UH-1 helicopter crash in Ashau Valley in Vietnam; Air Force Col. Dale Eaton and Capt. Paul Getchell, who went down in their B-57 Canberra in 1969 along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos on a night mission; Navy Lt. John Golz, lost when his A-4 went down in Salavan Province in Laos in 1970; Army Special Forces Sgt. Norman Payne, lost in a night attack in 1968 in Savannakhet Province, Laos.
 
Yes, I will always remember the recoveries I deployed to and the stories of these heroes. These POWs and missing servicemembers prove to all humanity just how good our nation can be at its best. 

On this National POW/MIA Recognition Day, remember them and thank them for their contributions, and remember those still missing. They showed us, through their example, freedom is not free, but it can be maintained. 

Today, all Americans should say: We remember, and we are very grateful.