Until They Are Home: Bringing Back the MIAs from Vietnam, a Personal Memoir

3. La Rue Sans Joie

 CLOSING OUT THE SEVENTY-FOURTH joint field activity, I gained my first true sense of the mature patience required not only to conduct the actual field science of an MIA recovery but also to endure the glacial pace of the very deliberate process of identification and family notification. Captain Shawn “Zeke” Zukowsky and Dr. “Hoss” Moore gave me a final overview of their work on case 0248, a very successful recovery. In this case the remains of USAF Major James L. Carter of Pasadena, California, Sergeant Edward M. Parsley from Naugatuck, West Virginia, and Sergeant Therman M. Waller from Wynne, Arkansas, were recovered from a crash site in Quang Tri province near Dong Ha. Major Carter and crew in a C-123 Provider of the 311th Cargo Squadron were flying a three-leg supply mission, Da Nang–Khe Sanh–Dong Ha, on February 3, 1966, when the aircraft inexplicably crashed into a mountain . Twenty-five search-and-rescue missions looked for the aircraft without success, while local villagers buried the crew’s remains. Between 2000 and 2004 JTF-FA conducted five recovery operations. Neither Zeke, Hoss, the recovery crew, nor I had any way to know the outcome at that time, but the identification was completed by CIL nine months later, in June 2004, and the families were notified, and the remains buried almost twenty months later, in June 2005. Carter and Parsley were buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and Waller was interred in the Missouri Veterans Cemetery in Bloomfield, Missouri . I learned very quickly that I needed to be ever mindful of the long view. With Mr. Thinh driving, Buddy and I went to the Da Nang Airport to load a commercial charter with the eighty recovery team members, who Chapter 3 LA RUE SANS JOIE LA RUE SANS JOIE  were on their way back to Hawaii, where they would stay until the next joint field activity. Then the giant U.S. Air Force C-17 lumbered in to take away their equipment. We loaded all of the team gear while watching a half-dozen Vietnamese Mig fighter jets take off and spin upward in a roar, putting on quite an air show to impress their American counterparts. The only time I ever saw the Migs flying in Da Nang was when a U.S. Air Force plane was on the tarmac. Loading completed, Buddy and I watched the C-17 roll halfway down the runway when cockpit computer bells and whistles apparently went off, announcing that this was not a very good time to fly. God bless the pilot, he tried to take off twice, meaning he could spend the night in Thailand if he could get airborne; he certainly gave it his best effort. The result was my very own attached C-17 crew at the Furama Resort at China Beach, along with a giant, nonflyable U.S. aircraft full of very sensitive navigation and communication gear that we could never let anybody else see. Fortunately, these birds carried two Ravens—USAF special security types—who spent the next few days in the plane on the Da Nang runway, while the pilots and crew lounged in the swimming pool, except those at China Beach. They were nice folks, but they were reservists. Also at this time I had to close out the extended site, so I needed to leave the next morning for Vung Tau, down near the Mekong Delta and in the middle of a mangrove swamp. Because of this, I collected our part-time brethren and gave them a detailed in-brief about hazards for the unwary in Vietnam, hoping to scare them enough so they would not venture beyond the hotel compound. Teams unloading their gear at Da Nang Airport.  Chapter 3 That afternoon, with faithful Thinh at the wheel, Buddy and I headed north up Route 1 to Hai Van Pass and back. Route 1, the legendary road from Saigon, runs nearly a thousand coastal miles to Hanoi and is the centerpiece of Bernard Fall’s book Street without Joy, or La rue sans joie, as the French soldiers called it. Hai Van Pass is a chokepoint dividing Vietnam, equally famous for its remarkable beauty and its old French fortifications. We enjoyed the vista stretching all the way to China Beach and Monkey Mountain and explored every inch of the overgrown French fort...