Army Listed Dead Captain as MIA After Losing Body

A woman whose soldier husband was killed in the Tet offensive 20 years ago last month said she has learned that the Army misplaced his body for two weeks at a time when she was told he was missing in action.

Brenda Reed Sutton, who has been researching a book looking at the Vietnam War from a widow’s viewpoint, expressed outrage and disbelief recently at her latest information from a chaplain in her husband’s unit.

“If they’d told me the truth, my family and I would have been able to put this to bed a long time ago,” she said.

She said she was not told that her husband had been killed until two weeks after the Army told her he was missing in action. She continued to write him letters, sometimes as often as three times a day, during that period.

Couldn’t See Body

It was a month before his body was returned home. She was never allowed to see the body, she said.

The latest information came from Paul Hinsky, the chaplain with Capt. James (Eddie) Reed’s company in the Mekong Delta. After reading a February Associated Press story about Sutton’s efforts to learn the hazy circumstances behind her husband’s death, Hinsky and several of Reed’s fellow soldiers got in touch with her.

Hinsky, who lives in Plainville, Mass., said he was the first person to reach her husband after the attack atop an old French stronghold called Ft. Courage 20 miles south of the former capital of South Vietnam.

The chaplain assured her that Reed “never knew what hit him” and confirmed what she heard last summer from several enlisted men: A young American soldier who believed his short mortar round killed Reed and three other officers went berserk that night and had to be shipped out.

‘A Touching Moment’

Hearing from the chaplain, Sutton said, was “quite a touching moment. I’d always wondered who was the first person there. Then, 20 years to the day later, I hear from this warm and caring chaplain who tells me Eddie was a tremendous person and says, ‘Your husband never suffered.’ ”

He also told Sutton, she said, that “the Army screwed up. They lost his body.”

“I can’t imagine how they could have misplaced his body” and then delayed telling her he was dead, she said.

She continues to be stymied, she said, in her efforts to secure a copy of a reported full investigation into the fatal events of 20 years ago.

Although Sutton said she is still angry

over the Army’s handling of the case, she said she is happy at having achieved so much in her attempt to reconcile herself to the death of her husband, her high school sweetheart in Kingsport, Tenn.

One soldier, she said, told her last month that Eddie was “the best officer in Vietnam.”

“It warms my heart to know how much the men cared about him,” she said. “Now I know that they felt pain at losing him too.”

Her two children, including a 23-year-old son who joined her on an emotional trip to Vietnam last fall, are thrilled with the news that their father was mourned by his soldiers, she said.

Several publishers, Sutton said, have expressed interest in her manuscript, tentatively titled “Silent Partner: A Vietnam Widow’s Story.”