Hope Kept Alive for Pilot Missing 22 Years in Vietnam

Barbie Robertson held a large photo of a young Air Force fighter pilot.

Seated in her quiet living room in Tustin, Robertson looked at the photo as she reflected on recent news reports that U.S. technical experts had ended 10 days of investigation in Vietnam without finding any live U.S. MIAs--servicemen missing in action from the Vietnam War era.

Robertson said Monday that it is just one more disappointment. But it does not prove one way or another that her MIA husband is not alive, she said.

“We know there are American men over there who are still alive,” she insisted. “Forget about bringing back bones. There are men over there who are still alive. Our country can’t close the door on that war until all those men are accounted for. Where are those servicemen who are still alive?”

Youthful in Photo

A film of tears in her eyes, Robertson motioned to the picture of the young fighter pilot.

“This is how my husband, Johnny, looked,” she said in a steady voice. “I still dream about his coming home. I see him walking in. I see where the oxygen mask pressed down on his face after flying all day. In the dream, I have the pitcher of martinis waiting just as we did in those days when he was 35, and I was the perfect Air Force wife waiting at home. Oh, God, it would be so wonderful if he were to walk in. It would be so wonderful for him to see how grand the children turned out, how they grew up. . . .”

For 22 years now, Robertson said, she has lived with the possibility that her husband, Air Force Col. John L. Robertson, would someday walk back into her life.

“Johnny was shot down over North Vietnam, 27 miles northeast of Hanoi, on Sept. 16, 1966,” she said. “The other pilot in the F-4 with him survived and was taken prisoner.”

Barbie Robertson said there are many indications that her husband also survived. For many years, John Robertson was listed as missing in action. But in the mid-1970s, she said, the Air Force officially “declared all of the ones still missing as dead.”

His body has never been found. He is one of 2,383 Americans listed as missing in Southeast Asia--13 years after the last U.S. troops left Vietnam.

Last week, the U.S. State and Defense departments, in one of the last acts of the outgoing Reagan Administration, issued a 22-page report saying that no evidence has been found to indicate that North Vietnam held any American prisoners after 1973.

But the report also acknowledged that it may be impossible to ever account for many of the MIAs. “Because of . . . discrepancies and the lack of knowledge about many cases, the Reagan Administration has concluded that we must operate under the assumption that at least some of the missing could have survived . . . ,” the report said.

Robertson said emphatically that she does not believe the United States has done all it could to locate the missing servicemen, including her husband. And while she considers herself “still a loyal service wife,” she said she no longer trusts the government.

The U.S. government has not been open or sympathetic about the MIA situation, she said.

“There is still concern about American hostages in the Middle East, and I agree there should be,” she said. “But what about our men in Vietnam? The men who are still alive over there are hostages, also.”

She Has Her Reasons

Robertson said she does not believe that the latest mission of U.S. experts to Vietnam has closed the book on MIAs.

“There are many reasons why Americans are being held over there (Vietnam),” Robertson suggested. “For one thing, Vietnam may be using them as negotiating chips, maybe for repatriation money. Then there is all the technical equipment that our government abandoned when it left Vietnam. Vietnam had no one to repair it. There are reports that some Americans have been seen having to work on that equipment over there.”

Robertson said that governmental pride on both sides also may figure into the mystery of the MIAs.

“Our government has said they are all dead. Does it want to admit now that it was wrong and that it abandoned all those men over there? Could it ever get men to fight again when it was proved that it had abandoned so many men for so long?

“And as for Vietnam,” she continued, “ . . . Vietnam has said there are no more men alive. Would it want to lose face and admit that this is not true?”

So Barbie Robertson, her children and her grandchildren still ponder the fate of John Robertson.

Her husband’s co-pilot was freed 7 years after their aircraft was shot down. But Robertson said the man, who now is living somewhere in New England, told her that he had no idea what became of John Robertson.

“He is still such a big part of our family,” she said of her missing husband. “When we get together, we always talk about him.”

Children Are Grown

The children are now grown, she noted. Deborah is 33, married with two children and lives in Los Angeles; Barney is 32, married with one daughter and lives in Canyon Lake, and Stacey, 30, is married with one daughter and lives in Denver. The youngest, Shelby, 25, is married and living in Ojai.

“Shelby was only 3 when her father was shot down,” Robertson said.

Barbie Robertson grew up and met her future husband in the Seattle area, where she was living when his plane was shot down in 1966. She moved to Orange County 17 years ago, she said, because “everything up there in Washington reminded me of Johnny.”

“We had known each other since our freshman year at the University of Washington. So I came down here to the sun. I started using lipstick again and trying to live.”

But she never remarried, despite the Air Force’s declaration that Robertson could be presumed dead. “Where would I ever find someone like that fighter pilot again?” she asked. “There was the man who could laugh and dance all night, the man who did cartwheels when he finally got his orders to Vietnam, even though he was 35 then and really didn’t have to go.

Still Hopeful

“Where would I find a man like that?”

Then, too, she cannot escape her belief that even after 22 years, Johnny Robertson might still be somewhere in Southeast Asia.

“If anyone could survive, he could,” Robertson said. “He was mentally extremely tough; a brilliant man with great powers of concentration. And he could eat anything; if had to survive on bugs, he could do it. He had great strengths of survival, plus he was so crazy about his kids and his wife. . . .

“But do I want him to have sat over there for 22 years, thinking his country has abandoned him?” she asked. “I don’t think I could wish that on anyone.”