A Conflict Finally Ends for Family of MIA

Just a few days ago, Aug. 30 to be exact, Col. Merrill R. Lewis Jr. came home in a flag-draped coffin. He had been “missing in action” for more than 23 years since his F-105 fighter-bomber was shot down over North Vietnam and fellow pilots reported that he “possibly ejected.”

As a “quiet time” order hushed the engine noises and the hubbub on the ground at the massive Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif., a C-131 transport lumbered to a stop and the remains of the jet pilot passed between two stiff-backed lines of an honorary color guard and assembled family members.

The much-decorated Air Force officer was certainly not the first casualty to return from the Vietnam War, and he probably will not be the last. The solemn moment was soon erased as the normal activities of the busy base resumed.

To Lewis’ son Merrill, the silent tribute was an awesome ending to a nightmare that had begun when he was 8 years old. Now 31, married and living in San Marcos with his wife and 3-year-old daughter, he can cease his angry attempts to go to the country where his father disappeared July 20, 1966, to try to find a man he scarcely remembered.

“I’m sure now. I’m convinced” that Col. Lewis died when his jet was hit by anti-aircraft fire on a mission over North Vietnam and that he had not been captured, tortured and imprisoned for years.

“I had to be damn sure,” Merrill Lewis said.

The remains of his father, including hip, arm and leg bones as well as a single vertebra--”not enough to fill up a (stereo) speaker box”--did little to convince his son. But the sheaf of Air Force dental records taken during Col. Lewis’ 16 years of service, which show a perfect match with X-rays of the remains, were proof enough.

The skeletal bones mercifully provided another answer to a question the Lewis family had been asking itself for more than two decades. They showed no “pre-mortal” damage. Col. Lewis had died on July 20, 1966, and not after months or years of imprisonment.

At the Travis ceremony, Merrill Lewis said, “my grandmother couldn’t believe that (her son) wouldn’t come walking down out of that plane,” until the flag-draped casket appeared, “and then she cracked up. I guess we all did, and even some of the honor guard did.”

An edge of anger returned to Lewis’ voice as he described the years of frustration, of wondering and not knowing whether his father was alive or dead, and, if dead, when and how.

“I’m the big mouth in the family,” he said. “I wanted to go over there, find out for myself. It was like no one was doing enough about it. But they said that it would do more harm than good.”

While Lewis wrote letters and made phone calls to MIA-POW organizations, to congressmen and to Air Force authorities, inquiring and demanding action, his mother took another road during the long wait.

Just before Col. Lewis’ fatal flight, he had given his wife, Janet, marching orders to leave Japan and go back to the States with the kids, “just in case something like this happened,” she said. And that is what she did, arriving only two days before her husband was reported missing over North Vietnam.

She settled in San Diego, as her husband had advised, setting up housekeeping in University City and putting her son and daughter, Tamara, then 10, in school that fall.

“I never even had a chance to tell him where we were,” Janet Lewis recalled.

“It was hard, and it didn’t get much easier.”

She Kept Pretending

She did not become active in the organizations that developed after the war to keep the plight of the MIAs and POWs in the public spotlight and thus keep the pressure on federal officials to retrieve them or their remains.

She admits she was silent, unable to talk about her missing husband with her two youngsters in the years that followed.

“It was easier for me to raise the kids and to pretend it wasn’t happening,” she said. She remembered saying to herself, “If I do this, I can forget.

“You have to pretend or you just wouldn’t make it. I concentrated in making a home ready for him to walk into.”

Janet Lewis prefers to talk about her husband during their 13 years of marriage after she, a Fullerton girl, met him and married him.

Col. Lewis joined the Air Force in 1950, right out of South High School in Kansas City, Mo. He started at the bottom rung of the military ladder and worked his way up to tech sergeant before he gained his goal, acceptance into Air Force flight training as a cadet.

A Vagabond Life

They were married in Tucson in 1953. After that, they followed the vagabond life of all Air Force families, “moving 26 times in 13 years.”

Her favorite place was Japan, where the family stayed for an unprecedented three years until they came to San Diego while Col. Lewis remained on duty, flying out of Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand.

The colonel took along Roscoe, a big yellow dog, when he went to Korat, flying the dog there in the cockpit of his F-105, against military regulations.

Roscoe got more publicity than her decorated husband, she recalled, conceding that, “There were a lot of good pilots over there,” but only one Roscoe, who became an honorary colonel and a good-luck symbol for the pilots flying out of Korat after Lewis was reported missing.

If Roscoe slept through a briefing session before a mission, the story went, it would be a piece of cake. If the dog was nervous, the pilots believed, the mission would go badly and men would be lost.

Col. Lewis’ daughter Tamara Kolstad now lives in San Diego with her husband. She doesn’t remember too much about her dad, but she remembers Roscoe. Her eyes still spark with anger when she talks about how her dad took Roscoe to Thailand and left her behind.

‘Kids Taunted Us’

The subsequent trip back to the United States from Japan with her mother and brother brought Tamara into what she describes as “culture shock.” From the safe cocoon of an Air Force base school, she was thrust into a San Diego public school, where “the kids taunted us” about their father’s involvement in the unpopular conflict and “even told us that he should have died for what he was doing over there.”

From life on an air base, where everyone’s father was a hero fighting for his country, Tamara and her brother stepped into the turbulent anti-war years of the 1960s in California.

“I’ve grown up since then,” she said, but she did not say that the childhood hurt had not left scars.

In 1979, Congress officially declared Col. Lewis dead and awarded him a Purple Heart to go with a Silver Star and another oak leaf cluster on his Air Medal, both awarded after he was shot down in 1966. That year, the Lewis family moved to San Marcos.

The long-awaited phone call came to Janet Lewis about seven weeks ago.

“They called me at work, the day after I had returned to work (after an illness) and said they thought that they had identified my husband’s remains,” she said.

When the identification had been confirmed to the family’s satisfaction, Janet Lewis confessed to a feeling of relief. One of the hardest parts was the uncertainty, she said. Half of her “selfishly” wanted her husband to have survived and to return, and the other half hoped he had died immediately, doing what he loved most to do, flying, and not being forced to live in a prison camp.

All three of Col. Lewis’ survivors believe that though he did not survive, there are other Americans still living in prison camps somewhere in the jungles of Southeast Asia. POW-MIA organizations estimate that at least 2,400 U.S. prisoners are still there.

On Friday, Col. Lewis’ remains will be interred at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery with full military honors.

A eulogy will be given by the Rev. Tom I. Kolstad, a former Navy chaplain who is pastor of First Assembly of God Church in San Diego and Tamara’s father-in-law. A fly-over in the “missing man” formation is planned by a new generation of Air Force pilots.

Janet Lewis expects about 40 of her husband’s old Air Force buddies to make the journey to attend the 1 p.m. ceremonies, in a section of the cemetery reserved exclusively for servicemen who were missing in action or prisoners of war. The rest of the cemetery near the tip of Point Loma is filled and has been for years. Appropriately, Friday is national POW-MIA Awareness Day.

Tamara Kolstad is impressed that “so many people” would make the journey over the miles and the years to pay their last respects to her father. She thought “they would have forgotten.”

She summed up what she and her family had learned from 23 years of waiting that might help others who are still conducting the silent vigil:

First, speak out. Talk to your friends; talk to the people who can make a difference, to keep the pressure on to get missing American servicemen out of Vietnam. Don’t let anyone forget that they are still there, she said.

And talk to each other. Share with your family, she said, the anger and the fear and the guilt that come from being alive and healthy, but unable to help someone you love.