Ghost of a Chance, but Still They Search

The gathering had said a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. As the first speaker stepped to the podium, there was a tap on my shoulder.

“If I give you my husband’s bracelet,” Marian Shelton whispered, “will you wear it?”

This was a few years ago. It was awkward to hear her words then. Today, it hurts to remember.

If you are familiar with the sad story of the late Marian Shelton, you know she wasn’t offering me a bracelet her husband had worn. She was offering a POW-MIA bracelet, the kind that thousands of Americans still wear as a talisman of their hope that Air Force Col. Charles Shelton and other U.S. servicemen who vanished in the Vietnam War may yet come home alive.

Before this, Marian and I had only met over the telephone. This encounter occurred one summer day at a Ventura County rally of POW-MIA activists on the set of “Tour of Duty,” a short-lived TV war drama. Fifty people, maybe, had gathered in a replica of Tu Do Street in old Saigon’s red light district. In this time warp of make-believe, America still hadn’t lost the war.

Among these activists, Marian was something of a media celebrity, and not only for the tirelessness of her crusade. Her husband, Charles, whose aircraft was shot down over Laos, was and is the only American still officially listed as a POW. Bear in mind that Pentagon authorities say that evidence indicates that Shelton died in captivity. The Reagan Administration had decided that, as other missing men were being reclassified as Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered, one man would remain classified as a POW as a symbol of the nation’s determination to account for the missing.

Col. Shelton thus entered the realm of official mythology. For better or worse, he became a ghostly symbol of a heart-wrenching cause.

Would I like a Col. Shelton bracelet? Sure. Would I wear it? No. To me, it would just be journalistic souvenir. My interest was professional, not personal.

Still, Marian put me on the spot. Between the lines, her question seemed to be: Are you for us or against us? Do you believe or do you not?

My lame response was to show her that I wore no jewelry on my hands and wrists, as if a POW bracelet is just a matter of fashion. “I don’t even wear a watch,” I said.

Marian nodded and said it was OK. Her smile was sweet and non-judgmental.

But I still felt guilty about it.

That’s probably why I’m writing this. Veterans Day got me thinking about Marian and many other relatives of missing servicemen I met during the months I had spent researching the POW-MIA issue. I interviewed dozens of family members and activists and visited the Pentagon and read reams of documents to try to make some sense of this mess. I’ve heard dozens of conspiracy theories of various degrees of credibility.

Today, if you ask me if American servicemen were left behind against their will, all I know is that I’m very glad this isn’t my story anymore. Few issues are so contentious, so charged with emotion. All facts are subject to wildly varying interpretation.

For awhile there, I was getting carried away. Maybe the fact that I’m a Marine brat has something to do with it. There is a kinship among military families. We were “dependents,” not “civilians.”

In any case, it isn’t hard to accept the idea that the Nixon Administration covered up what it knew about the possibility of POWs left behind. Then again, history shows that war has a way of making many victims disappear. Records show that, despite extensive jungle warfare and remote plane crashes, the U.S. military has done a much better job of accounting for the missing in Vietnam than it had in previous wars. Some things can’t be known.

So why should I feel guilty about Marian Shelton?

Well, we met while I was researching a story about a quixotic POW-hunter named Jack Bailey, a Vietnam veteran who seemed to embody the good, bad and ugly of the cause. Although I was convinced of Jack’s sincerity, there was no getting around the fact that he’d put false information in fund-raising letters that helped him raise more than $3 million. Government officials and fellow activists regarded him as an opportunist. For Jack, bringing home a live American had become a matter of redemption.

As I was struggling with the Bailey story, I belatedly heard the sad news about Marian Shelton--that one night in October, 1990, she had climbed into the terraced garden behind her San Diego home, put a handgun to her head and pulled the trigger.

Her husband had disappeared 25 years earlier. When Marian’s body was found, she was wearing her St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

Marian deserved a Requiem. Subsequently, I interviewed several of her children, who wanted the world to know more about their mother and her singular struggle. I never forced myself to put Bailey aside and write the story. Then it seemed like “old news.”

I never delivered, but others did. Marian Shelton’s sad tale received wide attention; CBS included it in a documentary on the POW-MIA issue. Special arrangements were made to allow her to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. She was, in her way, a veteran.

Marian, as it happened, didn’t live to see how the POW-MIA attention once again grabbed the public’s fancy in the summer of 1991, when some intriguing photos surfaced purporting to show missing U.S. servicemen.

You may recall the photos supposedly showed Air Force Col. John Leighton Robertson, Air Force Maj. Albro Lundy Jr. and Navy Lt. Cmdr. Larry James Stevens. The excitement over that photo prompted Jack Bailey to go public with a pair of photos he’d shown me earlier. One was a wedding photo of a young soldier named Donald Carr. The other, Bailey claimed, was Carr as a middle-aged man, living in Laos. The resemblance was stunning.

As it turned out, Pentagon authorities later established that the photo of the three men was actually a doctored copy of a photo of three Soviet farmers that appeared in a magazine called Soviet Life Today. And Bailey’s discovery, alas, turned out to be a picture of a German national who was later arrested for smuggling exotic birds.

But the questions linger. Recently I chatted with Albro Lundy III of Culver City and Deborah Robertson Bardsley of Chatsworth.

The government may be bent on debunking evidence and “closing cases,” they say, but the families aren’t giving up. Albro’s younger brother has a job that enables him to travel frequently in Laos, where he researches his father’s disappearance. Deborah has traveled to Vietnam and Moscow in search of answers about her father’s fate.

Why does she do it?

“It boils down to what I’m trying to teach my children about life,” Deborah said. “If something is happening and you think it’s wrong, you have to stand up and try to change it. Otherwise, it won’t have a hope of ever changing.

“I hope people won’t look at me and think I’m possessed. I hope they look at me and think there’s somebody who’s trying to make a difference in the world.”