For MIA’s Family, a Slow, Hard Truth

An answering machine message from my mother on St. Patrick’s Day told me the Pentagon had officially confirmed my father’s death, 33 years after he was shot down over Vietnam.

A tooth and a few bone fragments brought to a close a lifetime of searching and the efforts of hundreds of people chronicled in a file cabinet full of government reports. I was 10 months old when my father died. He was 29.

St. Patrick’s Day was a serendipitous occasion to make the identification public, a family friend noted. It was on St. Patrick’s Day in 1957 that Patricia Gavin was introduced to John Bailey. Everyone called him Jack.

Although I was barely 5 months old when he left early in 1966, holidays always bring him to mind. They always will.

As a reporter, I am often asked to distill lives into terse passages. The facts here are simple: The remains of Air Force fighter pilot Maj. John Edward Bailey, a Minnesota native, were identified from anthropological analysis and other evidence. This leaves 2,069 Americans unaccounted for from the war, which took 58,000 U.S. lives from the 1950s to 1975.

We knew it was coming. At every step of the investigation, the government’s joint task force for accounting notified my mother by phone and followed up with a letter. She would relay the information to my sister, Molly, my brother, John, and me.

The latest report was based on the recovery of a tooth and small bones from a crater in the former North Vietnam, apparently carved by his F-105 jet in May 1966. The excavation also yielded possible pieces of a flight helmet, a parachute harness ring and a zipper pull tab.

The first reports arrived within days of his crash. One of the other two pilots on the mission reported that Jack’s plane lurched to the right, he jettisoned pylons and a belly tank, and his F-105 tumbled nose-over-tail and slammed into the ground.

The canopy appeared to be intact and the pilot heard no tone in his headset, which indicated Jack had not ejected.

He was listed as missing in action, though there was little doubt that he had been killed. That whisper of a doubt disappeared after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, when he was not among the prisoners of war returned to the United States.

In July 1973, Mom held a memorial service. One member of an honor guard handed her a neatly folded American flag. Another sounded taps. At age 7, I did not understand why.

A white headstone was placed in a new, narrowly spaced section at Ft. Snelling National Cemetery near Minneapolis to honor those whose remains had yet to be recovered.

Every Memorial Day, we walked through the cemetery. Mom carried two sets of flowers, one for my father and one for his older brother Bill, who died in an Air Force training accident in 1957. For a while, Jack’s marker was easy to find, but that small section has grown quite large over the years.

From time to time, someone claimed to have his remains, or information leading to them. Sometimes they offered military ID cards or vaccination certificates as proof, and the military dutifully turned over the information and its analysis of its veracity. It was clear people were doing the best they could to salve the pain, but there was little anyone could do.

While a college student, I made a tracing of my father’s name at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and attended a POW/MIA family gathering. At the White House, President Reagan read a speech and a squad of jet fighters flew over in a missing-man formation.

Several times friends brought back tracings of his name from “the wall” as well. Those pencil outlines provided more comfort than any words could.

Later, as U.S.-Vietnam relations began to thaw, more reports trickled in.

In 1990, a joint U.S.-Vietnam field team interviewed residents in an area north of the former DMZ, following up reports of a downed F-4 jet fighter. Residents steered them to a site they said involved an F-105 instead.

The crater, now a pond about eight yards across and several feet deep, had no visible wreckage, but the team decided the site might “correlate” to my dad because his F-105 was the only one thought to have crashed in that vicinity.

In 1994, the joint task force recommended excavating the pond. I knew then that I had to see not only the site where my father may have died but also Vietnam, the country.

In October 1995, a guide from Vietnam’s MIA office and a Quang Binh Province official took me to the site. We walked from a small cluster of houses under a stand of trees along a dirt path to a berm that separated small rice fields.

I asked my escorts for a few minutes alone at the site to collect my thoughts. I also wanted to say a prayer for my father and the others who had died in that killing ground, though I kept that to myself.

Had I not known already that a jet had carved out the crater, I would not have made a connection. A cow stood off to one side munching grass, and the mild heat fogged my glasses. I looked out over the pond and across the valley to distant mountains, trying to imagine the place three decades before.

I couldn’t then, and I can’t now.

I never knew him and no ream of reports or crash site visit can bring him back. Nor can a photograph of him grimacing and pointing to bullet holes in his jet fuselage.

The empty space cannot be filled by other people, nor should it be, although many people have comforted us over the years and continue to do so.

Within days of the Pentagon’s March 17 statement, my mother received a package. It was a POW/MIA bracelet with my father’s name on it. There was also a short letter from the man who had worn it through high school, saying he had kept it in a drawer should the occasion ever arise to deliver it.

As my family decides how to honor my father’s remains, I consider what keeps him alive for me. It is hearing about his close-knit friendships and his love of flying. It is listening to a recording of his voice, which reminds me so much of his younger brother, with speech patterns we all share.

An unofficial squadron historian at Korat Air Base in Thailand, my father used a company tape recorder to send a message home in April 1966. He talked much as other servicemen have, before and since, of missing his family, wanting to be home, and vaguely of the chance he might not make it back.

“I imagine being a mama and a papa to three kids is a real handful,” he told my mother. “I don’t know if I would want to try it or not, know what I mean?”