A Stubborn, Cruel Hope Is Their Legacy of War

Richard R. Rich hasn’t spoken to his father in 33 years. But in a couple months, if all goes well, the son will reopen the conversation with a single word--goodbye.

Rich’s father is U.S. Navy Cmdr. Richard Rich, whose F-4B Phantom was shot down 20 miles southwest of Hanoi on May 19, 1967. The aircraft’s radarman ejected and was captured, raising hopes that Rich had survived the crash as well. But Rich’s father was never heard from, and the Navy classified him as missing in action.

“You couldn’t grieve because you weren’t sure if he was dead or not. And even if you knew he was dead, there was no body to grieve over,” said Rich of Woodland Hills, who was 12 when he last saw his father. “The ambiguity is overwhelming.”

Now, finally, Rich has a chance to achieve clarity. In March, with U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen looking on, search crews excavated two thumb-sized pieces of bone and five bags of aircraft fragments from his father’s crash site.

If DNA tests and crash site evidence are positive, Rich will be strangely grateful. Grateful to know. Grateful, at last, to say one final thing to his father at his funeral.

“It will be a profound relief to get some level of closure after all this time,” Rich said. “But [then again] how do you do 30 years’ worth of grieving?”

If there is no resolution, Rich will return to the emotional purgatory inhabited by the children of America’s 2,029 MIAs from Vietnam. Now in their 30s and 40s and numbering in the thousands, these adult children are left with scant clues and few hopes to wonder about the ultimate fate of their fathers.

“I know he’s probably dead,” said Sheri Randle, a San Diego resident who was 6 in 1968 when her father’s plane crashed in Laos and he was listed as MIA. “But there’s a slight possibility he might not be. At this point, I just want to know.”

If Randle never gets her answer, it will hurt, of course, but it won’t ruin her. If nothing else, children of MIAs are seasoned veterans of living with profound uncertainty.

From the moment their fathers vanished, they’ve had to manage torrents of conflicting messages and emotions. The news always seemed to excite their two most vulnerable fantasies--that their fathers were alive or that their remains have been found.

At home, they frequently saw their mothers refuse to marry or even to date. Family discussions rarely mentioned their father’s absence.

They heard stories about the Vietnamese releasing French POWs 25 years after their capture in Indochina. They heard stories about a Chinese mortician who defected to the U.S. and claimed to have seen the remains of hundreds of American POWs in a Hanoi morgue. They saw photographs (declared hoaxes by the U.S. military) of American MIAs imprisoned, but alive, in Southeast Asia.

But during the Carter administration there was a government declaration that all Vietnam MIAs were reclassified as KIA-BNR (killed in action--body not recovered.) Their fathers’ names were carved into the black marble of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. (A diamond mark was placed next to the name of each MIA.)

And, most damning, there was simply the passage of time. Realistically, how many years could their fathers survive in Southeast Asia?

“Every day it’s different how you feel,” Randle said. “Sometimes, you hope he’s alive. Other times, you feel there’s no way. He’d have to be living in captivity. If he was, what kind of man would he be now? What would his life have been like?”

To resolve what is often the central conflict of their lives, a few children of MIAs have made the arduous trek to Southeast Asia. They go searching for the last known traces of their fathers and to share a certain experience. They go, too, to be as close to their fathers as they may ever be in their adult lives.

“It was eerie even being 100 miles away from where his plane went down [near the Thai-Laos border],” said Michael Clark, who was 14 when his father went missing. “It was very emotional. It helped me confront things more and helped me accept that even though I was a man, I had to be able to cry and let these emotions out.”

‘Soldiers’ Who Won’t Abandon Their Fathers

Of all the journeys undertaken by the children of MIAs, the hardest by far is the one to a father’s funeral. Short of a father appearing or irrefutable identification of remains, some children may never make that trip. And many end up living for memories instead of themselves.

One of the main reasons, according to Hamilton McCubbin, who has studied MIA families since the 1970s for the U.S. Department of Defense, is found in their military upbringing.

In their childhoods they were imbued with a heightened sense of duty and honor and, though their fathers may not have been present in body over the years, they were there in spirit.

A cardinal rule of the military is never leave your men behind. Whether physically or psychologically, the children of MIAs can become soldiers who refuse to abandon the commanders, their fathers.

“What if they held a funeral and years or months later their father showed up?” McCubbin asked. “The sense of guilt and betrayal would be overwhelming.”

Most children of MIAs weren’t teenagers yet when somber men in uniforms showed up at their homes.

“It was Christmas Eve, and a full-bird colonel was at our front door,” remembers Albro Lundy III, who was 10 in 1970 when his father was listed as MIA. “My mother didn’t have to say anything. When your Dad is in Vietnam, you knew what the visit was for.”

Like the Lundys, some MIA families held memorial services--not funerals--for their missing relative. The services, usually military in tone and setting, lacked the more concrete symbols of finality and farewell associated with funerals and rarely eased their grief.

“It was surreal,” said Lundy, whose father parachuted from his downed plane but was never found. “He’d been gone for a year, and it wasn’t like he was dead. In the Catholic Church, an open casket is an important part of saying goodbye, and we didn’t have that.”

Rich recalled his father’s memorial service at a Southern California military base in a similar light.

“As far as healing goes, it was completely ineffective,” said Rich, who develops entertainment real estate projects around the country. “The people there didn’t know my father, and it just didn’t touch the pain. It didn’t get to the point, and I just didn’t believe it.”

While the services rarely registered as a true farewell to a parent, they often marked the end of a childhood, especially for an eldest son.

“I had adults tell me that day that ‘You’re the man, now. You’ve got to take care of your mom and your brothers and sisters.’ That was a lot for a 10-year-old boy,” said Lundy, the oldest of six and now an attorney in Hermosa Beach.

For other eldest sons, an MIA designation immediately exhumed a grim talk they’d had before their fathers went off to war. Clark remembers his father--Air Force pilot Col. Stanley S. Clark--quietly taking him aside one day.

“He said, ‘Michael, if anything happens--but nothing will happen--but if it does, I want you to remember to take care of my two favorite women [Michael’s mother and sister]. It will be all up to you.’ I still carry that with me,” said Clark, 45, whose doctoral thesis explores the grief suffered by children of MIAs.

Often the children of MIAs had to plan a future without their fathers and cope with the cruelty of classmates. If you didn’t have a father, you were teased. If the reason you didn’t have a father was that he disappeared in an unpopular and losing war effort, you might be spit at or hear the epithet “baby killer.”

“I got into a lot of fights,” said Chris Rich, the youngest of three sons in the Rich family. “Sometimes, I just used to tell people my dad was on a secret mission.”

Fantasies That Dad Would Suddenly Appear

The children of MIAs recall watching friends and their fathers with envy. They longed to do things that those lucky children seemed to take for granted. Playing catch. Going camping. Learning to drive.

Instead, they felt left on the sidelines, where they fantasized about fathers miraculously reappearing on their front doorsteps in the same mysterious way they had vanished years ago.

Of course, if a father did come home, what would he be like? The only answers came from photographs, scant memories, family recollections and imagination.

“I know I still have unrealistic hero worship of him even today,” Richard R. Rich said. “In photos, he looks like a tall Tom Cruise in ‘Top Gun.’ He’s dashing and handsome, but really, I don’t have a tremendous number of memories of him.”

A father’s uncertain status, particularly during the turbulent high school years, gave many children of MIAs a maturity beyond their years.

“I remember telling my friends that were fighting with their fathers that they should be thankful they have a father in their life,” said Randle, who manages a trucking company in San Diego.

To outsiders, the notion that American MIAs could be alive borders on the absurd. Either old age--many MIAs would be in their 60s and 70s--or the jungles of Southeast Asia certainly would have claimed them by now.

While some families hold on to thin beliefs that some MIAs are being held by the Vietnamese or Russians, the governments of those two nations, now friendly with the United States, maintain there are no prisoners still held from the Vietnam War.

The United States spends $100 million a year searching for MIAs from all recent conflicts, an effort handled by a military agency called the Joint Task Force Full Accounting. Between earlier efforts and those of the task force, officials have found the remains of 554 Vietnam MIAs since 1973.

“We have an absolute, sacred obligation to do whatever we can to look for our missing in action,” Cohen told reporters at Rich’s crash site last month. “We will do that and not fail.”

The number of Americans missing from the Vietnam War is small compared with those in other wars. There are some 8,000 MIAs from the Korean War and 78,000 from World War II.

Figures for America’s MIAs also pale in comparison with Vietnam’s. That country, however, has no plans to search for an estimated 300,000 North Vietnamese and 150,000 South Vietnamese soldiers still listed as missing in their homeland.

Some applaud the U.S. effort to recover MIAs as noble, if unrealistic.

“The nature of war is you don’t get a full accounting,” said James R. Reckner, director of the Center for the Study of the Vietnam Conflict at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. “That’s part of the tragedy of war.”

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Martin Miller can be reached at martin.miller@latimes.com.