After more than five decades, remains of an MIA pilot come home to San Diego

Two U.S. Navy planes came in fast over a bridge in Dong Phong Thuong, North Vietnam. It was June 1965.

Cloud cover forced them to descend. The enemy was waiting.

Heavy ground fire erupted and the plane of Lt. Cmdr. Frederick Crosby was on fire as it plummeted toward a fish pond.

A 31-year-old father of four, Crosby was listed as killed in action, although his body was not found.

Deborah Crosby, 6 years old at the time, said she has always felt the void — especially each Memorial Day, when people mourn at the graves of the fallen.

“It wasn’t something we talked about,” she said recently. “My dad’s plane was shot down, and that’s the end of the story. … That always hurt me.”

On Friday, Frederick Crosby’s remains finally came home to San Diego. The decorated pilot will be buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery on Sunday, near the Point Loma house where his children grew up.

His headstone will read “He is home.”

On the back of it, the name of his widow, Mary, will be etched. She died in 2002.

In 1973, nearly 600 American prisoners of war returned from Vietnam in airlifts called Operation Homecoming. Deborah Crosby remembers looking at the list of names.

Her father’s wasn’t on it.

And the antiwar sentiment in the country at that time, Crosby said, was one reason that her family didn’t push for answers.

It wasn’t until decades later, at her paternal grandmother’s urging, that Crosby started inquiring about her father’s remains.

She contacted the Library of Congress for the declassified files on her father’s mission and learned where the Navy thought the RF-8A went down.

Crosby also learned that after relations between the U.S. and Vietnamese governments began to normalize, the Pentagon’s recovery branch had conducted investigations and interviews as early as 1993 in search of her father’s remains.

Vietnam villagers said the aircraft had crashed in a different spot than Navy records indicated. Investigators found an 89-year-old who had witnessed the plane going down.

The man said he was close enough to be splashed with mud upon impact. He even had a piece of the RF-8A’s broken glass in his home.

But it wasn’t until the fall of 2015, armed with a mitochondrial DNA sample Crosby got from her father’s sister, that a Defense Department team excavated the fish pond, emptying it and using buckets to sift through the mud.

After five decades, they were still there: Frederick Crosby’s wedding ring, his lighter, pieces of his uniform and some bone fragments.

Three days before Memorial Day last year, his daughter got the call.

At a defense lab in Hawaii, the DNA was a match.

“My heart is so much lighter,” Deborah Crosby said recently. “I feel a tremendous amount of relief that he’s been returned.”

More than 1,600 Americans who served in the Vietnam War are still missing or unaccounted for. Pilots and Navy and Air Force air crews make up a large portion of that population.

“The vast majority of these men were lost in very traumatic incidents — shot out of the sky at high rates of speed. And then, being exposed to the elements in a tropical environment for going on 50 years now,” said Michael Allen, a professor of modern U.S. history at Northwestern University.

“In most cases there are very, very little remains left to recover. Absent DNA, you are essentially making a circumstantial case,” he said.

The Defense Department long has spent more than $100 million a year on recovery efforts for its missing troops. In 2016, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency had a $115-million budget and more than 600 employees.

Lt. Cmdr. Frederick Crosby and the men he flew with knew they faced losses.

It was 1965, the early part of the air war in Vietnam, called Operation Rolling Thunder.

“That’s where you see some of the most intense air-to-air combat of the war,” said Hill Goodspeed, historian at the National Naval Aviation Museum.

Crosby was deployed on the Bon Homme Richard, an aircraft carrier operating off the coast of Vietnam. His mission by its very design was dangerous.

His unarmed reconnaissance plane had to fly low enough for its cameras to capture evidence of damage caused by bombs dropped from other U.S. planes. The RF-8A pilots had speed on their side, but timing was against them.

“They were coming in low and fast on an enemy who is already spun up because he’s already been attacked,” said Karl Zingheim, historian at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego. “They were bearing the full brunt of the attack so they could bring the intelligence to bring back to the carrier.”

The North Vietnamese were prepared with their ground fire.

There was no gravestone at a national cemetery for Frederick Crosby. No military honors. Mary Crosby accepted her husband’s posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross medal with little fanfare.

Now that will be partially rectified.

“It means a lot to my family for my dad to get the military honors that he deserves. He’s truly an American hero,” Deborah Crosby said.

“And it’s just so wonderful that he’s going to be home, at last.”

jen.steele@sduniontribune.com

Steele writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune