ARLINGTON, Va. - Nearly 50 years after a military crew disappeared while fighting in the Vietnam War, a funeral service was held for them at Arlington National Cemetery.
Army Staff Sgt. Lawrence Woods and an Air Force and Army crew were on a plane that was shot down over Vietnam on Oct. 24, 1964, during a resupply mission.
Capt. Valmore Bourque, 1st Lt. Edward Krukowiski, 1st Lt. Robert Armstrong, Staff Sgt. Ernest Halvorson, Staff Sgt. Theodore Phillips, Airman 1st Class Eugene Richardson and Pfc. Charles Sparks were killed, and their remains were recovered by U.S. forces in 1964, according to the Defense Department. But Woods remained missing.
“We know that he was part of the crew that crashed,” said Lt. Col. Melinda Morgan, spokesman for the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, “but his individual remains were never identified.”
On Friday, dozens of relatives of the eight servicemen attended the burial at Arlington, where their fallen kin were given an “active-duty funeral,” said Melissa Bohan, a spokesman for Arlington National Cemetery. Three rifle volleys were fired to honor the men.
In December 2009 and January 2010, a joint team from the United States and Vietnam excavated the site where the plane most likely crashed. They uncovered human remains but were unable to identify them.
“Therefore today, they were all buried in this one ceremony to include Woods,” Morgan said. The remains were buried in a single coffin.
Woods’ children, Steven Woods and Lisa Szymanski, and other soldiers’ relatives accepted a folded American flag while an Air Force band played. Steven Woods clutched a framed picture of his father during the service.
“What drives all people crazy is the uncertainty,” said Ann Mills-Griffiths, chairman of the National League of POW/MIA Families, an advocacy group. Her brother, Navy Cmdr. James Mills, also disappeared during the Vietnam War, in 1966. “Thedevastation becomes an internal debate of when and where you give up.”
The POW/Missing Personnel Office usually identifies 60 to 80 missing veterans in a year.
But Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last month called for a complete review of the department’s operations, “to maximize the number of identifications, improve transparency for families, reduce duplicative functions and establish a system for centralized, complete, fully accessible personnel case files for missing personnel,” Hagel said in a statement.
Mills-Griffiths met with Hagel in December to detail her concerns about the department.
“It’s dysfunctional,” she said. “The Defense POW/ Missing Personnel Office has had successive directors that focus more on micromanaging operations than providing policy guidance to the governmental community.”
Hagel’s review is expected to be completed in April.
For now, there are still 1,642 Vietnam War veterans unaccounted for.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 03/22/2014