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(from biography of Francis J. McGouldrick, Jr. at POWNET) Sunday, January 4, 1998 LOVED ONES STILL SEEK ANSWERS FAMILIES OF MIAS QUESTION GOVERNMENT'S RESOLVE ON ISSUE Ann Fisher, Dispatch Staff Reporter A new year of hope and labor to learn the whereabouts of her father awaits Mitch McGouldrick Guess. Nearly 30 years ago, Air Force Col. Francis McGouldrick Jr. was lost in a midair collision over Laos during the Vietnam War. A few years later, Guess, then 12, bought her first MIA bracelet and began in earnest a search that has spanned the balance of her life. She gladly would search another 30 years, the 40-year-old Guess said. So it hurt when she read a recent newspaper report that interest in MIAs in Vietnam has waned in Washington's political and diplomatic circles. "My husband was reading the paper on Sunday, and he looked at me and said, 'Oh boy, I don't think you're going to want to read this,'" said Guess, of Dublin. Of course, she read it. "It was like a knife in my heart. I thought, it's been 29 years of what? All of this waiting and waiting, and then they tell us we're done," she said. Mike Sasek, a spokesman for the Pentagon MIA/POW department, disputed the news reports. "The search continues at the same pace that it has been," said Sasek, of the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Affairs Office, adding that the government devotes about $100 million a year to the effort. As many as 135 are employed in the Washington office, and another 170 work in the Hawaii-based Joint Task Force Accounting field office. The fate of 2,099 Americans involved in the Vietnam War is unknown, Sasek said. Of those, 113 are from Ohio. About 8,000 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Korean War, and 78,000 are unaccounted for from World War II. "It's a very large, very important priority and a very dedicated group of people," Sasek said. John Wheeler of Reynoldsburg said the money and the personnel of which Sasek spoke are part of an elaborate public relations front. Wheeler has followed the government's progress for years, since his brother, Marine Corps pilot Eugene Wheeler, was declared missing in action in Vietnam on April 21, 1970. "The monies they say they've spent to obtain data is misleading. That money has been spent on PR and people who sit in Washington, just to have the families of MIAs appeased as best they can without obtaining information," said Wheeler, 59. Reaction to the newspaper report runs a gamut of emotions among some families of service personnel still missing in action and among those whose loved ones' remains have been found since the Vietnam War ended in 1975. "I have two feelings," said Patricia Zook, 65, of West Liberty in Logan County. "I think a lot of the families are going to be very distressed because it's their loved one." "I also agree that it's been long enough. Our loved ones, as far as I'm concerned, are in heaven, and they're taken care of." Zook, a retired schoolteacher, has her own stake in the issue. On Oct. 4, 1967, contact with Air Force Maj. David H. Zook Jr., 37, was lost when the small, unarmed plane he was flying north of Saigon to drop leaflets collided with a larger U.S. plane. The Air Force eventually promoted him to colonel, and, in 1978, declared him "presumed dead." Two years ago, Mrs. Zook learned the Air Force thought it might have her husband's remains. They're still not sure, however, she said. The government spends about $47,640 per Vietnam MIA every year in its attempt to find them. Liz Flick said it's been worth the effort. Reports that politicians are losing interest in the fate of MIAs angers her. "My first reaction was I wanted any of those (people) who say we should stop looking to face a family and tell them that," said Flick, state and regional coordinator for the National League of Families of Prisoners Missing in Southeast Asia. "All you have to do is go to a funeral of a loved one who's been returned, and you realize how much that means to the family. Until you have something definitive, there's no closure." Helen Purcell, 85, of Mount Gilead, said she knows that feeling. The remains of her 30-year-old son, Air Force Capt. Howard Philip Purcell, a B-26 bomber pilot, were identified in 1996 through DNA and dental records. Word came 33 years after he was reported missing on Sept. 3, 1963. Purcell said she was astonished at the crowd that gathered Nov. 3, 1996, at the Trinity United Methodist Church in Mount Gilead for a belated funeral for her son. "It has made a difference because we all feel that it's finished," Purcell said. Since the Vietnam War, closure has become more important to Americans, Flick said. Her organization, founded in 1969, still sells $5.50 stainless steel bracelets that bear the name, rank and date the MIA was lost. Before then, families had nowhere to turn but the government for support and information. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, government officials referred concerned families of troops to the league, Flick said. The military also publicly vowed not to leave anyone behind in that war, she said. Ella May Cates remembers the feeling of not knowing a loved one's fate when her granddaughter was reported missing in action in the Persian Gulf War. Army Maj. Rhonda Scott Cornum, a flight surgeon and pilot in the 101st Airborne Division, was in a helicopter that was shot down during a search-and-rescue mission for an injured U.S. pilot. Five of the eight crew members were killed. For four days, Cates didn't know whether Cornum, since promoted to lieutenant colonel, was dead or alive. She originally was listed as MIA then reclassified as a prisoner of war before her release after four days. "It was horrible," Cates said of the interlude before learning Cornum was alive. If the military had abandoned efforts to find her, "I would have been furious," she said. Still, Cates said she is of two minds about whether efforts should continue on behalf of MIAs from a war that ended 23 years ago. "Sometimes people have to accept things. I know it would have been very hard for us. Of course you would be angry. But this many years afterward, what good would it do anybody? Sometimes I think closure is in your mind." Public pressure to solve the remaining mysteries of the Vietnam War is largely what spurred those promises to quickly find MIAs and POWs during the Gulf War, Flick said. "If our group has done nothing else but that, it will be an achievement," she said. SMITH 324 COMPELLING CASES Laos Francis J. McGouldrick Thomas W. Dugan (1341) John S. Albright, II Joseph P. Fanning Fred L. Clarke Morgan J. Donahue Samuel F. Walker, Jr. (1340) On December 13, 1968, a C-123K (Case 1340) collided in mid-air with a B-57E (Case 1341). The aircraft wreckage crashed into an area approximately 47 kilometers northwest of the town of Tchepone, Savannakhet Province, three kilometers east of Route 411 and in the area of Ban Kok Nak. The C-123 pilot, First Lieutenant Thomas H. Turner, exited through the cockpit window after finding the co-pilot's seat empty and fire coming into the cockpit from the fuselage. He later reported that there had been an explosion in the aft section of the aircraft and the C-123K had gone out of control. After parachuting from the cockpit window, Lieutenant Turner noted that there was another parachute below his and he believed it might have belonged to a member of the two-man B-57E crew. Lieutenant Turner was rescued on December 13th and all other crewmen from the two aircrews were declared missing. Returning U.S. POWs had no information on the fate of the two aircrews. After Operation Homecoming they were eventually declared killed, body not recovered, based on a presumptive finding of death. From 1968 through 1971, the next of kin of Lieutenant Donahue tried unsuccessfully to obtain information about him from Lao communist officials. Reward notices were circulated in Thailand in the late 1970s which promised money and resettlement into the U.S. for information about Lieutenant Donahue. During 1980, information attributed to former Royal Lao Army Region II Commander, General Vang Pao, asserted that U.S. POWs had been moved from North Vietnam to Sam Neua, Laos, and then to the area of Kham Keut, Khammouane Province. These and other reports in a similar vein, eventually leading to assertions that Morgan Jefferson Donahue was still alive and simultaneously a prisoner in either Khammouane Province or Houa Phan Province, Laos and Binh Tri Thien Province, Vietnam, were determined by DIA to be fabrications. In 1980 the DIA Director, Lieutenant General Eugene Tighe, initiated an effort which prevented the release of all POW/MIA intelligence reports received at that agency after August 1979. While due in part to a concern that the release of such reports might hazzard any U.S. POWs still alive in Southeast, this policy coincided with efforts by some next of kin to have POW/MIA reports released so they could be entered into military service casualty board case reviews underway, including that of Captain Donahue. The Defense Department agreed to permit DIA to act as both initial and appellate review authority over such reports, effectively denying their release. Lieutenant Donahue was declared killed in action, body not recovered, in February 1981. However, these earliest accounts led by 1981 to either funding by the U.S. Army's Intelligence and Security Command and National League of Families senior officials for, or involvement by senior Defense Department officials in, covert cross border forays by elements of the so-called Lao resistance operating from Thailand into Laos and may also have involved the so-called Vietnamese resistance. Such reports of live Americans in Khammouane and elsewhere were determined by DIA by 1987 to have been the result of an active measures disinformation program by the state security apparatus of Laos and Vietnam which achieved various objectives, including manipulation of the POW/MIA issue. Such hostile intelligence efforts had directly targeted the Lao neutralist faction as a conduit for the disinformation. DIA determined it was the neutralist groups and others in Thailand who had been, and still continue to be, conduits for hostile intelligence managed disinformation which eventually reaches private POW/MIA hunters and next of kin. In 1982, a source reported information about a wartime crash of a C-130 in the area of this loss incident. Human remains were reportedly recovered and buried during the war. In 1986 the wreckage was located and the tail number determined to be that of the C-123K (Case 1340). In March 1990, Lao officials reported that civilians had recovered human remains from a B-57/C-123 crash site located on a karst in the area of this loss incident. |
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All Biographical and loss information on POWs provided by OpJC have been supplied by Chuck and Mary Schantag of POWNET. Please check with POWNET regularly for updates. |
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