Sunday, April 29, 2007
Family photo by
Paul Getchell appears in a 1969 photo taken at a base in Vietnam shortly before his plane went down during a bombing mission in Laos. An Air Force navigator who grew up in Portland, Getchell was among the Vietnam War missing until just before last Christmas.
Staff photo by John Patriquin
Teresa Getchell learned recently that her husband's remains had been positively identified at the site where his plane crashed in Laos in 1969.
MAINERS STILL MISSING FROM VIETNAM WAR
Twelve Mainers are among the 1,785 soldiers, airmen and Marines still listed as missing from the Vietnam War:
Malcolm A. Avore of Hallowell, missing in South Vietnam since 1965.
John H. R. Brooks of Bryant Pond, missing in South Vietnam since 1969.
Carl R. Churchill of Bethel, missing in North Vietnam since 1970.
Richard C. Dority of Dover-Foxcroft, missing in South Vietnam since 1970.
Blenn C. Dyer of Standish, missing in South Vietnam since 1967.
Walter L. Hall of Old Town, missing in South Vietnam since 1965.
Terrence G. Hanley of Gardiner, missing in North Vietnam since 1968.
Jack R. Harvey of Gardiner, missing in South Vietnam since 1972.
John N. Huntley of Portland, missing in Laos since 1969.
Joseph T. Musetti Jr. of Hall Quarry, missing in South Vietnam since 1967.
William S. Sanders of Winthrop, missing in Laos since 1970.
Neil B. Taylor of Rangeley, missing in South Vietnam since 1965.
Peter G. Vlahakos of Auburn, missing in North Vietnam since 1966.
Source: Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, Department of Defense
Ever since Paul Getchell's plane crashed during a 1969 bombing mission in Laos, his wife, Teresa, has waited for him to come home to Portland.
At first she expected him to walk through the door. After the military determined that Getchell was likely dead, she searched for his image in photos carried home by former prisoners of war.
Later, she clung to rumors of missing U.S. soldiers in Soviet work camps.
Now her waiting has come to an end.
Twelve years after the Defense Department began searching for the site where his plane crashed, Paul Getchell is coming home. His remains were positively identified by the military two days before Christmas. Next month, Teresa Getchell, her son, Greg, and daughter, Karen, who were 3 and 4, respectively, when their father disappeared, will fly to Hawaii to pick up his remains and bury him at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
"What a Christmas present," Teresa Getchell said last week in an exclusive interview after the Pentagon announced the identification of Getchell and the plane's pilot, Lt. Col. Norman Eaton of Weatherford, Okla. "It was a sense of relief."
That the Getchells' four-decade vigil is over is a rare ending for families of the 1,785 soldiers, airmen and Marines who are still listed as missing from the Vietnam War.
Each year the remains of only 100 of the 88,010 soldiers missing from World War II, the Cold War, Korean and Vietnam Wars are located by the Defense Department's Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, where 600 people are involved in the $105 million-a-year effort to locate and return America's missing.
Not all missing soldiers will be found. Larry Greer, a Defense Department spokesman, said analysts believe only 1,000 of the 1,785 soldiers still missing from Vietnam are recoverable, only 20 of the 125 missing in the Cold War, 5,500 of the 8,100 missing from the Korean War and 30,000 of the 78,000 missing from World War II.
Capt. Paul Getchell, 35, navigated B-57B Canberra warplanes on secret bombing runs in Laos out of Phan Rang Air Base in Vietnam for about six months. The one-year assignment was required before he could take up his new post, teaching philosophy at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.
His plane went missing at 11:45 p.m. on Jan. 13, 1969, said Teresa Getchell, who recalls each step of her search for her husband down to the hour and the minute.
According to the Air Force's official report, which his widow received in January, Getchell and Eaton, the pilot, were on a napalm strike in a plane named Yellowbird 52 over the northeastern tip of Laos' Salavan Province, about 18 miles from the Vietnam border.
They were working along with a crew in a C-130 airplane, dubbed Blindbat 2, which marked the targets with flares before Eaton and Getchell swooped in with a bomb.
After maintaining a holding pattern for about an hour, Eaton decided to forgo the flares for his next target because he was running low on fuel. Eaton and Getchell went in at a steep dive toward their target just outside the remote mountainside village of Ban La Lao.
"Eaton called out 'off target.' Blindbat 2 lost radio contact with Yellowbird 52 and seconds later saw an explosion on the ground. Communication with Yellowbird 52 could not be re-established," the report states.
A search the next day failed to detect any voice or beeper contact or visual signs of wreckage. "Because enemy forces controlled the area, ground searches for the missing men were not conducted," the report states.
Around 9 a.m. on Jan. 14, two Air Force officers the Getchells knew appeared at the front door of the family's home in Buzzard's Bay, Mass., not far from Getchell's posting as an instructor at Otis Air Force Base.
"I opened the front door and said, 'I hope this is just a visit' and I knew damn well it wasn't," Teresa Getchell recalled.
Teresa Getchell started wearing a metal bracelet engraved with her husband's name. Three years after he disappeared, she sold the Buzzard's Bay home and moved the family back to Portland, where she and her husband grew up.
She went to work as a pulmonary nurse specialist at Mercy Hospital. She never remarried and she never stopped pushing to find out the fate of her husband.
She became active in the League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.
In 1972, she and her two children went to Laos seeking answers. They traveled with Eaton's wife and son. Getchell said the government officials she met there were polite but not helpful.
Greg Getchell said he grew up imagining his father alive somewhere, possibly tortured, and hoping his father would come home to take him camping and play baseball.
"My mother always spoke so highly of him," he said. "I always hoped he would eventually come home."
Their hopes were raised again in 1995, when the Department of Defense opened its investigation into the fate of Yellowbird 52 and its crew as part of a push started in the 1980s by President Ronald Reagan to find missing Vietnam War soldiers.
But the pace of the investigation was slow. It was another three years before a team identified the site of the crash with the help of the 70-year-old chief of Ban La Lao, the village where the plane was thought to have gone down.
During the next decade, teams returned seven times to excavate the site. The debris was scattered across the jungle floor. The team found hundreds of items -- a sunglasses case, assorted keys and fragments of uniforms.
Greer, the spokesman for the POW/MIA office, said recovering missing troops from the Vietnam War is a race against time because the soil in Southeast Asia is so acidic that bones quickly become corroded.
He said the 13-year effort to recover remains of Getchell and Eaton is typical. He said some recovery cases have taken more than 20 years to complete and will take longer as time passes and memories of crash sites begin to fade.
Thirty-eight years after she last saw him, Teresa Getchell still weeps over her husband, who smiles out from old photos, a handsome, pipe-smoking man with a crewcut.
They met at Camp Gregory in Gray, a summer camp for boys, where she was a nurse and he worked in maintenance during his summer break from studies at St. John's Seminary in Boston.
The oldest of nine children, Getchell was a graduate of Cheverus High School. He made local headlines in the 1950s as a movie usher who was hit on the head with a flashlight and robbed of $3,941 outside a night deposit box by a well-known gang member, Bradley "Hot Rod" Baker.
His trip to Europe as a Civil Air Patrol cadet to present greetings from Maine Gov. Burton M. Cross to the president of Turkey also earned the notice of the press.
Ted Borduas of Portland said he cannot visit Fort Williams at Cape Elizabeth without thinking of Getchell. They joined the Air Force together. The two had gotten to know each other at Camp Gregory -- Borduas worked at the sister camp, Camp Peski -- and bumped into each other in the recruitment office in 1961.
They took their tests together and were sworn in together at Fort Williams. Borduas said Getchell aced the test, even the section where they were supposed to identify the type of airplane by its silhouette.
"He was the leader type," Borduas said.
He reconnected with the Getchell family last month. While working out on the treadmill at a local gym, he struck up a conversation with the man next to him about the funeral procession he'd seen that day for a South Portland native killed in Iraq.
"He told me, 'I just got word they found my father in Vietnam,'" said Borduas, who realized he was chatting with Paul Getchell's son, Greg.
"I told him, 'Your father and I raised our hands together at Fort Williams,'" he said.
In the nearly four decades since their vigil began, the Getchells' life has gone on. Teresa Getchell continued her work helping families find their missing soldiers. She marched in parades, often accompanied by her two children. She left nursing, got her teacher's certificate and taught grade school for a couple of years before retiring.
Today she divides her time between her home on Little Road and a second home outside Sarasota, Fla., where she plays a lot of golf.
Greg took on the cause of his father as New England regional coordinator of the National League of Families, and as a history major at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., where he studied Vietnam and MIAs.
Now a salesman for Idexx Laboratories Inc. in Westbrook, Greg Getchell lives in Portland and has a 16-year-old daughter, Abigail. His sister, Karen, is a sales consultant for Martin's Point Health Care in Portland.
When the Getchells travel to Hawaii on May 17 they will leave with two bone fragments that were matched by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory to mitochondrial DNA using a blood sample from Getchell's sister, Mary Buttermore. Eaton's remains also were identified, and buried at Arlington National Cemetery last week.
They will also carry home Getchell's dog tags, the only other item retrieved from the crash site that investigators could definitively tie to Paul Getchell.
But it is enough, said Greg Getchell. "It is a relief to know that he died on impact, he wasn't tortured," he said.
His widow said she plans to bury the fragments and dog tags, along with the bracelet she put on shortly after his death and has only removed when she underwent surgery.
There will be a ceremony back in Portland to remember Paul Getchell, who was posthumously promoted to lieutenant colonel, soon after his burial May 21 at Arlington, where a marker in his memory already stands.
"He was such a military man we feel that is where he would want to be buried," Greg Getchell said.
Staff Writer Beth Quimby can be contacted at 791-6363 or at:
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My deepest sympathies to the Getchells.report abuse
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