Missing No More Flying Around The World With The Remains Of Mias Brings The War Home

Bringing home the remains of 10 MIAs lost in Vietnam 20 years after the war ended there - has left a McChord Air Force Reserve crew with tears in their eyes, lumps in their throats and questions on their lips.

“Every time a casket went by I wondered, ‘Who was that? What were they? What were they about?”’ said Maj. Ron Morlier, pilot of the McChord cargo jet that flew the 10 flag-draped, silver coffins from Hanoi to Hawaii last week.

“They got up in the morning, had coffee, talked to their buddies like we do. We never expect not to come back.

“Did they lose their lives in one tragic ‘boop’?” he asked, snapping his fingers, “or did they spend 10 years in a POW camp?”

Looking out from the cockpit of the C-141 as they flew over Vietnam, he asked himself how recovery teams could find human remains - or even the wreckage of an airplane - in the dense jungle below.

“It’s hard to even think about it without it bringing tears to your eyes,” said Morlier, 42, commander of the mission and the 10-person flight crew.

Many other members of the 446th Airlift Wing (Reserve) said the same thing.

“That’s 10 of our guys,” said Sgt. Mary Clouse, 33, a flight engineer. “I can’t believe I got to be part of this, bringing them home after all these years.”

The Vietnam war ended in 1975 with thousands of Americans unaccounted for in the Southeast Asian country. It wasn’t known whether they were MIAs missing in action - or POWs prisoners of war.

The United States and Vietnam have not had diplomatic relations since and information on missing personnel was agonizingly slow in coming. Since the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting started in 1992, things have improved and the remains of 288 Americans have been repatriated from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and China.

But there are still 2,206 MIAs from the Vietnam War. Of those, 790 are from the Air Force, 666 from the Army, 432 from the Navy, 277 from the Marines, 40 civilians and one from the Coast Guard.

When word spread through the 446th Airlift Wing of the mission to bring MIAs home, many reservists lobbied to go, Clouse said. Her father fought in Vietnam and survived the war, but was killed soon after in an airplane accident.

“Bringing these guys home is also important for veterans,” she said.

Three separate ceremonies, with the pomp and circumstance that military honor guards lend, marked the return of the MIAs.

During the first, in Hanoi, the remains in their plain wooden boxes were placed in silver-colored coffins and covered with the Stars and Stripes. Then they were escorted onto the McChord C-141, the same type of troop and cargo carrier commonly used to fly troops to Vietnam during the war.

Another ceremony at Andersen Air Base in Guam marked the return of the MIAs to American soil.

The third ceremony, at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, was the official homecoming attended by senior representatives from all four branches of the military, as well as veterans.

The remains were left in Hawaii for analysis by the Central Identification Lab. The McChord crew returned Thursday night from the weeklong trip.

For Morlier, who is also a commercial airline pilot, it wasn’t the first repatriation mission. While he was serving in the Persian Gulf in early 1991, he was sent to Vietnam to fly remains to Hawaii.

“This was the only mission I heard of that had a higher priority than Desert Storm,” Morlier said.

For Clouse, the trip started as a routine flight, but soon became a strongly emotional journey.

“Regardless of the crew, of their differences, it’s still very much a team,” Clouse said. “You depend so much on each other. When one dies, a piece of everyone dies.”