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Family hopes for recovery of soldier's remains
Sunday, November 11, 2001
By Susan K. Treutler
CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER
On May 27, 1968, Mildred and Paul Stevens of Twin Lake went to East Dalton Oakhill Cemetery and bought three grave sites.
Paul Stevens was buried there in 1980.
Mildred was buried beside him last June.
But the grave they bought for their son, Philip, remains empty even though he's been gone as of today 33 years and 10 months.
Philip Stevens' resting place since his Jan. 11, 1968, death has been a mountaintop in Laos.
Now, there is finally hope that the U.S. Navy aviator who died in the Vietnam War will be laid to rest next to his mother, who wanted him returned to the nation whose uniform he so proudly wore.
A highly specialized search team in March combed the ledges of Phoulouang Mountain where Stevens and the other eight members on his flight crew crashed and retrieved some remains. The site, because of its remoteness and ruggedness, had not been disturbed. The team is to return to Laos in February when the weather is favorable for further searches, according to Lt. Jerry O'Hara of the U.S. Navy's Killed In Action Body Recovery team in Honolulu.
The recovery is undertaken by the military's Joint Task Force-Full Accounting Office, which since its formation in 1992 has embarked on about 600 searches and digs looking for lost soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. The effort restricted to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia includes the expertise of archaeologists, forensic and mortuary specialists, and linguists operating on $100 million annual budgets.
So far, the remains of 500 soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines have been found. Most have been identified.
It takes up to a year to identify the remains, O'Hara said. It is not yet known if Stevens' remains were among those already taken off the Lao mountain.
Stevens' sister, Joy Warren, of White Lake, northwest of Detroit, said searchers have recovered her brother's "dog tags" and sent pictures of the site to family members showing airplane parts and personal effects of the crew on ledges.
She and her brother, Richard Stevens of Commerce Township, also near Detroit, a few years ago gave blood in an effort to match DNA with remains and identify them. She said they have heard nothing from the military since.
The crash site was identified in 1996, but was determined to be far too dangerous to search. Family members of the crew applied pressure and the search was finally undertaken. Some of the remains, however, are on narrow mountain ledges that cannot be reached.
The search has been extremely dangerous, as are many such missions. Last March, five U.S. servicemen died while on an advance mission to prepare for a search. The Russian-made helicopter they were in crashed 280 miles south of Hanoi . Also killed were 11 Vietnamese men the helicopter crew ferrying the Americans and members of the Vietnamese Office Seeking Missing Persons.
In an odd twist of fate, the team looking for Stevens and the others on the Lao mountain suspended their search to help recover their fellow searchers' bodies.
Despite the shortened search, the team did recover some bones and other artifacts.
The finds put to rest any wondering about exactly where the crew went down and gave some promise that remains of at least some of the crew would be brought home.
Too late to ease mother's pain.
Philip Paul Stevens is among 63 soldiers and sailors from Michigan, and nearly 2,000 nationwide, still listed as missing in Southeast Asia some as long as 36 years.
So many parents are still waiting. So many have died wondering.
Mildred Stevens was 92 when she died in June. She lived just long enough to know that Philip might one day be buried on U.S. soil.
She always wanted more information on what happened to her youngest child. She was told that a crash location and some remains were discovered. But in the end, as age took its toll, family members did not show her pictures from the site showing boots, pieces of uniforms and other evidence of the crash.
"My mother kept up with the correspondence that came from the government," said her older son, Richard, who now lives in the Detroit area. "She knew they were searching. She was happy that they were actually looking for him."
"It's too bad my mother didn't live long enough to see them find him."
A secret mission
The Stevens lived first in Dalton Township as Philip was growing up, moving to North Muskegon when he was 8 so the children could be close to school and take part in athletics and other activities.
Young Philip was interested in science and astronomy and was good at electronics. He graduated from North Muskegon High School in 1960, and went on to the University of Minnesota, earning an electrical engineering degree on a Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship.
After college, he was trained as a pilot by the Navy, and earned his "wings" in 1967. He held ratings as a private, commercial, instrument and multiengine pilot and had logged more than 400 hours of flight time.
Stevens was a 25-year-old lieutenant junior grade when he and the other eight members of Observation Squadron 67's Crew 2 were shot down over Laos, about 20 miles from Vietnam.
Information on the top secret mission was not declassified and made public until 1998. But there was little mystery about the mission's fate. Unlike many such crashes, there were eyewitnesses.
A.G. Alexander, now a retired Navy commander, was on another airplane on the same mission, flying in tandem with Crew 2's Neptune OP-2E aircraft.
They were flying low, zigzagging just above the treetops over the Ho Chi Minh Trail a supply route, much of it just a narrow walking path, used by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to move soldiers and materiel through the rugged Southeast Asian countryside.
As the Navy personnel flew, they dropped 3-foot-long, cylindrical sound and motion sensors, which were suspended from small parachutes. The chutes would catch in the trees over the trail, allowing the U.S. to track the enemy via sensors hidden deep in the foliage. It was the only way to detect them. The heavy canopy of trees did not allow visual tracking, so the U.S. had to be able to hear traffic below.
"All the information gathered would go to a large plane circling at 25,000 feet and then be collected at a computer center in Thailand," said Alexander, now of Whitefish, Mont.
"Our troops would know exactly where the sounds were coming from," Alexander said. "We could then come in with an attack airplane or a B-52 and really do a job on them. We stopped the North Vietnamese Army 40,000 troops like that at Khesanh."
Because of their low altitude, the flights were extremely dangerous. Stevens and the others, who were based in Thailand, volunteered for the duty. Alexander said it is not known exactly what happened to Stevens' plane, but the pilot or navigator radioed: "I am going down through a hole in the clouds."
Then silence.
"Immediately, we knew," said Alexander. "We didn't hear another word. "
"We stayed around and looked around for another hole in the clouds and couldn't find one. With all that cloud cover, we knew that a gunner would be looking at that hole waiting for anyone to come down through and shoot the hell out of them," Alexander said.
When last seen, Stevens the crew's bombardier was in the glass nose of the airplane, crouched over the plane's bombsight.
Families left in the dark.
The mission Stevens was on was largely kept secret because the U.S. government had denied it was fighting in Laos.
A month after Stevens died, his family was informed that his plane went down due to hostility or mechanical problems. No other details were offered. It was 30 years before the family learned from the Navy why he was flying over Laos.
On March 9, 1968, his parents held a funeral for him at St. Mary's of the Woods Catholic Church. There was an empty casket there, its presence offering comfort while symbolic of all that was lost.
Alexander lost not only fellow servicemen in the crash, he lost his best friend, Delbert Olson, 42, the Crew 2's pilot.
"We flew three squadrons together. We chased girls together. We both married, had children the same age. We were very good friends," Alexander said.
With all that history, Alexander over the years became the chronicler of the mission.
He spent a year finding family members of the lost crew. Many of Crew 2's families are corresponding and gathering information on those killed in action who remain missing.
One of the most active is David Olson, son of the Crew 2 pilot, who would like to see the crew eventually buried in Arlington National Ceremony, the way they flew together, died together, and have rested together all these years.
Joy Warren said no decision has been made on where Philip will eventually be laid to a final rest.
Meanwhile, family members do what they are used to doing. They wait.
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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