Hopes rise for man searching for uncle’s remains in Vietnam

Forty years after the fall of Saigon, the war is still not over for Terri Francisco-Farrell and her son Zak as well as the families of 1,627 other U.S. military personnel who are still unaccounted for.

New information that Zak Farrell says is “quite intriguing” has renewed his hope that the remains of his uncle, Air Force 1st Lt. San D. Francisco, will finally be returned to U.S. soil 47 years after Francisco’s jet was shot down over North Vietnam.

A report surfaced after the Las Vegas Review-Journal published a story April 29 about his family still searching for his missing uncle, one of 1,627 American military personnel still unaccounted from the Vietnam War.

“There’s always been hope. I’m kind of shocked that it has taken so long to get this far,” Farrell, of Las Vegas, said in a June15 interview.

Now he wonders how much the Pentagon’s MIA accounting agency officials “knew before and were holding back, and how much of it is ‘new’ information.”

“I have a hard time trusting what they say,” said Farrell, 34.

PILOT’S SISTER ENCOURAGED

His mother, Terri Francisco-Farrell, said she’s encouraged that the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) dispatched an investigation team to take new witnesses to her brother’s alleged burial site.

Like her son, though, she is also bewildered by what appears to be new information about her brother’s case.

“I don’t understand where these witnesses came from,” she said last week. “We’ve had the same witnesses for several years and now all of a sudden witnesses are showing up out of the jungle. It’s kind of unnerving and makes me wonder.”

Francisco-Farrell, of Kennewick, Wash., is traveling to Washington, D.C., to meet with DPAA officials Thursday for an annual review of her brother’s case. She expects to receive the agency’s report from an investigation that teams from the United States and Vietnam conducted jointly in May.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency team “interviewed additional witnesses and surveyed a purported burial site,” according to a June 11 email response to the newspaper’s query by Air Force Maj. Natasha Waggoner, DPAA public affairs deputy.

“Members of our organization are still working with their counterparts in Vietnam to find witnesses that may have participated in the burial of Lt. Francisco,” Waggoner wrote.

DPAA’s predecessor agencies conducted the first operations to recover remains of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam in 1985.

“It was not until 1988, however, when we started regularly scheduled joint operations with the Vietnamese,” Waggoner wrote, adding that U.S. teams first gained access in December 1988 to the Quang Binh province where Francisco’s jet went down.

1,627 ‘UNACCOUNTED FOR’

So far remains of 1,019 previously unaccounted U.S. servicemen from the Vietnam War have been identified but those of Francisco and his partner, Maj. Joseph Morrison, who U.S. authorities believe was shot and killed resisting capture, are among the 1,627 with “unaccounted for” status.

While on a mission Nov. 25, 1968, to escort a reconnaissance aircraft near the Laos border, their F-4D Phantom fighter jet was shot down by a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery. Witnesses saw their parachutes float down in separate locations after they ejected from the crippled jet.

Francisco-Farrell said her family has received information periodically about U.S. efforts to locate her brother since 1991, two years after a joint-team investigated the crash site and confirmed it was the wreckage from her bother’s aircraft.

In January 1991, a joint U.S.-Vietnam team surveyed a site where witnesses claimed 1st Lt. Francisco was buried. Then, in July 1991 the joint team examined records from military museums in Hanoi and Vinh City, Vietnam, that included pictures of the crash site, a pilot’s helmet, Francisco’s military identification, a $20 bill, personal effects and U.S. Air Force paperwork that he was carrying.

Francisco-Farrell was 16 when her brother was declared missing in action.

He had volunteered to fly the Nov. 25, 1968, mission in the absence of another pilot, just days before he was to go on leave from Thailand to meet his wife in Hawaii.

That day, North Vietnamese troops outside a village in Quang Binh province on the north-central coast saw the airmen parachute to the ground.

Francisco broke at least one leg as he landed, according to the agency’s most recent report. He was being held captive when U.S. fighter-bomber jets flew over to clear the search-and-rescue area. They unleashed cluster bombs. One exploded and killed him in an open area while his captors took cover in a trench, according to one version.

OTHER CLAIMS

The agency’s March 15 report cites accounts of former “volunteer youth group” soldiers who claim to have witnessed 1st Lt. Francisco’s death and burial.

“The other pilot who was Caucasian … suffered a broken leg and landed near his unit’s position,” reads the report that references Nguyen Huu Vay, who was 22 when Francisco’s jet was shot down.

Vay’s unit, 5th Company, 2nd Engineer Battalion, “was ordered to capture the pilot alive but because of the fierce bombing of opposition (U.S.) aircraft they couldn’t carry out the order. The pilot was killed as a result of a rocket strike from a U.S. aircraft. AAA soldiers and volunteer youth buried the pilot,” the March 15 investigative report states.

Another witness, Dinh Ngoc Son, a soldier in the 3rd platoon of Vay’s company, told investigators that he and a third witness, a woman named Vu Thi Minh, “along with other soldiers dug a one meter deep hole and buried the pilot’s body on the spot. … (there) was no coffin nor was the body wrapped. The pilot was only wearing his undergarments,” according to the report.

“About 10 days later, following an order from higher headquarters aimed at propagandizing the fact that the U.S. was still bombing the north, violating the cease fire, Mr. Son and fellow soldiers dug up the pilot’s body so photojournalists could video and photograph the body. The pilot’s body was reburied in the same grave,” the report states.

Investigators from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency were still deployed June 11 but the team was expected to return to Hawaii before the end of June “to finalize their reports, which will then be reviewed and published,” according to Waggoner’s email.

Francisco-Farrell said she expects some of that information will be shared with her during meetings with agency officials this week.

“My hope is that they will tell me they’re going to go back and try to retrieve him this year,” she said.

Contact Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308. Find him on Twitter: @KeithRogers2.