From: tran@peora.sdc.ccur.com (Nhan Tran)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Subject: MIA/POW: Missing brother
Date: 30 Aug 92 20:08:37 GMT
Reply-To: tran@peora.sdc.ccur.com
Organization: SCV Relay
Originator: daemon@media-lab.media.mit.edu


08/30

Missing Brother

By Megan Rosenfeld
 Washington Post Staff Writer

    For the first 18 years after her brother was reported killed in the Vietnam
War, Constance Hegdahl believed that he was dead, left in a Laotian jungle where
the plane on which he was a Navy navigator had crashed on Feb. 17, 1968.
    That was, after all, what the military authorities said. And Hegdahl was the
daughter of a military man, the wife of another one, and the report about her
brother's death seemed conclusive. "Search and rescue aircraft thoroughly
searched the crash scene and surrounding area via visual, electronic, and
photographic means from the time of the crash until (five days later) when the
search for any possible survivors was terminated with negative results," said
the Navy Department report.
    All that was left of her brother was paper.
    Her parents got the ritual visit from a Navy officer and a telegram telling
them their son was missing, and another telegram a few days later reporting that
the search had produced "negative results." They got the usual letter from the
president, Lyndon B. Johnson - "Words are inadequate to express my sorrow ..."
etc. - and, a few months later, notification that Lt. j.g. James S. Kravitz was
posthumously promoted to lieutenant. A memorial headstone was placed in a
cemetery in Riverside, Calif. For years, Hegdahl believed her brother was dead;
in 1982 she went to the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial, where her brother is
listed in section 39 E of the Wall.
    But four years later, ironically on the 18th anniversary of her brother's
crash, Hegdahl read an article in the Washington Times that changed her life.
The Associated Press dispatch reported that a team was about to begin excavating
a site in Laos, looking for the bodies of U.S. airmen who had crashed in 1972.
The site was in the same province, Savannakhet, where Jim Kravitz and eight
fellow crewmen had gone down four years earlier. The story said that the remains
of 13 other airmen had been found in Laos a year earlier.
    Hegdahl got out the file of papers her father had left her when he died in
1974, and reread the letters and telegrams. "The area in which your son became
missing presents the possibility that he could be held by hostile forces against
his will," said the first telegram from Vice Adm. B.J. Semmes. Her father never
believed that his son was dead, she remembered; a World War II veteran, he held
to the standard that, absent the dog tags, the possibility of life remained. She
had preferred to think of her brother as dead rather than captured, injured from
the crash, possibly tortured.
    Three days after reading the Times article, she wrote the first of what
would grow to dozens of letters during the next six years. The letter was to the
National League of Families, asking how she should go about requesting   to have
her brother's crash site excavated.
    She tells the story in the midday quiet of a suburban Alexandria living
room. Now 56, Hegdahl has both the appearance and the lifestyle of a
middle-of-the-road, middle-class, conventional, all-American housewife. She
would never interrupt a president's speech, as members of some other families
did at a League meeting last month, and she is not one of the maniacal fringe,
twisted by rage and conspiracy theories to the point where no explanation can
satisfy. "I am not one of those people wearing a lot of buttons all over them,"
Hegdahl said.
    Since 1986, Hegdahl has turned from being a person who believed blindly in
what the government said to one who questions almost everything. Once someone
who paid little attention to the news, she now combs newspapers and watches
congressional hearings on C-SPAN. She's read some of the ever-growing number of
books on the subject, joined the League of Families and become disenchanted with
it, and learned to be a nag in order to get a response from people reluctant to
answer her questions.
    She's even learned, gruesomely, something about excavating remains, how
modern science can learn a great deal from pelvic bones, "even if they can't
find the head," she said. She has other images too: her brother, adapting to
life in a jungle, learning the local language because he was always a good
mimic, somehow surviving.
    This month she went to four days of hearings held by the Senate subcommittee
on POW/MIA affairs; it was the first time she had been to a hearing, the first
time she had been inside a Senate office building. She does not represent a
group, she just went "to hear with my own ears" the explanations from Defense
Intelligence Agency officers, from Ross Perot and from other witnesses summoned
in what Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) called "the time to do away with fantasy and
do away with speculation on this issue." The hearings, which have been held
regularly since November, will continue next month.
    As she sat in the hearing room, Hegdahl felt vindicated for all the doubts,
mistrust and anger she has known in the past six years. She thought Kerry and
Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.), both veterans of the war but from opposing ends of the
political spectrum, sounded more in agreement than not by the end of the four
days, even though Smith has been the more radical doubter on the POW/MIA issue.
    Among the moments she particularly remembers was one on the second day, when
Smith, who believes there is a secret prison underneath Hanoi's version of the
Pentagon, questioned a Pentagon official about some aerial photographs of the
site. Unable to find a location he knew was there, Smith realized the problem:
The pictures had been reversed during printing; what was on the left should have
been on the right.
    "When you hear something like that you really have to wonder," said Hegdahl.
"How many other pictures have been reversed? How many other mistakes have they
made?"
    She was also impressed when one senator asked the Pentagon representatives
how long it took them to react to a report of a "live sighting" of a purported
POW, of which there have been more than 1,500 over the years. The answer added
up to at least 10 days to get the information to the U.S. office in Vietnam -
plenty of time for any "sighting" to vanish.
    Going to the hearings was "the best thing I've done," she said. "Now I know
I'm not crazy."
 Missing Records
    Jim Kravitz was 23 when he joined the Navy in 1964. He had gotten a degree
from a community college and was working for the Southern California Gas Co.
when he enlisted. "He really believed his country needed him," Hegdahl said.
    He joined the Navy because both his father and his brother-in-law were in
the Army. He couldn't be a pilot because he didn't have perfect eyesight, but
after completing Officer Candidate School, he became a navigator.
    Right before he left for Vietnam in late 1967, he converted to Catholicism,
the religion of his fiancee. They were going to get married after his six-month
tour of duty was up. She waited for him for seven years, said Hegdahl, who is
still in touch with her.
    Hegdahl and her brother did not have an all-American childhood; their
parents divorced during World War II and they were bundled off to relatives. The
two siblings were retrieved in 1948 by their father and his new wife, a
German-born woman they came to consider their mother. After moving a number of
times in the course of Army assignments, the Kravitzes settled in Riverside.
    The telegram informing the Kravitzes that their son was missing in action
said that he was on an "armed reconnaissance mission" in South Vietnam. But a
subsequent "narrative" said the aircraft, an OP-2E,    "carried no ordnance,"
and was lost in Laos, having flown out of a base in Thailand. Using their
military contacts, Hegdahl's father and husband learned the mission was
"seeding" the Ho Chi Minh Trail, dropping small mines that would explode as the
enemy advanced.
    Kravitz's plane was in a group of four - a typical arrangement of
observation and armed aircraft. The final report said his crew radioed that the
plane had been hit, one engine was on fire and that it was aborting the mission
and returning to base. The observation craft was above the cloud cover, but flew
under it and saw flaming wreckage below. Rescue helicopters arriving an hour
later reported seeing the plane, but could not land because of the dense jungle.
    Years later the senior Kravitz, accompanied by his son-in-law, Jim Hegdahl,
went to the military personnel office   and asked to see his son's records.
There were six pictures of the wrecked plane.
    When Constance Hegdahl asked for those pictures recently, she was told they
could not be found.
    When her brother was reported dead, Hegdahl was a young mother, taking care
of a 2-year-old and pregnant with another child, with a husband in Vietnam. She
grieved for Jim, but had no mental energy to consider jousting with the
Establishment. All she did was save a National Geographic article about an air
rescue mission, using it years later to imagine the place her brother went down,
the mountainous jungle of something foreign called a "triple canopy."
    Since she first asked in 1986, she has been told five times that her
brother's crash site would be excavated, the last time two weeks ago. The latest
notification was followed by yet another - that the excavation had not been
completed because the rainy season had begun, and that she would receive a
report as soon as it had been "sanitized."
    "Why issue a report if the excavation was incomplete?" she asked. Because
that's the way things are done, she says she was told.
 Wiggle Room
    It's so complicated, so messy, so frustrating. Even the number of
"unaccounted for" has fluctuated until recently, from a high of 3,600 to the
current figure of 2,266. Part of the problem was that for years there was no
central database; each branch of the military kept its own numbers. In addition,
so many men were cycled through Indochina, almost 9 million, on short tours of
six months or a year.
    Jim Kravitz is among the 2,266, but not among the estimated 135 now said to
be POWs unaccounted for after the 1973 "Operation Homecoming," or in the
possibly 43 "about whom there remain the most serious questions," as Kerry put
it.
    But given all the unknowns, all the supposed sightings, the terrain, the
parachutes, the one (Robert Garwood)   who came back after Hanoi said there were
no more prisoners,  the fluctuating access to both Vietnam and Laos, Hegdahl
cannot rest until she gets proof that her brother is dead.
    "I believe in my heart and mind that there are people alive," she said. "If
there are people who married and had kids, don't rub them off as a deserter or a
turncoat. ... Maybe they saw a newspaper story that said `No more POWs' and
believed their government had written them off."
    What about the 350 POWs that then-Defense Secretary Elliot Richardson said
remained in Indochina after Operation Homecoming - and who Richard Nixon
declared dead two weeks later? Memos in 1973 from Richardson and then-Assistant
Defense Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger, flushed out by the Senate committee
recently, opened a whole new area of inquiry that is expected to be addressed
next month.
    What about the high-ranking officials who have quit their POW/MIA
investigation posts with harsh words for the operation? Even the official
government position has gotten mushier, from a total denial that any live
Americans remain to one with wiggle room: "While there is no information to
confirm that Americans are still detained in Southeast Asia, the possibility
cannot be ruled out," as an official said at the Aug. 4 hearing.
    What about the "sightings" - all of which the Defense Intelligence Agency
has discredited, over half of them as second-hand "hearsay" reports. Some of the
sighted Westerners are drug dealers on the run, they say; others are not
Americans. A report of a black American seen "chained to a log or tending
buffalo" turned out to be the son of a French-Cameroon man and a Vietnamese
woman serving time in a Vietnamese "reeducation camp." There was a report of an
American seen selling firewood at a local market in Lam Dong province; another
said to be collecting garbage in Ben Tre City. DIA officials say they have gone
to the places where these people were said to be, and found no one.
    The remains of others have been returned without any explanation of how they
died, well after the war ended. Others alive are said to be "look-alikes," which
the military describes as: "Amerasians, Afro-Americans and Eurasians; Russian
advisers, Western diplomats, missionaries, drug traffickers and tourists." The
underground prison in Hanoi, U.S. military officials say, is impossible because
the city has a high water table.
    "I hate to say it, as a military wife and a military daughter, but I have
learned to distrust what they say," said Hegdahl. Her two daughters are out of
college now. She works at home as a graphic artist; her husband, retired from
the military, works at the Institute for Defense Analyses. Friends have told her
Jim Kravitz cannot be alive; but they do not applaud the government's accounting
of its Vietnam War missing.
    "A lot of people have lied to save face, or save their jobs, or protect some
economic interest over there, or some negotiation," said Hegdahl. "But it's not
right to give up on our soldiers. This is really about the soul of our country."
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese