We are excited to have two great speakers for the Vigil this year. Both are family members and have a story to share of living with a family member listed as a MIA. We invite you to come and hear their stories and share them with others.
Deborah Crosby, the daughter of an American pilot shot down over Vietnam never gave up in her quest to find her father's remains. And now, it is a mission accomplished.
Deborah Crosby, was only six when she was sent home from the first grade to learn her father was presumed dead, though his body had not been found during Operation Rolling Thunder.
Lt Cmdr Frederick P Crosby had been deployed on the Bon Homme Richard, an Essex-class aircraft carrier stationed off the Vietnam coast.
Deborah's mother could never talk about that day, but she gave Crosby and her brothers a binder with articles about her father's plane zooming low through the clouds on a bomb damage assessment mission before it was gunned down by North Vietnamese ground forces in 1965. The 31-year-old pilot was armed only with cameras, his daughter said.
'They were coming in low and fast on an enemy who is already spun up because he's already been attacked,' said Karl Zingheim, historian at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego.
'They were bearing the full brunt of the attack so they could bring the intelligence to bring back to the (aircraft) carrier.'
Crosby and her grandmother made a pact to someday bring home her father's remains and bury him in his hometown of San Diego.
In 2016, military investigators found his remains in a fish pond in north Vietnam. Deborah Crosby fulfilled her promise to her late grandmother.
Shortly
after starting his initial strike on an artillery position outside An Loc near
the Cambodian border, a burst of tracer rounds was seen coming toward Blassie’s
plane. His flight commander, Maj. James Connally, described what happened next
in a letter to Blassie’s parents: “Mike’s aircraft was hit and began streaming
fuel. He must have been killed instantly, because he did not transmit a
distress call of any kind. The aircraft flew a short distance on its own and
then slowly rolled over, exploding on impact in enemy-held territory.”
Other
planes were dispatched to provide cover while an Army helicopter rescue team
went in to inspect the wreckage. The team encountered such “a murderous hail of
fire” it was forced to leave, wrote Connally.
The day
following Blassie’s death, his parents in St. Louis were visited by an Air
Force chaplain who informed them that their son had been killed in action, but
his body could not be recovered.
That
would be the same official explanation the Blassie family would hear for the
next 26 years.
