33rd Annual Northeast POW/MIA Network Vigil - June 17, 2021...Hesky Park, Meredith .. Please pass the word.

 

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.

 he was finally given a military burial in San Diego, after a half-century effort to find him by his daughter from Long Island. He's home now

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/military/veterans/sd-me-mia-return-20170526-story.html

http://www.pownetwork.org/bios/c/c441.htm

Our second speaker is Col. Patricia Blassie (RET) on May 11, 1972 Lt. Michael Blassie, a 1970 graduate of the Air Force Academy, learned to fly A-37s at Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi. When he took off from the American base in Bien Hoa that May morning, Blassie, who had arrived in South Vietnam less than four months earlier to join the 8th Special Operations Squadron, had already flown 130 combat missions.

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.

In 1994, Patricia Blassie was a captain in the Air Force and living in Marietta, Ga., when she received a phone call from Ted Sampley. The former Army Green Beret told her he had just written an article for the Vietnam veterans’ newsletter he published proving that her brother was buried in the Tomb of the Unknowns.

Doc Jones

Visit our website to learn more: http://www.northeastpowmianetwork.org/FreedomRide.html