Lost Utah pilot's remains finally come home
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
He was the drum major. And she was smitten.
So June Lundin hatched a plan: She would learn to play the cymbals so she could spend time with Russell Goodman -- the tall and handsome East High band leader she adored.
It worked. The pair began dating in high school. A few years later, when Goodman was an Air Force ROTC student at the University of Utah, he asked June to marry him.
But their partnership, like many others during the Vietnam War, would be broken by tragedy.
Now, more than half a century later, the two are finally together again.
One of the best - For more than a decade after leaving Utah in 1955, the Goodmans traveled the world as Russell made a name for himself as one of the top F100 Super Sabre pilots in the Air Force. In 1964, the Fairview native was selected to be a member of the Thunderbirds flight demonstration team. He returned to his home state in August of that year for the Weber Valley Air Fair as the advance pilot and narrator for the famed aerial acrobats.
Meanwhile, a U.S. contingent of hundreds of "advisers" sent to South Vietnam in the 1950s had grown to a force of hundreds of thousands of military members. Seeking to broaden the experiences of its aviators during this time of war, the Air Force began an exchange program with the U.S. Navy. For three months in 1966, Goodman trained at Naval Air Station Miramar on the Navy's F-4 Phantom.
Navy Lt. Gary Thornton recalled seeing Goodman with his wife and three children for the last time as the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise set to deploy in November 1966.
A month later, the Air Force pilot was flying combat missions in Southeast Asia.
"He did everything right," said Thornton, who flew with Goodman on dozens of combat missions, including one in which Goodman was awarded the Silver Star for saving a downed aircrew. "He was a super guy and a super pilot."
Uncertain death - Thornton said his co-pilot's thoughts were never far from his family back home.
On Feb. 20, 1967, Goodman and Thornton launched off the Enterprise for a bombing mission against a railroad target near the city Thanh Hoa in North Vietnam. The pair were able to put their weapons on the target, but they didn't get much further.
"Just as the nose was coming up toward the horizon, I saw a flak burst right outside of the forward cockpit," Thornton recalled.
As the aircraft rolled to the left, Thornton saw his co-pilot's body fall to the right. "I don't remember any communication," Thornton said. "I looked at the instruments. Our airspeed was increasing and our altitude was decreasing."
Thornton ejected. Within minutes, he would be a prisoner of war.
But Goodman's fate was uncertain.
While he was being marched off by a group of Vietnamese irregulars, Thornton could see a plume of black smoke over the horizon. But he couldn't know for certain what had happened to his friend.
Hard to move on - Russell Goodman was officially recognized as having been killed in action. His family held a funeral. His name is located about halfway down on Panel 15E of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C.
But his daughter, Sue Stein, said that it was difficult to truly put her father to rest without absolute proof of his death.
"Of course, we were pretty sure he was gone," Stein said. "But growing up, there was always this tiny shred of disbelief because we never had his remains, so we never had closure. And that made it difficult to really believe it had happened."
Adding to the Goodman family's dreams was Thornton's repatriation after six years as a prisoner of war.
The Navy aviator also believed that Goodman had been killed in the crash, but he didn't have any proof, either. And Thornton himself had been wrongly declared dead by the military. His parents were initially told he had died in the crash -- only to learn three years later that he was alive and being held in a prison in North Vietnam.
Ultimately, June Goodman moved with her family to Alaska, where she lived until her death in November 2009.
But she never stopped mourning her husband.
And the U.S. military never stopped looking for him.
Long-awaited closure - There was never any question as to the general area where Goodman's plane crashed, but an initial investigation into the area in 1993 did not produce the evidence needed to conclusively prove the pilot's death.
Then, in March 2008, a team of U.S. and Vietnamese forensics experts excavated the site again, returning with human remains and pilot equipment. Using mitochondrial identification techniques that were not available in 1993, investigators from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command were able to link Goodman's remains with two maternal relatives.
June Goodman would never know for certain that her husband's remains had been identified. The investigation's conclusion came just six days after her death.
The Goodman children were the guests of honor last week as The Thunderbirds held a memorial service for Goodman at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas. Stein said she wishes she could have shared those moments with her mother, who never gave up hope that she would be reunited with her band leader.
Now, she will be. The Goodman children plan to scatter their parents' ashes on an Alaskan mountaintop this summer.