News-Info-Alerts

Re: Remembering

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: November 18, 2002

"Lost Nation soldier remembered

By Dorothy de Souza Guedes, Herald Staff Writer

LOST NATION - Army Private First Class Robert Charles "Chuck" O'Hara was just three months shy of ending his one-year tour of duty in Vietnam and celebrating his 20th birthday with family in Lost Nation in 1969 when the helicopter he wasn't even supposed to be on went down over enemy-occupied territory in South Vietnam.

After he was classified as missing in action (MIA) on Feb. 6 of that year, his parents and 10 siblings struggled to get officials to fill in the missing pieces -to give any explanation - for what happened on that ill-fated helicopter mission.

"Was Chuck still alive?," they wondered. They needed proof, a body. They needed a funeral. They needed closure. That waited 33 years to get it.

"People don't realize how long 33 years is," said his sister, Phyllis Sterk. "Thirty-three years is like forever."

For more than three decades, she has worn a Prisoner of War (POW) bracelet, a constant reminder of her long-lost brother.

"There's probably not a day that goes by that I don't think about him," she said.

Growing up in Iowa

Chuck O'Hara was born smack dab in the middle of John "Jack" and Ruth O'Hara's 11 children. The O'Hara clan moved from Coggon, a tiny town north of Cedar Rapids, to Lost Nation in 1963.

All living siblings still are in Iowa; in birth order they are: Michael, of Ryan; Patricia Odean of Marion; John of Postville; Terry of Stanwood; Donald of Lisbon; Phyllis Sterk of Lost Nation; Steve of Klemme; Greg of Lost Nation; Margaret Monaghan of Masonville; and David of Winfield. Chuck was born between Donald and Phyllis.

Less than a year younger than Chuck, Sterk, a fifth-grade teacher at Calamus-Wheatland Elementary School, considers him her "Irish twin." Chuck was closest to the siblings nearest his age, but was the type of good kid who always had time for his younger siblings, she said. He was the kind of kid who really didn't have a temper.

"He was pretty easy going," Sterk said.

Her brother Greg, a "jack of all trades" with the Clarence Co-op, agrees with his sister.

"He was always good-natured," Greg said of the brother who was about three years older than him.

Growing up in small towns, the O'Hara kids had to find things to keep themselves busy, Sterk said. Chuck was small for his age and played a little baseball as a kid, but not any organized school sports.

One memory that really stands out for both Greg and Sterk later proved key to the family's history. On the last day of school when he was about 10, Chuck got in the way of a swinging baseball bat and lost his two front teeth. A partial dental plate replaced those two teeth.

Chuck attended all four high school years in Lost Nation, graduating in 1967. He and two buddies promptly enlisted in the military.

"When he enlisted that was '67. The war was going on. We were just kids," Sterk said.

Before Chuck left home in October 1967, three other O'Hara boys had done so: Michael was in the Army Reserves and two brothers already had been sent to Vietnam: John with the Marines and Terry with the Navy.

"It was the thing you did," Sterk said of those enlistments.

Chuck went to Vietnam in May 1968. He wrote a lot of letters, not only to family, but to others back home in Lost Nation. When asked if he liked the Army, Sterk paused, then answered, "He didn't like Vietnam."

He was counting the days until he came home, his sister said, and expected to be in back in the United States for his 20th birthday on May 18, 1969. That February, he was just three months short of serving his one-year tour of duty and discharge.

Chuck didn't make it home for his birthday.

Missing in action

It was Feb. 8, 1969, a Saturday morning.

That morning, as Sterk and her mother were getting ready to run errands in Maquoketa, they noticed an Army car across the street at Pete's Corner Cafe. They didn't consider that the news could be about Chuck because the car wasn't at their home, the apartment above the Colonial Inn, the tavern the family ran.

The women were probably gone for about two hours before returning to Lost Nation.

"When we came back they were still there and they came and told us (Chuck was missing)," Sterk said. Jack O'Hara had already been told the news.

Sterk doesn't remember what the weather was like, or exactly what they did in Maquoketa because of what happened when they returned.

"The only thing I remember is my mother screaming, crying," she said.

Greg was upstairs in the family's apartment watching television. One of his brothers came upstairs crying and told him the Army was downstairs talking to their mother. Greg headed downstairs and went into the kitchen, trying to overhear what was being said. From what he heard, Greg assumed his brother was dead, but soon learned he was missing instead.

Chuck had been on a helicopter that went down in enemy-occupied territory.

"They lost radio contact with the helicopter. That's how they put it," Sterk said. "They didn't know anything else."

Chuck O'Hara was an Army helicopter crew chief. During the late morning of Thursday, Feb. 6, 1969, he and six others were running an emergency resupply mission when their UH-1H Huey chopper went down in bad weather in Quang Tri Province. Others on the helicopter when it went down were Lt. Col. Donald Parsons, Chief Warrant Officer Charles Stanley, co-pilot; 1st Lt. David Padgett, pilot; Sgt. 1st Class Eugene Christiansen, a gunner; 1st Lt. Ronald Briggs, a passenger; and Maj. Vu Vanh Phao, an advisor from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

That's all the O'Haras knew for nearly 10 years about what happened to the family's middle child. The close-knit family was devastated.

That the helicopter went down was one thing, but that they didn't know what happened to Chuck for decades was an entirely different ordeal.

"It was the hardest thing my family had to go through," Sterk said. "It was something that you don't get over."

Hope

When a brother goes missing, there's "a lot of ups and downs," Greg said.

"I had hope off and on for a lot of years," he said. When he was old enough, Greg almost enlisted in the Marines, but another brother talked him out of it.

It never ceases to amaze Greg that only one POW - Pvt. 1st Class Robert Garwood - ever returned from the Vietnam War.

"You hope that they would find somebody still alive. Maybe that's not possible but you would think that and maybe there still could be," Greg said.

According to the Arlington, Va., organization, the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, there were 2,599 unaccounted for categorized as prisoners of war, missing in action or killed in action and bodies not recovered. As of a year ago, that number dropped to 1,903.

The families of those still missing definitely have the O'Hara family's sympathy, Greg said. "Don't give up hope, I guess."

Chuck's missing was considered a very private family matter. In fact, the Army discouraged them from talking to others about Chuck.

"It was hard to talk about. People didn't know what to say. We didn't talk about it outside the family," Sterk said.

For about 10 years after the crash, the military told them nothing more than what they heard that first day. They discouraged the O'Haras from contacting the families of the other men listed as missing in action with Chuck.

"It was difficult. It was hard on my mother. It was hard for us to talk about it. It was hard for all of us to talk about it," Sterk said.

With no burial site, there was no place to visit her brother. Their mother had a stained- glass window made that noted the O'Hara name and that Chuck was missing in action. The window would be decorated for holidays; always there was a tiny MIA flag posted there. After their mother died, the memorial at the window was taken down.

Without a body to claim, the family imagined Chuck still was alive; both parents died before the truth was disclosed to the family.

"My mom never gave up. She wouldn't admit that he was gone," Greg said. "She was always hoping something would turn up but it never did."

Greg and Sterk said they and other family members were frustrated with the Army.

"They never told us anything. Nothing. They'd have reports and they wouldn't tell us anything," Greg recalled.

The Army had been pushing to declare Chuck dead but his family first wanted to know more. It most likely was through contact with the League of Families that Jack and Ruth O'Hara learned they could file for any information the Army had about their son under the Freedom of Information Act. A request was made but it took about a year before a packet of reports arrived in Lost Nation in 1978.

What they learned had been withheld from them made Jack O'Hara very angry. Some of the reports noted possible sightings of O'Hara or the others with him on the helicopter when it crashed. One report even placed Chuck in a photo of a Vietnamese hospital, Greg said; that sighting never was confirmed.

Jack died in 1978, not knowing what had happened to Chuck. When he died, a plot in the Catholic part of the Low Moor cemetery was purchased for Chuck. Although no remains were found, the Army declared Chuck dead on April 23, 1979.

Many more years went by before the O'Haras heard anything more from the government about their son and brother. It bothered Sterk - and still does - that the O'Haras were kept in the dark. Ruth O'Hara died in 1993 not knowing. The next year, at the 25th anniversary of Chuck's disappearance, the family put a tombstone on the plot purchased 16 years earlier with a favorite picture of the teen-aged soldier and an inscription from a card Ruth O'Hara had for many years.

The crash site was found in 1993 and excavated in 1995 but the O'Haras weren't notified. It took another five years, until December 2000, before the family learned what was found at the crash site linking Chuck to the scene. It's this five-year lapse in not telling the families anything that makes Sterk the angriest at the government.

"Five years is a long time not to hear anything," she said.

"We certainly are thankful that they found the helicopter, that we know something. Some families don't know anything," she said.

A piece of Chuck's laminated military identification, his medals and that dental plate with the two false teeth replacing those he lost when that long ago last day of school were all that was found.

"We were pretty sure that the plate was Chuck's," Sterk said. No one else on the helicopter had a partial dental plate. By the time the Army found the dental plate, its copies of Chuck's dental records were gone; Sterk had to locate dental records.

Greg felt it was possible for Chuck still to be alive until just a couple of months ago. A conversation with a man named Lee Smith, now living in the Washington, D.C. area, changed his mind.

Smith visited the O'Haras in Lost Nation late this past August. He told them he was supposed to be on the Huey that crashed on Feb. 6, 1969, but was ill. Chuck took his spot.

When the helicopter did not return to base, a search and rescue mission was initiated, but proved unsuccessful. The military searched for the downed helicopter for a week and a half, then continued to look for it whenever crews flew out in that direction.

Lee said that if the helicopter went down where the Army said it did, hitting a mountain, it was likely that the Huey fell apart and there wouldn't be much of it left.

Hearing what happened from someone who had been there - a soldier who had helped search for the downed helicopter - finally felt like the truth to the O'Haras.

Recently, three on the ill-fated helicopter were identified using a new DNA technique. That allowed identification from bone fragments, or one tooth.

The others in the Huey crash were not identified that way.

"We didn't have DNA match," Sterk said of her brother.

An Arlington ceremony

A week ago, eight O'Hara siblings and their families went to Washington, D.C. - at the government's expense - to attend a memorial service for Chuck and the six men who went down in the helicopter with him.

The service originally had been planned for Memorial Day 2001, but was reset for several reasons, including the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Eventually, it was decided to hold the ceremony to coincide with Veteran's Day and the 20th Anniversary of Washington's Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

It was a sunny, glorious autumn day; the trees were colorful. Sterk described the ceremony at Fort Myer Old Post Chapel and Arlington Memorial Ceremony as somber and respectful and "very impressive."

Throughout the ceremony, a phrase or song would move Sterk to tears.

The O'Haras were the largest group from a single to make the trip, but there were at least a couple of hundred people at the ceremony. Only Padgett's parents still were alive, able to travel to Washington for their only child's ceremony. One soldier left behind children, two daughters well into adulthood.

The chapel was packed.

A military band played when the lone casket was brought into the chapel, when the casket was brought out, and as the group drew closer to the burial site. Each family had a limousine that followed the horse-drawn caisson through Arlington.

Sterk knew what to expect at Arlington because she and her son Philip had attended Charles Stanley's funeral there in September. She's had contact with all but two of the families of the men on the helicopter with her brother. Meeting the other families was the nicest part of going to Washington.

"They shared the same kind of grief we had," Sterk said.

Burial at home

For some of the O'Hara clan, the Arlington ceremony and group burial were enough to bring closure. Still, they all want a funeral in Lost Nation.

"We'll do this one more time," Sterk said.

A Catholic family needs to have a burial Mass, she explained. In a church - their family church, Sacred Heart in Lost Nation.

"It would be nice to have something here," Greg said. "I'm sure that people who knew him would come if they're around."

The date of the local funeral hasn't been set, but Sterk expects the service to be in the spring.

"This is our hometown. This is where he belongs," she said. "We still need to have a final burial in Lost Nation."


©Clinton Herald 2002 "