News-Info-Alerts

Re: Decades of Wondering

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: December 05, 2002

"After decades of wondering, family lays Vietnam War airman to rest

By Jennifer H. Svan, Stars and StripesPacific edition,
Thursday, December 5, 2002


When Capt. Francis Wayne Townsend left for Vietnam in January 1972, he didn’t tell his parents when he’d return.

Thirty years later, the fallen Air Force navigator finally has come home.

Townsend was laid to rest with full military honors Friday in a small country cemetery in Cherokee County, Texas.

After years of uncertainty, Norman and Betty Townsend celebrated their son’s life.

“I had hoped and prayed that I would live long enough to know what happened to him,” said Norman Townsend, interviewed by phone Tuesday from Texas. “I’m glad I did.”

Francis Townsend was 24 when his plane crashed and burned in North Vietnam.

On Aug. 13, 1972, Townsend and Capt. William A. Gauntt, the pilot, were flying an RF-4C Phantom on a photo-reconnaissance mission. A surface-to-air missile struck their jet. Gauntt ordered Townsend, who was running the surveillance cameras, to eject.

Gauntt ejected from the aircraft and had six seconds between his parachute canopy filling with air and hitting the ground not far from the burning crash site, according to the Tyler (Texas) Morning Telegraph. He was captured by the Vietnamese and held as a prisoner of war until March 1973; he never again saw Townsend alive.

When Townsend didn’t come home with the other POWs in 1973, Norman Townsend said, he and his wife prayed their son was killed in the crash, rather than still being held captive somewhere. But the U.S. government had no answers.

The search for clues that would reveal Townsend’s fate began in 1997, after relations with Vietnam warmed. Joint U.S. and Vietnamese teams, led by the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, conducted the first of four investigations in the area where the RF-4C Phantom crashed.

They interviewed dozens of villagers, including one who claimed to have buried some remains near a flooded crash crater in the area, according to a Department of Defense news release. During one of the investigations, a local Vietnamese resident showed team members Townsend’s military ID tag.

Enough evidence was found to excavate the area, and full-scale digs ensued in 1998 and 1999.

The Townsends were called in July: The U.S. Army’s Central Identification Lab in Hawaii had identified their son’s remains.

“We were a little reluctant to accept it at first,” Norman Townsend said. “I told the man, ‘I’ve been waiting 30 years. We weren’t getting into a hurry.’”

They had reason. Previously, the Townsends had been told a tooth found at the excavation site didn’t hold up to DNA analysis. But this time, a rib bone fragment matched the DNA of Francis Townsend’s mother and sister.

Still, they wanted to be sure, so Norman Townsend’s younger son, Robin, flew to Hawaii to meet with the CILHI anthropologists who excavated the crash site.

The evidence was conclusive, Norman Townsend said.

And so last Friday, about 300 friends and family gathered in Rusk, Texas, to remember one of their own: a boy who was the 1966 Rusk High School valedictorian and football team captain; an Air Force Academy graduate with a bright future; and a man who died for his country.

Francis Townsend received the Distinguished Flying Cross with two Bronze Oak Leaf Clusters, the Purple Heart, the Air Medal with two Silver Oak Leaf Clusters, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal with one Bronze Star and the Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal.

At the cemetery, a U.S. Air Force Honor Guard fired a 21-gun salute, and four F-16s streaked across the sky in the missing man formation. Townsend’s parents, his five sisters and brother, numerous nieces and nephews, as well as Gauntt, attended.

“We brought him here, instead of Arlington [National] Cemetery,” Norman Townsend said, “because we wanted him to come home.”

© 2002 Stars and Stripes. All Rights Reserved. "