News-Info-Alerts

Re: The Long, Painful Trip Home

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: September 14, 2003

"At long last, a son found

By Patti Richter, Staff Writer

PORT ORFORD - Jim and Jane Black will bury their 22-year-old son at Arlington National Cemetery on Friday. Paul Black is not a recent casualty of the United State's ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He died 32 years ago with three other soldiers, when the U.S. Army helicopter he was piloting 2,000 feet above a Cambodian village on a surveillance mission was shot down and exploded in flames.


The death of his eldest son is still too hard a subject for Jim to broach. As Jane began talking about Paul, her 88-year-old husband quietly grabbed a light jacket from a coat rack in the tidy living room and slipped out the back door. He headed for the garage a few feet away from the gray, three-bedroom house a few miles outside of town.

Jane, sitting down at the dining room table, picked up and looked at pieces of paper that she had accumulated from the government throughout the years since Paul's death. As she spoke about her son, her glance occasionally drifted to a shadow box on the wall, filled with Paul's medals. Beneath it was a small snapshot of her son, with a questioning look and furrow in his brow. He was sitting in the pilot's seat of his helicopter.

Jane said her family (which also includes two daughters, Judy and Jolene, and another son, Darryl) is close-knit, but Jim, who was a driver for Greyhound, was especially tight with his boys. The three used to spend hours in the garage, fixing up old cars.

"It's very hard - it's just too painful for him," Jane said as her voice began to choke up with emotion. The woman with the curly white and gray hair brought her hand to her chin, trying to steady her composure.

Growing up, Jane said, Paul was always an outgoing and spontaneous child. He laughed a lot and was a hard worker. Jane remembers asking Paul, who was in high school at the time, to quit one of his three part-time jobs.

"I wanted to see him once in a while," she said. "But he liked working because it gave him spending money."

Paul joined the Army a few years after graduating from Central Valley High School near Redding, Calif. During basic training, her son was recruited and joined an Army intelligence unit.

It was in late 1967 when Paul left the United States for Vietnam. And throughout his 13-month tour of duty, Jane said they knew very little about what their son was doing. The couple of letters they received each month from him were upbeat as he talked about his friends there and some of the things he saw. Jane said she sent him "care packages" all the time.

"I sent him banana bread, cookies - you know, the usual stuff," she said.
Those letters are now in one of the bedroom closets, sealed in a box.

"Maybe one day, I will be able to go through them again," she said. "Right now, it's still too painful."

When Paul returned home in the spring of 1970, Jane was happy. But he didn't stay for long. Paul decided to go back to Vietnam and this time he wanted to fly helicopters.

Paul's love of flying was nothing new, Jane said. He persuaded his parents to let him take flying lessons right after his high school graduation.

Jane remembers going to visit Paul a few months after he started training in Fort Worth, Texas. She said he called her and asked her to come visit and make him tacos and guacamole.

A few days later, Jane boarded a Greyhound bus in Tucson, Ariz., where the family had recently moved, to go see her son. When she walked off the bus, Paul was waiting with a military vehicle to chauffeur her to the house he was watching for friends. Jane chuckled as she reminisced about her son's behavior while he drove her across the base.

"He kept yelling, 'My mom's here!' at all these guys - his friends," she said.
A few hours later, Paul - and all of his friends - converged on the house for tacos and guacamole.

"They just kept coming and coming," she said with a laugh.

In the few days she was there, Jane said she and Paul also went to church and she helped him with his Christmas shopping.

"He never had any money except on payday," she said.

She didn't know it was the last time she would ever see her son.

After completing almost nine months of his second tour, Jane said Paul was excited about returning home for good and said so in what turned out to be his last two letters to his parents.

"He said, 'It looks like I'm going to make it,'" Jane said quietly, as her eyes glistened with pooling tears.

Paul also asked Jim to get a new clutch and insurance for his "baby" - a 1969 Plymouth Barracuda.

"(Paul) had burned it out racing before he left," his 81-year-old mother said with a smile.

"On 1 March 1971, Warrant Officer Paul V. Black and Warrant Officer Robert D. Uhl were flying a UH-1H Helicopter, with two passengers aboard, on a combat mission," states a narrative from the Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Hawaii. "The helicopter ... was hit by ground fire, crashed and burned ... approximately 45 kilometers east of Kampong Cham (Cambodia).

"The pilot of another helicopter in the area did not see anyone exiting the helicopter before and after it crashed. A ground search team subsequently recovered the remains of Warrant Officer Uhl and the two passengers. No trace of Warrant Officer Black could be found."

Jane heard the news a few days later, when Army officers tracked down Jim at the Greyhound station in Tucson. Jim called Jane at the post office where she worked and told her to come home immediately.

"I've got bad news," he told her.

Even though both her sons were in Vietnam at the time, Jane was positive the bad news concerned her eldest boy.

"I knew it was about Paul," Jane added. "I always knew it would be him. He was in intelligence. Darryl wasn't."

She didn't believe Jim at first, until two Army officers came back later that night to talk to her in person. What they told her is still etched in her memory.

"They said, 'He's been shot down and is missing in action. It doesn't look good,'" Jane said.

"You can never prepare for that kind of news," she added.

Darryl, who had joined the U.S. Air Force in 1970, heard the news about a week later from his first sergeant while he was stationed in Cam Rahn Bay as a liquid fuels specialist. Paul had traveled to the base only three months earlier to spend a day with him, Darryl recalled in a phone interview Thursday night. The two spent the evening catching up and Paul stocked up on supplies.
"We had as much fun as you could at Cam Rahn Bay," he said with a chuckle.
The next morning, Paul returned to his own base.

After learning the news of his brother's helicopter crash, Darryl said he was given new orders and sent back to the states.

Paul was officially listed by the military as "missing in action." Many years later, Jane said, his status was changed to "killed in action, body not recovered."

But the story didn't end there for the Blacks.

In September 1995, the Army began building a case file about Paul's mission with the hope of working with the Cambodian government to find the location and survey the area for human remains.

A joint team comprising U.S. and Cambodian specialists returned to Kampong Cham province and found two witnesses to the incident, said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Prisoner of War/Missing in Action office in Washington. The information the team found correlated to the information the Army had about Paul's helicopter crash, Greer added.

A month later, a group of experts began excavating the site. They found small fragments of human remains and personal items from the crew members aboard the helicopter.

In January 1996, the team submitted a tooth for DNA testing. Jane said that was when the Army contacted her and asked her to submit a blood sample that could be used for DNA comparisons. Officials also contacted the families of the other three crewmen aboard to provide samples.

Months later, Jane learned her sample wasn't a match. The tooth didn't belong to Paul.

Over the next few years, several more fragments and a few teeth were submitted for DNA testing. Each time, Jane was notified she wasn't a match, a pattern that continued through January of this year.

Then, in April she received a call from an Army mortician.

"He said they had a positive ID on my son," Jane said. "I said, 'How can you when in January you still had nothing new?' I didn't believe him."

The man said a match had been made between a bone and teeth to her DNA and he wanted to come see her in person.

"I told him, 'No he wasn't (coming),'" she said. "Jim couldn't handle it."
Instead, she told him to contact Darryl.

Darryl said Army officials came to his Houston-area home in May and they began planning Paul's burial. Due to the summer heat and coordinating the schedules of the four soldiers' families involved, a fall burial was planned.
Coincidentally, the burial will take place on Friday during National POW/MIA Recognition Day and the ceremony will be held at Arlington National Cemetery.
"It's going to be an emotional event," Darryl said. "It's going to bring closure for me. I've always had these thoughts lingering in my mind. ... Paul was working on (National Security Administration) intelligence missions. Maybe he's out there in a covert situation. Who knows? So for me, this will bring closure to it."

In addition to his parents, Darryl said his two sisters, a few grandchildren and even some cousins will be attending the full military burial at the expense of the Army.

"I think this will be the most meaningful thing for those who will be attending and for my dad," Darryl said. "He's never accepted it. He can't deal (with Paul's death). Hopefully, this will help him move on."

For Jane, the discovery has been bittersweet. Her son's body has been officially identified and she is grateful for all the Army officials have done.
But it is still hard to believe it is her Paul, Jane said.

"(The Army) say it is Paul, but I don't know," she said. "I guess I will always question it because we don't have a body to bury. That's what makes it hard. I can't see that it's really him."

She said Thursday's memorial service and Friday's burial will provide her with some solace and closure.
"This helps," she said.

© 2003 Southwestern Oregon Publishing Company"