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Re: A Final Honor

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: June 16, 2003

"A FINAL HONOR FOR VIETNAM WAR CASUALTY
By Barbara Feder Ostrov Mercury News


For 35 years, Rebecca Siow missed her husband Gale like a phantom limb: there but not there, the Navy airman who disappeared during the Vietnam War brought pain and uncertainty every time she thought of him.

The San Jose woman has known for some time that her husband perished in 1968, along with eight other crewmen, when his plane crashed in a remote and mountainous region of Laos. But late last month, the Navy arranged for the crew to be buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Gale is coming home. And Siow, at age 60, thinks now she will find the peace she has craved for decades.

On Saturday her younger son Sean flew to Honolulu to escort the remains of a father he never knew to Arlington. There, surrounded by family, Petty Officer 3rd Class Gale Robert Siow will be laid to rest along with the rest of his crew. A group ceremony will take place Wednesday, with Gale's burial on Thursday.

``I never had a chance to grieve,'' Siow recently told the Mercury News, her eyes tearing. ``It will be a relief finally to welcome him back, to find rest in the soil of the country he fought for and loved.''

On a cloudy day in November 1967, Gale Siow hugged his wife and children goodbye at Alameda Naval Air Station on his way to his final mission. He was 27.

Sean was only 1 1/2 years old. Robert, 4, and Elizabeth, 3, were barely old enough to understand what was happening. But Rebecca was worried.

``I've been told it's a slow bird,'' Gale Siow told her earlier. ``I have a feeling somehow I may not come back from this mission.''

Indian bloodline

Gale Siow, part Hopi and part Laguna Indian, had been working as an insurance company accountant in Huntington Park when his brother Larry, a Navy man, urged him to join up. It would give some shape to his life, he said. Larry gave him a crash course in electronics, allowing Gale to start his Navy stint as a radio operator.

Born in Albuquerque and raised in Arizona, Gale Siow had been an easygoing athlete, pole vaulting and running track and playing football at an Indian high school, his widow said. Reserved and meticulous about his work, he ``never raised his voice,'' she said. ``He was such a nice and gentle person.''

His tastes were simple: He drank Bud, liked Chinese food, watched westerns and laughed uproariously at Jerry Lewis and the Three Stooges. Rebecca can't recall why his squadron nicknamed him ``Beaver.''

They had met at a YMCA dance in San Francisco. ``He was just an absolutely stunning young man,'' she recalled. ``I said to myself, `If I ever marry, he's going to look like that one.' ''

She had recently graduated from high school when they began dating in July 1962. She was 19, he 21 when they married. As they bounced from Memphis to Alabama to Alameda as his career progressed, she grew to accept the loneliness of the military wife.

But his absences always stung.

On Jan. 11, 1968, Gale Siow, his fellow crewmen and a mascot dog named Snoopy took off in a Lockheed OP2E from an air base in Thailand. Their plane was designed to drop electronic sensors to detect truck movements along a North Vietnamese supply route through Laos known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Military experts believe the plane, flying through dense clouds, crashed on the side of Phou Louang Mountain in the Khammouane province of Laos, according to the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.

The wreckage was discovered two weeks later. But the remoteness of the crash and continuing enemy fire kept U.S. forces from retrieving the plane or its crew.

The fateful call

Rebecca Siow was in a ceramics class on the base when the call came. A chaplain and two officers asked her to sit down, asked if she needed anti-depressants.

``I couldn't bring myself to cry because there was so much confusion,'' she said.

Within weeks, her husband was presumed dead. But she still wasn't sure he was truly gone, even after a memorial service was held in late January 1968.

``It just didn't hit me,'' she said. ``I tried to find my emotions, but I couldn't find them there.''

After the memorial service, Rebecca was at a loss. How could she work and at the same time raise three children? Traditional in his values, her husband had discouraged her from having a career.

The Alameda military community was a comfort, but she wanted to make a fresh start. She bought a home in the Cambrian district, but felt her husband's absence even more keenly amid the sympathy and casseroles from neighborhood homemakers who all had husbands.

Rebecca Siow and her children moved several times, as she tried on different careers like sweaters: cosmetologist, travel agent, receptionist at a Stanford sleep laboratory.

The Navy would send letters updating her husband's case. Because of the family's moves, she didn't get all of the letters. Unlike other squadron wives, she didn't always keep in touch with the Navy officer assigned to her husband's case, something she now regrets.

Lots of questions

``There was always a `but,' a little question,'' she said. ``Was it the actual plane? They did not know for sure. It was very frustrating.''

When the Navy considered calling off the search, ``that was the bottom,'' she said. ``Here we are in America, with all of its technology, and it's too dangerous to bring Gale home? My husband and his crew gave their lives for this country.''

But the Navy reversed its decision. From 1993 to 2002, a series of missions retrieved the plane and the remains of its occupants.

Gale's sister, Jo Anne McKenzie, and Rebecca's daughter donated samples of DNA to help the Navy identify him. There wasn't much left to work with, just a small section of his femur and part of his jaw, along with an identification card.

In the meantime, there were certain joys, such as son Robert's marriage in 2001, and larger tragedies: daughter Elizabeth, 38, died of liver and kidney failure in February.

Gale's death did not change his family's views on the justness of the Vietnam War, or any war.

``They did a job they were trained for,'' Robert Siow said. ``He lost his life for us, his family, his country.''

Now, with the Navy's missing-in-action case #0982 finally complete, there is pride, remembrance, a sense of finality.

``There's closure now,'' Robert Siow said. ``We just didn't think our dad would ever come home.''
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An account of the OP2E crash and its crew can be found at www.cilhi.army.mil/OP2EIdentified.htm

Mercury News wire services contributed to this report. Contact Barbara Feder Ostrov at bfeder@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5064. "