News-Info-Alerts

Re: Civilians Still Missing

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: November 21, 2003

"Neither POW Nor MIA, 34 Civilians Still Missing in Southeast Asia

BY DRU SEFTON c.2003 Newhouse News Service

Now that Charles Dean's body is being returned to his family -- which includes brother Howard Dean, Democratic presidential contender -- the list of civilians missing from the Vietnam War drops to 34.

They were physicians, engineers, teachers, missionaries, journalists or, like Charles Dean, just traveling through. Then they were gone.

Americans know well the military designations of Prisoner of War and Missing in Action. The Defense Department still is searching for more than 1,800 Americans from the Vietnam era. These include the 34 categorized as "unaccounted for United States civilian citizens."

"They're a small number but just as important to their families as everyone else," said Larry Greer, spokesman for the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office at the Pentagon.

An "astounding" number of civilians -- several thousand -- lived, worked and traveled in Vietnam, said Ron Rexilius, assistant professor of history at Houston Baptist University. The son of missionaries in Vietnam, he wrote a dissertation titled "Americans Without Dog Tags: U.S. Civilians in the Vietnam War, 1950-1975."

There is scant information about them. "Their story is yet untold," said Rexilius, who was born in Saigon in 1962.

Civilians disappeared throughout Southeast Asia. Charles Dean, 24, was on the Mekong River in September 1974 when he and a friend were captured by guerrillas. Physician Eleanor Ardel Vietti and two colleagues were kidnapped by Viet Cong from a leprosy hospital near Ban Me Thuot in South Vietnam on Memorial Day, 1962. Photojournalist Dana Stone was last seen in Cambodia in April 1970.

Phillipe Ritter remembers well Dec. 27, 1971, the day his father, pilot George Ritter, vanished.

Phillipe was 16, living with his parents and three siblings in Laos. His father was flying for Air America, a fleet of planes (secretly owned by the CIA) that dropped food and supplies and helped transport wounded troops and refugees.

"I was the first one in my family told," said Ritter, now living in Fort Worth, Texas.

That day, he was at the airport restaurant with friends. "Somebody from Air America pulled me into the office," he recalled. "I was in shock. Basically, they didn't know what had happened."

Now Ritter is a board member of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, based in Arlington, Va. Its membership, about 1,000 relatives of the missing, work to keep the issue alive while struggling to put their own grief to rest.

"I always told myself that if my father came back, he wouldn't have wanted me to ruin my life with this," Ritter said. "And I have seen lives ruined."

In 1995, wreckage was found that was thought to be Ritter's plane.

But no remains.

Greer said evidence dictates when recovery teams are sent to check a site. Sometimes timing also dictates the decision, as with Charles Dean.

That site, a rice paddy in Laos, "was soon to be developed with roadways and buildings, so the recovery moved up in priority," Greer said.

Whether military or civilian makes no difference.

"We look at them as Americans, and our job is to bring Americans home," Greer said.

Civilians played a larger role in Vietnam than people realize, said Steve Judycki, head of the CivSEA Project, an effort to locate civilians who worked in Southeast Asia back then. (On the Web at www.civsea.org)

His father, Raymond Judycki, was a field service representative for the Hamilton Standard Division of United Aircraft, specializing in jet engines on Chinook helicopters. He survived both a mortar attack on his base as well as being shot down in a helicopter.

"He came back, but I know first-hand what a sacrifice he and other civilians made during the Vietnam War," said Judycki, of Wilbraham, Mass.

"These civilians made an important contribution to the national security in the 1960s and '70s," he said. "But there is virtually no documentation of their service."

(Dru Sefton can be contacted at dru.sefton@newhouse.com)"