News-Info-Alerts

Re: 9 Navy Crewmen Identified

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: May 29, 2003

"Waiting over for Vietnam victim's family
Purvis man's remains return 35 years later

Janet Braswell
American Senior Writer jbraswell@hattiesb.gannett.com

Burial ceremonies next month at Arlington National Ceremony will end 35 years of waiting for the families of a Purvis man and eight other Navy crewmen killed in Vietnam.

The remains of Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael L. Roberts and eight others will be turned over to their families June 12 at the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory Hawaii .

"The wonderful thing is that all nine men perished and all nine remains have been identified," said Susie Hester of Canton, Roberts sister. "I'm going to Hawaii to escort the body back. I will actually get to view his remains."

A group burial will be held June 18 at Arlington followed by burial of remains identified as Roberts' at 3 p.m. the same day.

"Maybe we can, at some time, have a memorial," said Glen Chambliss of Hattiesburg, a classmate in the Purvis High School class of 1962. "We just had our class reunion, and his name always comes up. It is a comfort to know that his body has been found."

Roberts and his fellow Navy crewmen in Observation Squadron 67 left Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand on Jan. 11, 1968, to drop sensors that would detect enemy troop movements along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

"The mission was very secretive," Hester said. "It only became unclassified about three years ago. They lost three crews. His crew was not the only one to perish."

A search plane spotted the suspected crash site 12 days later on the northern side of Phou Louang Mountain, 150 feet below its 4,583-foot summit about 13 miles from the Laos/North Vietnamese border.

Aerial surveillance showed the fuselage scattered down the face of the mountain. Bodies, including that of the squadron's mascot, were seen among the wreckage.

"He was just a little dog, their mascot, a black and white mutt named Snoopy," Hester said.

On Feb. 23, 1968, the crew's status was changed from missing in action to killed in action/bodies not recovered.

"The Navy notified us immediately that he was missing," said Roberts' brother, Jack Roberts of Purvis. "They told us some of the circumstances. It was settled in our minds a long time ago.

"I had mixed emotions about spending the time and effort to recover all the remains. I didn't want anybody else to get killed. We had had closure a long time ago."

Mike Roberts, the middle of five children, would be 58. His siblings - Jack Roberts, 67; Bill Roberts, 63, of Jackson; Hester, 52; and Lynn Amacker, 43, of Brandon - will attend the ceremonies at Arlington.

"He was a little brother always," Jack Roberts said. "He led a pretty hard life with two older brothers. He was a good kid, never in any trouble. He liked to play ball. He went to Purvis and played football, basketball and baseball."

Mike Roberts was vice president of his senior class and a member of the Beta Club and Student Council.

"That was the last year Purvis sponsored a senior trip," said classmate Myrtis Cayten of Purvis. "We rode chartered buses to Gatlinburg. He was just like the rest of us, excited about getting out of school."

Hester was 17 when her brother was killed. "Being a teenager, it was hard, but you really don't realize the magnitude until you get older," she said. "I remember he always played tricks on me and was always teasing me about things. I never knew what to believe. That's just an older brother."

After graduating from Purvis High School, Mike Roberts attended Pearl River Community College, rooming with Hattiesburg businessman Sidney Malone.

"I still think about him a lot," Malone said. "He was a good friend. We double dated a lot. (The girls) were best friends in nursing school in New Orleans. They'd have to be in at 10 o'clock, and then we'd go out on the town."

The 1964 PRCC Wildcat annual lists Roberts' major as pre-engineering.

"When he got out of Pearl River, he really didn't know what he wanted to do so he thought he'd do time in a branch of the military until he got settled," Jack Roberts said. "He picked the Navy and it went from there."

Mike Roberts was on his second Vietnam tour when he died.

Members of the Joint Task Force for Full Accounting made the first recovery mission to Phou Louang Mountain in 1996 but decided the terrain was too dangerous to attempt retrieval of the remains. Full-scale recovery missions by the Central Identification Laboratory Hawaii in 2001 and 2002 resulted in identification of all nine crewmen.

Mike Roberts' remains, including a collar bone, part of a jaw bone and teeth, were identified through DNA on Dec. 20, 2002.

"Once they've identified everybody, they stop and everything that's left over is buried as a group," Hester said.

The military burial next month will bring an end to her brother's journey home, Hester said.

"When they found his dog tags, that was the thing," she said. "I had always prayed that I'd have something physical, something intact. The dog tags were recovered completely intact. You can see where they're burned."

© 2003 Hattiesburg American"