Re: Missing 38 Years, Coming Home

Date: May 21, 2004

"NH Vietnam airman's remains ID'd

By RILEY YATES Union Leader Staff

MANCHESTER — Exactly 38 years after going missing in action in Vietnam, a Manchester man will get a burial.

Air Force Airman First Class Phillip Joseph Stickney was just 28 when he was among those aboard a cargo plane shot down May 31, 1966, during a special bombing mission aimed at destroying a bridge in Thanh Hoa, North Vietnam. He left behind a wife, three sons and a daughter.

He was one of eight New Hampshire men still missing since the war.

Stickney’s remains were repatriated in January 1998 and identified Feb. 10, 2004, according to the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.

Lt. Col. Don Kimminau, the commander of the 62nd Airlift Squadron in Little Rock, Ark., said yesterday that Stickney will be buried in Little Rock on Memorial Day. Kimminau is searching for details of Stickney’s life and trying to locate his family.

Stickney would have been 66. His eldest son, Phillip, would be 49; his youngest, Jeffrey, 39. Newspaper reports written when Stickney went missing said the family was living in Tennessee, where Stickney was based before going to Vietnam.

A plaque in his honor is still at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 8214 on Manchester’s Kelly Street. Years ago, the post made plaques for the 16 Vietnam veterans missing at the time. His name is also on a plaque at the State Armory on Canal Street.

All but two of the VFW plaques have since been given to family members. The other remaining is for Air Force Col. Gerald Robert Helmich, who went missing in Laos on Nov. 12, 1969.

“Stickney was one of them that we could never find any family for,” said Robert St. Onge of Manchester, a past state commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Onge said he hopes he’ll be able to track down Stickney’s relatives now that his remains have been found.

Bob Williams of Manchester knows Stickney’s name well. Since December 2002, Williams has met with others who served in Vietnam at Veteran’s Park in Manchester on the first Wednesday of every month. There, they read the names of MIAs from New Hampshire.

“When they find remains and they’re identified as the remains of that person, it gives closure,” said Williams, an organizer of the annual Walk of Awareness to remember POWs and MIAs. “And now the husband, father, son is home, it’s a closure to that chapter. We want closure to all these chapters.”

Williams first heard about the recovery of Stickney’s remains from a friend in Rolling Thunder, a veterans motorcycle club. The friend was doing Internet searches and the name jumped out at him.

“It stuck right out in his mind,” Williams said. “He said, ‘Hey, that guy’s from Manchester’

“The reason we read the names is that when we read the paper, when we are on the computer, the names will pop out at us and we’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, I know that guy,’” Williams said.

Williams keeps an old list of the POWs and MIAs, one that shows 78,000 in the U.S. from World War II, 8,000 from the Korean War, 2,300 from Vietnam and 23 from the Persian Gulf War. Add that to 3,000 from World I, he said, and you almost have the population of Manchester.

“Taken together just think of that,” Williams said. “Manchester would be a ghost town.”

Mike Lopez, an at-large alderman and a retired Army master sergeant, keeps a 1982 list of Vietnam servicemen missing in action. It has the names of two men whose remains have since been found — William Pearson and Richard Ganley.

Seven remain missing: Helmich, Clyde Alloway, Frank Badolati, Sheldon Burnett, Quinten Mulleavey, Albert Page Jr. and Robert Sullivan.

Stickney had planned to make a career of the service, according to reports published in 1966. He had enlisted in 1956 and was on his last mission before coming home for assignment to a flight school in Virginia. His father, Oscar Stickney, was a World War I veteran.

©The Union Leader"