Re: One Man's Fight to Bring MIA Home

Date: May 22, 2004

"Veteran fights to bring an MIA home

David Kranz
©2001 Argus Leader

City man takes on system to return Ohio soldier's remains

originally published 5/27/2001

Doug Haugstad could go for years without thinking of his tour of duty in Vietnam.

He suffered no nightmares or lingering mental or physical scars from his part in the steamy jungle conflict 35 years earlier.

But that all changed last spring when the 58-year-old John Morrell & Co. worker returned from Vietnam once again - this time entrusted with two brittle teeth and the charred, bent dog tag of a young Marine named Luther Edmund Ritchey Jr.

The remains were given to Haugstad by a Vietnamese woman who had secured them from a friend - a man looking for treasure among the ruins of a partially submerged helicopter near DaNang. When Haugstad returned this March on a humanitarian mission to aid the handicapped, the same woman presented him with a sandwich bag filled with dusty bones and fragments - also presumed to be Ritchey's. He would learn later that the 20-year-old Marine died Oct. 8, 1963 - the very day he arrived in Vietnam.

While Haugstad was certain he did the right thing by bringing the bones back to the United States for proper identification, he was anxious about the risk he and his wife, Lynne, had taken in removing the remains from Vietnam. And he soon grew frustrated that no one in the U.S. government seemed willing to help.

He called the Department of Defense, other military offices and MIA/POW agencies. No one returned his calls. He contacted Sen. Tom Daschle's staff, and, in June 2000, a Haugstad family acquaintance called the Argus Leader.

"I hear about officials making trips to Vietnam, looking for MIAs, getting publicity, and I have one here in my home, and they don't want it," Haugstad said. "I was frustrated with the government."

Meanwhile, the bag of bones on his kitchen counter served as a constant reminder that an American soldier had not been given the burial he deserved. Haugstad was certain that these remains were authentic and that the people who had turned over the bones were not attempting to deceive him.

"It kinda went through my mind at first, but these people had no reason to lie about it," said Haugstad. "If we were duped, so were they. I'd bet my life on this."

Finally, earlier this month, an official from the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii notified the newspaper and Daschle's staff that tests on the teeth indicated the remains almost certainly were Ritchey's.

Haugstad was relieved, believing that Ritchey's family - 850 miles away in Mansfield, Ohio - would finally learn the news.

The family received a call from a government official two days later, but the person stopped short of telling them about the tests.

So, more than a year after Haugstad brought the first remains home to South Dakota, an Argus Leader reporter visited the family's acreage at the edge of Mansfield and told Ritchey's 80-year-old mother, Dorothy Heslep, and her family that it was highly probable her son's remains had been recovered.

Seated with members of her family, Heslep sat quietly for a time, remembering the moment in 1963 when she received a telegram explaining how her son had gone down in a helicopter and was presumed dead.

"I think this would be closure for me. I kinda believed it when they told me back then," Heslep said of Luther Jr.'s death. "But to have some bits of him back here, that would be important to me."

For Haugstad, the 14-month journey may finally be drawing to an end: Now the pound and a half of human bones on his kitchen counter can be buried properly.

In 1999, Haugstad, along with family and friends, began delivering medical equipment to needy Vietnam villagers.

The country seemed cleaner and the air fresher than when he served there from August 1965 to May 1966 as a pole climber, stringing electrical wire for military units.

On Haugstad's second missionary trip in March 2000, a middle-aged Vietnamese woman approached him in the village of Tuy Hoa, about 100 miles south of DaNang. She told Haugstad that he seemed to be a kind and trusting man and invited him and and his wife into her home. The woman showed them a transparent bag filled with pieces of bones, two teeth and a damaged military dog tag.

" 'Here,' " Haugstad recalled the woman saying. " 'Take them back.' I saw a dog tag and a couple of teeth. The dog tag was tarnished, and it looked like it had been in water for some time, but other than that it was in excellent condition."

The woman explained that her brother had been given the bag and its contents by a friend. She said that friend had discovered a U.S. helicopter, partially submerged in a body of water not far from DaNang, in 1986. Resting on its top and badly burned, the helicopter potentially meant economic treasure for the finder, who sifted through the water gathering up the remains of the crew members.

"The woman told us that his first inclination was to sell them," Doug Haugstad explained, noting that human remains and other artifacts from the war are bought and sold regularly on the black market in Vietnam.

Instead, the man buried the bones, teeth and tag in his back yard and left them there for 14 years.

"But she told us that he was a Christian now, and he wants them to go back to the family," Lynne Haugstad said.

At first, the Haugstads were cautious.

"I was afraid we would get caught with them, because on your passport information it specifically says not to take something like that out of the country," Lynne Haugstad said.

Still, she shared her husband's desire to bring peace to the family of the soldier by identifying the bones. And turning over the remains to the Vietnamese government was out of the question, the woman had told them.

"She feared reprisal and the possibility that the bones would never get back to the United States," Doug Haugstad said.

That's why the woman asked Haugstad to take the parcel. She urged him to make sure the soldier's loved ones gave the remains a decent burial.

"At that point, I said, 'I'm taking the teeth and the dog tag for sure. They're going to go,' " Doug Haugstad said.

He stuck the items in his pocket and returned to Sioux Falls.

When he got home, he placed the teeth and dog tag in a small dish - generally used for coins - that sits amid family photographs on the couple's bedroom dresser.

He then began the double task of making the government care about his find and learning the identity of the missing soldier.

The singed aluminum identification tag read:

Ritchey,
Luther E., Jr.
1928239
O
USMC
Lutheran

It was a starting point.

Proud of opportunity to serve

In October 1963, Dorothy Heslep - then Dorothy Ritchey - lived with her husband, Luther Sr., in Mansfield, Ohio, a blue-collar automobile factory town of about 49,500 people, 70 miles south of Cleveland. Her four children were grown, and the youngest, Luther Jr., 20, was a U.S. Marine who had just been assigned to duty in Vietnam.

A Yellow Cab driver brought a telegram to the front door of her big white house at 168 Arthur Ave. The message explained that her son had been involved in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. Military officials had not recovered the aircraft and feared there were no survivors.

Shock consumed her.

"The driver didn't leave me until my son Don came home," Heslep recalled in an interview last week.

Soon, the government classified Luther Ritchey Jr. as "Missing and Presumed Dead." The family held a memorial service Oct. 19, 1963, 11 days after the crash.

Heslep has boxes of medals that have been awarded to the family posthumously. Ritchey's name is engraved in the cultured black granite Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., a small cross denoting that he is still missing.

Friends who visit the memorial bring her pictures and rubbings of her son's name. She keeps them all.

She also treasures a large painting of the son she calls Junior, dressed in his Marine uniform, a helicopter hovering overhead. The young Ritchey had joined the Marines in 1961, shortly after graduating from high school, Heslep explained.

"He was so proud of the opportunity to serve, proud of his uniform," his mother said. "You never saw a wrinkle on it."

Frustrating search

Haugstad had made calls trying to find a starting point in his quest to identify the remains. He was getting nowhere.

After weeks awaiting a response from the Prisoner of War/Missing Person office in the Pentagon, Haugstad contacted Sen. Tom Daschle's office in Washington, D.C.

In April 2000, he handed over the dog tag and teeth to Mark Gerhardt, a Daschle aide who works in Sioux Falls. A Daschle staffer then carried the items to Washington, D.C., and turned them over to the Department of Defense's missing persons office.

Haugstad was hopeful for a resolution, but weeks passed again with no answers.

So he continued his own search.

Haugstad's son, Lance, learned of Roger Andal, a Brandon resident and Vietnam veteran known for his work on behalf of veterans.

"I was taken aback by the fact that there were remains right here in Sioux Falls," Andal said. "But what knocked me off my feet was that no one had responded to him."

Andal called Daschle's Washington office and spoke with Nancy Erickson, a high school classmate who works on the senator's staff.

Things suddenly began to move.

Within 24 hours of that call, Haugstad got a response from the Defense Department..

"The man told me, 'I get this stuff all the time.' "

Replied Haugstad: "You don't get this kind of stuff all the time."

Then the Department of Defense representative began asking questions in an almost accusatory tone, Haugstad said.

"He wanted the names of the people I was with and who gave it (the sack of remains) to us. I told them he wouldn't be getting that."

Haugstad was told the identification process could take six months to a year, since the bones had to be sent to the Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu. That lab is designed to handle the identification of missing military personnel.

While relieved to finally have a response, Haugstad was far from satisfied.

"It made me real mad," he said. "They probably thought I was some spook, some kind of idiot. But I told them, 'I think this is the Real McCoy.' "

More than 11 months would pass before the laboratory provided an answer.

The mystery

In the meantime, Lance Haugstad, 26, began working the Internet, putting together a profile of Luther E. Ritchey Jr. He found the official record of the 1963 crash.

"Lance Corporal Luther E. Ritchey Jr., Mansfield, Ohio, attached to HMM 361 Marine Air Group 16. Crewman in a helicopter conducting a search mission for a downed friendly aircraft," the report read.

Lance Haugstad also learned that another Marine, Manuel Reyes Denton, was a crewman with Ritchey on the helicopter. The report does not say who was piloting, nor does it mention other passengers. But it pinpoints the crash site, 43 miles west of DaNang in mountainous jungle terrain, an area considered enemy territory.

Ten bodies eventually were recovered from the site. Ritchey and Denton were not among them.

Military officials later told Ritchey's family members that the young Marine had volunteered to be a part of the search mission.

"That was like him to do that," Ritchey's sister Carolyn Izer said.

Waiting in Mansfield

The Ritchey family have spent most of their lives in and around Mansfield.

Around the city, it is common to see signs supporting unions in disputes with management. Flexible plastic cards displaying the Ten Commandments are posted on lawns the way political signs are planted at election time.

Townspeople prefer the Cleveland Indians to the Cincinnati Reds on the baseball diamond, but they divide their support for the Browns and Bengals on the football field. A General Motors metal fabricating division is the top employer in town, with 2,400 workers.

In addition to his mother, Ritchey's brothers, Don Ritchey and Sam McCracken, and sister Carolyn Izer live in the Mansfield area.

His father died in 1981. His mother has remarried, and she and her husband, George Heslep, now live with Carolyn and Ron Izer on an acreage at the city's edge.

Ritchey's family hadn't heard anything about Luther's status for a long time, and they are resigned to the fact that he is dead.

They're skeptical of reports about the crash investigation, the finding of remains from the site or any possible sightings of their son because of false hopes that have been dashed in the past.

They recounted several scam attempts - opportunists who tried to cash in on the family's grief - that have bruised their trust.

"Mom was harassed more than once," said Carolyn Izer. "There was a call about the bones. They wanted money for them ... $2,500."

About five years after the accident, the family was confronted with an even more bizarre scheme.

"Some character called at 10 minutes to 5 in the morning, talked about some kind of seance," Heslep said. "He told me he knew where Junior was and wanted us to make this meeting. He told me that the Chinese had kidnapped him, and they had him in a cave. They would let him out long enough to work, and then you had to go back in the cave."

Added Donald Ritchey, "For a tidy sum, they said, his freedom could be bought."

The Ritchey family turned the information over to the FBI.

The family's last false alarm occurred in 1997, when the Marines asked Heslep for a DNA sample to match with a discovery of remains. The samples did not match.

Because of those experiences, the family was skeptical when the Argus Leader called to discuss Luther Ritchey Jr.'s life.

A return to Vietnam

About three months ago, almost a year to the day after he had returned with the dog tag and teeth, Doug and Lance Haugstad returned to Vietnam on another charitable trip. They hoped to retrieve the plastic bag that held the rest of the soldier's bones.

Although the identity of the teeth still had not been substantiated, Doug Haugstad felt it was important for the Ritchey family to eventually have as much of the remains as possible.

Anticipating another meeting with the Vietnamese woman, Haugstad was anxious. He wondered if his contact with the U.S. government might have made him a target of observation on this trip. The Haugstads saw the woman during their two-week visit, but there was no sign that she was ready to turn over the remains.

Finally, as they were preparing to leave the airport, the woman walked up and handed Doug Haugstad a small multicolored box containing the familiar plastic sack of bone fragments.

Doug Haugstad put the sack in his pocket and headed toward the gate.

"When we were going through the security check to get on the plane, I was standing behind Dad. Someone started asking him questions about what was in his pocket," Lance Haugstad recalled. " When I saw what was happening, I tried to set it off (the metal detector), and it wouldn't go. Dad was pretty scared. I was nervous, too."

Doug Haugstad convinced the airport security guard that the materials in the bag were something akin to chicken bones, and the guard allowed the men to pass through.

Back in Sioux Falls, the Haugstads decided this last grouping of remains wasn't going anywhere until they were certain someone in the government would take action.

With still no word on whether the teeth he had turned over a year earlier matched the name on the dog tag, Haugstad placed the plastic sack on the kitchen counter under a white wall telephone and went on with his life.

Haugstad a 'real hero'

Andal acknowledged that the Haugstads took some risks in retrieving Ritchey's remains.

"He did what every soldier in combat believes," Andal said. "Don't leave anyone behind, whether living or dead. The most admirable thing you can do is bring them home."

Larry Greer, a spokesperson for the defense department's POW/MIA office, said that there are risks in removing remains from Vietnam. But Vietnamese and Americans should not feel threatened about turning similar items over to the government.

"It is forbidden for civilians or private citizens to be trafficking human remains," Greer said. "If they cooperate with us, we work with agreed-upon procedures. We have Vietnam citizens who turn remains over to their government, our leaders, all the time and have no knowledge of anyone suffering because of it."

Lance Haugstad was on edge that day at the airport security check, but he knew how important this mission was for his father.

"When I saw him getting frustrated about this, it was like I had never seen him before," he said. "He has always been the calmest individual I have ever known. ... He is a standup guy in my book, and I respect no one more."

Added Andal: "Doug is the real hero. He has the satisfaction of bringing someone back who probably would have never come back. How many people would say, 'I'm going to get involved'?"

Reasonably sure

Finally, in telephone calls to the Argus Leader and to Daschle's Sioux Falls office earlier this month, the news came.

"We are reasonably sure the teeth are Luther Ritchey's," said Johnie )Webb, a Vietnam veteran and deputy director of the Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu. "There is a high probability that these are his remains."

An undisturbed tooth, like the one Haugstad had given the laboratory, is the best source for a positive identification, Webb said. It had been compared with Ritchey's dental records.

But, Webb said, the lab needs a little more time and information before the remains can be identified with 100 percent certainty. He said the next step likely would be excavation of the crash site, a mission that would involve an anthropologist searching for more bones.

Webb didn't know about the plastic bag in Haugstad's kitchen. Those contents could be the key to final identification, Webb said. They also will help determine if some of the bones belong to Denton, the other soldier in the helicopter.

Daschle will be in Sioux Falls this week, and Haugstad hopes to hand the bag of remains to the incoming U.S. Senate majority leader, hoping that the senator's newfound power will expedite the case.

"This certainly was one of the most unusual matters that I have been involved with," said Gerhardt, the senator's aide. "It is gratifying that Daschle's office was able to play a small role in bringing closure to the Ritchey family's years of pain and uncertainty."

Ironically, Webb, whose agency has frustrated Haugstad for months, also is eager to get the bones.

"I have been dejected to see too many times the loss of a family member while they are waiting (for word)," Webb said.

Memories of Junior Ritchey

Mementos of Luther Ritchey Jr.'s childhood are easy to find in Heslep's home.

If he'd lived, he would be 58 today - the same age as Doug Haugstad.

Ritchey's 1961 Union High School diploma is there. So are the pictures of him as a youngster and as a teen-age boy with his 1957 red-and-white Chevy.

Family members recall Luther's love of farm life and his jobs at Fort's Garage and delivering pizzas. He was gregarious and made friends easily.

The Defense Department's Greer said the Marine Corps would bury Ritchey with honors, "if that is what the family wishes."

But Heslep isn't sure she wants a full military ceremony.

"I would have our minister say some prayers, some words, and have him interred, but not an official service," she said. "So many people, family and friends are gone."

Doug, Lynne and Lance Haugstad would like to attend the service, and the Ritcheys say that might be possible. In the meantime, the Vermillion Township Cemetery in Hayesville, Ohio, is where they go to find solitude.

Each Memorial Day, Donald Ritchey makes the 20-mile drive from his home in Ontario, Ohio, to place flowers at the tombstone his little brother shares with his father; his mother also will be buried there.

Chiseled words on the light gray stone record a father's death and document the life and death of his namesake son, "Luther E. Ritchey, Jr., 1943-1963, killed in Vietnam."

A mother's peace

If Heslep's son's remains do come home, it will mean one more farewell.

As she reminisces about her youngest son, Heslep recalls that he was different from most children.

"I could have a box of chocolates sitting on the coffee table, and he would never touch them," she said. "But he loved carrots and vegetables."

Often, as she stood cleaning vegetables in the sink, Junior would come up from behind. He'd put his arm across his mother's shoulder while reaching under her arm to get the carrots.

"About five years after it happened, I came down the stairs, ready to go out the back door with my neighbors," said Heslep. "I stopped in the middle of the living room. No door was open. No furnace was running. An arm came across the back of my shoulder.

"I stood there paralyzed. I knew it was my son. I never saw him, but I know it was him. He was the only person who did that," she said. "I knew then it was final."

Reach reporter David Kranz at dkranz[at]argusleader[dot]com or 331-2302"