Re: I Never Forgot You

Date: May 22, 2004

"POW who died in captivity buried after 34 years
Associated Press

BREMOND, Texas - It has been more than 30 years since Dennis Hammond died in captivity during the Vietnam War.

Saturday, friends and family were finally able to lay the former Army helicopter door gunner to rest in Bremond.

Hammond was shot down and captured just eight days before he was to leave Vietnam. He suffered a gunshot wound to his calf in a later escape attempt and never completely recovered.

Fellow prisoner of war Jim Pfister of Carmi, Ill., said he helped bury Hammond, who was beaten and bound after being recaptured. Hammond, who was from Bremond but grew up in Detroit, died in 1970 after being held two years.

Pfister was released in March 1973. He declined to return to Vietnam as part of a search and recovery team, but he sketched a map of the area where he had buried bodies, including Hammond's. Searchers found the grave in 1989, but officials believed the remains belonged to an aboriginal Montangard tribesman.

In January, a DNA comparison matched his tooth with sister Carlene Tackitt's blood sample, and his body was returned to Central Texas for burial. About 200 people gathered to remember him at the memorial service.

"It's just overwhelming," Pfister said. "It's slowly starting to catch up with me that he's resting here now. I just absorbed 34 years in an hour and a half."

Andy Anderson, 56, an Arlington High School teacher and Vietnam veteran, wore Hammond's prisoner of war/missing in action bracelet for about 20 years. Anderson gave the bracelet to Tackitt on Saturday.

"It's truly a celebration," Anderson said of the service.

Hammond's mother, Opal died in 1981, and his father, Ernest, died in 1994, Tackitt said. His brother William Hammond of Howell, Mich., pressed through storm delays in the Midwest while flying to the burial.

"He's where he belongs now," William Hammond said. "He's at rest."

As "Turn, Turn, Turn," played in the background, a slide presentation at the service showed snapshots of Hammond's life from age 3 to his last days in Vietnam.

Childhood friend and writer Jasper Garrison of Detroit paid his final respects. He remembered his first meeting with Hammond well.

"He was the first friend I made in school," Garrison said after the graveside service. "Dennis smiled and I saw the little gap in his teeth. I smiled, and he saw mine."

Garrison dedicated his book, "The Invisible Warriors," about Vietnam and the media to Hammond.

The dedication reads: "For Dennis. I never forgot you.""