Re: Saying Goodbye, Again

Date: June 04, 2004

'I Won't See Him Again Until We Get To Heaven'

  By Kevin Reece

SEATTLE - Three days before Memorial Day, three children said goodbye to their father.

Allison Spires of Woodinville and her brothers Allen Musil and Larry Musil were saying goodbye to a man named Clinton Allen Musil Sr. : A man they first tried saying goodbye to 33 years ago.

"I look at that often and think, 'Wow, look at the looks on our faces, we were visibly upset," Allison said of a 33-year-old photograph of herself and her two brothers at a memorial service for their dad. "So we must have known something was wrong."

Something was wrong. The three young children are visibly distraught. Larry is holding a folded American flag. And all three children are standing in front of a photograph of their father. Clinton Allen Musil Sr. didn't come home from Vietnam.

Army Captain Clinton Allen Musil Sr. was a photographer. He took photos of enemy positions from the right side seat of a Grumman OV-1 Mohawk: a twin prop plane with pilot Jack Brunson at the controls.

The plane vanished somewhere in Laos on May 31, 1971 and they became two of the more than 1,800 soldiers and airmen never found even long after the war was over.

Allison and her family were left only with photographs and the fading memories of a girl who was just 3-years old when her dad disappeared.

"I really missed out. I really missed out knowing him," said Allision.

All Allison and her brothers knew, and all they had, was their father's name etched with 58,234 others in the Vietnam Memorial. So every year that they visited the Pentagon for updates on the search for their father, they would sit in front of the Vietnam Wall, light a candle and stare at their father's name until the candle burned out. His name on a wall was as close as they could get to their dad.

Then, in just the last five years, a search team in Laos found pieces of an American plane and they found human remains. And in 2001 DNA would finally prove that Clinton Allen Musil Sr. had finally been found. Three more years would pass before the investigation was closed and their father's remains returned for burial.

"Nothing's been that relieving or comforting and thrilling at the same time as that moment," said Allison. "Because I never thought it would happen."

So those three days before Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery, the children of an Army Captain finally got to say goodbye.

"I think it's just a little bit of us knowing he's here at home, what he died and fought for," said Larry Musil from his home in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

"He was on foreign soil now he's back home where he should be," said Allen Musil.

But what they waited 33 years for wouldn't be easy. They decided to give all but one of the MIA bracelets they'd worn all their lives and put them in the casket with him. And a private letter Allison would write would go in the casket too.

"You know, some things that I wish I could have told him about me," an emotional Allison said just two days before the funeral. "Things I think he'd want to know. We want to touch a part of him one more time. Because you know it's done. I won't see him again until we get to heaven."

But with the goodbye there would also be surprises. In his room in Vietnam, Captain Musil taped pictures of his children to his wall. Those pictures with the tape and his memories still on them are now part of Allison's collection.

And the Army returned an Army flight jacket, in perfect condition, with "Musil" embroidered on the chest. Allison savors a photo of her dad holding her as a little girl. She feels that in way when she wears the jacket she has his arms to hold her again.

"Yeah that's a treasure. It's a girl thing maybe but it's very comforting to put on," she said.

And it proved comforting for the families who waited all these years that Captain Musil and his pilot Jack Brunson would be buried side by side just as they died.

"They are remembered and we need to be thankful for that," said Allison. "I want my kids to be thankful for the price that was paid."

A price paid by soldiers and by their families who sometimes wait a lifetime to say goodbye.

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