Lost and Found - Giving Families Hope
Ken Raymond - The Daily Oklahoman
Lost & found; Modern science and old-fashioned hard work are filling in the gaps in the history books - and giving the families of missing service members hope.
For 35 years, Oklahoma City resident Patricia Slattery sought information about her brother's death, but the details seemed to have vanished when he did.
All Slattery knew was that his U.S. Army helicopter, struck by ground fire, crashed in Vietnam in April 1969 - and while others onboard escaped, her brother, William Konyu, didn't. July 31, though, Slattery attended a meeting at the Westin Hotel in downtown Oklahoma City. The meeting, sponsored by the U.S. Defense Department and agencies under its umbrella, brought families of missing service members together with those who are trying to bring them home.
Suddenly, Slattery had more information than she ever expected. In one document, all the details emerged - not only of her brother's death, but of government efforts to find him.
With the document came a realization.
"They're here for us," the New Jersey native said. "They're here for the people who lost loved ones." And they're still looking.
The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) has the responsibility of trying to recover lost American service members from the Persian Gulf War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Korean War and World War II. "It's a great job," said Johnnie Webb, senior adviser to JPAC. "I think it is important."
Formed in 2003 from the union of the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory and the Joint Task Force - Full Accounting, JPAC boasts 425 civilian and military personnel and an impressive array of resources, equipment and laboratories.
Six investigative teams, working on information gathered by historians and analysts, seek information leading to promising sites, and 18 recovery teams launch painstaking searches under often-arduous conditions.
"It's especially difficult working in an environment like North Korea," Webb said. "We're relying on technology, relying on capabilities that didn't exist before. We're doing recoveries in places where they couldn't get to back in World War II."
Since reclamation efforts started in 1973, recoveries include the remains of more than 775 service members in Korea and Vietnam and the excavation of a World War II plane - with an Oklahoman among its crew - that crashed into a mountain in Tibet.
Webb, like others involved in the search, travels to a different city each month to participate in a briefing - called a "Family Update" - for relatives of the lost. The regional gathering last weekend attracted families living within 300 miles of Oklahoma City. About 100 people attended.
Upcoming regional meetings will be in Denver; Hartford, Conn.; Portland, Ore.; and Orlando, Fla. National meetings are held each summer, usually in Washington, D.C., and draw about 1,000 people.
Deanna Klenda is usually among them.
"I started in 1983, started going to the National League of Families meetings with my parents," said Klenda, a Kansas resident who attended the Oklahoma City meeting. "I've been going ever since." In 1965, Klenda's brother, an F-105 pilot in the Air Force, ejected from his plane after ground fire struck it over North Vietnam. His parachute failed to open and he plunged into the jungle.
His remains have not been found.
Klenda said she has little hope her brother survived, but in a way, the family updates and the JPAC staff help her keep his memory alive. "They're like a part of him," Klenda said, crying. "They just are a part of him, and I've looked forward to this meeting, even though I just saw everyone at the national meeting in June, and it's going to be really sad leaving today because I won't see these people again until next June, and it just fills a void for me.
"I don't think they realize how much they give me. It's a warm fuzzy that I can only get from these people."
Something from nothing The Oklahoma City briefing was Slattery's first. If she has her way, it won't be the last. For decades, Slattery knew only the roughest outline of her brother's death. She didn't even know anyone was trying to find him. Now she knows more. A summary of her brother's case was provided to her at the briefing. According to that document:
About 1:30 p.m. on April 16, 1969, her brother - William Konyu, 22 - was piloting a UH-1H helicopter on a combat insertion mission into a landing zone. Three other crew members and some passengers were aboard. As the helicopter neared the landing spot, enemy fire erupted from the front and left.
"The windshield on the right side shattered," the summary indicates, "and ... Konyu screamed and threw his hands up to his face as he slumped forward over the controls. He lost control of the aircraft, and it crashed ... rolling on its left side and burning."
The others on board were rescued, but Konyu could not be reached amid the fire. When searchers returned four days later, his body was gone.
Since 1991, developments have been made in Konyu's case, the summary shows.
Among them are "credible" reports that a Vietnamese man found one of Konyu's dog tags, a St. Christopher medallion and two bones near the crash site in 1990.
For Slattery, the news is simultaneously painful, welcome and overwhelming. "For 35 years, I didn't hear anything," Slattery said. "The first couple of years, I thought he was still alive. Then after that, I thought if he was alive, he'd somehow let me know, but there was nothing. "And now there's something."