Re: Remains Identified from Laos

Date: January 17, 2004

"Pentagon confirms Minnesota soldier's remains found, recovered in Laos

The Associated Press

Clinton Allen Musil Sr. had been missing since May 31, 1971, when his military helicopter was shot down while on a reconnaissance flight over Laos.

On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that the remains of the Minneapolis soldier had been recovered, bringing relief to a family that spent 33 years wondering.

“It’s just an incredible thing to finally know for sure,” Musil’s son, Larry, said Thursday. “I’m ecstatic we’ve gotten the identification.”

Clinton Musil’s remains were identified by the Pentagon’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii last year, using DNA and skeletal analysis.

He was one of 48 Minnesotans still listed as missing in action in Southeast Asia. In all, 1,871 Vietnam War-era service members are still listed as missing in action.

Clinton grew up in Minnesota and joined the Marines immediately after high school in 1957. He later joined the Army and rose to the rank of captain. At the time of Musil’s death at age 31, he was divorced from his wife, who had remained in Minneapolis to raise three small children.

“Military life was his family, so you can imagine that put a strain on the family,” said Larry Musil, a 37-year-old architect living in Florida, where most of the Musil family has relocated.

“He did one tour in Vietnam, so he didn’t have to go back,” he said. “But he went back so one of my uncles didn’t have to do a tour. And he volunteered to go on that mission — he was taking the place of another soldier in that plane.”

According to the Defense Department and POW-MIA organizations:
Clinton Musil was the observer flying with pilot Jack Brunson in an OV-1A Mohawk helicopter, the lead aircraft in a flight of two on a photographic/visual reconnaissance mission about 45 miles west-southwest of Hue, South Vietnam. The area was near a major artery of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the major North Vietnamese military supply line, and was known to be bristling with enemy anti-aircraft artillery.

About 2:15 p.m., Brunson had completed his fifth pass over the target. His wingman in the second helicopter watched as the Mohawk banked steeply to the left and disappeared into the afternoon shadows. The helicopter crashed into a mountainside, exploding in a fireball. No emergency transmissions were heard, nor were any parachutes seen by the other helicopter pilot. Enemy soldiers in the area made a ground search impossible.

Musil was listed as missing for nearly two months before being declared “killed/body not recovered.”

The Defense Department positively identified Musil’s remains about three months ago, and the military flew family members to the Pentagon and presented its documentation.

“I didn’t realize how much I needed to know what happened to my father until I found out,” Musil’s daughter, Allison Spires, 35, said from her home in Washington.

Laotians led Pentagon investigators to the crash site during expeditions in 1993 and 1995. The site was located on a steep slope and appeared to be within about 200 yards of the crash location listed in U.S. records. The site had been scavenged by local residents, but the U.S.-Laotian team found small pieces of wreckage and what appeared to be human remains.

Following the initial investigators, other U.S. and Laotian teams excavated the site twice in 2001 and once in 2002. During these three excavations, they recovered aircraft wreckage, personal effects and human remains. Brunson’s remains still have not been formally identified.

Family members plan to bury Musil with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on May 28, a date as close to the anniversary of the crash as cemetery officials will allow.

Besides Spires and Larry Musil, Clinton Musil Sr. was survived by his ex-wife, Lois Riley; son, Clinton, 38; brother, Richard, of Phoenix; and an ailing mother.

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