Re: Dad's Fate Unknown After 30 Years

Date: January 18, 2004

"After 30 years, Dad's fate in Asia known

By Thomas R. Collins, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

JUPITER -- Larry Musil struggles to recall the times he spent with his dad. After 30 years, a fog has set in over most of them. He remembers, generally, the time his dad helped him mount a horse, and played with him on a swing.

But the memory of one day in 1971 at home on an Army base in Baldwin Park, Calif., remains crisp. Larry, then 5, was cavorting with his brother and sister on the front lawn. An Army truck slowly pulled up next to the house and a man in a green uniform got out.

"Hello," he said to the kids.

The man approached the front door and Larry's mom, Lois, let him in. When the kids went in the house, their mom was sobbing.

That was day Larry Musil found out his dad might never come home again. Capt. Clinton Allen Musil Sr.'s plane had crashed into a slope in Laos while on a reconnaissance mission during the Vietnam War. But exactly what had happened to him? Because of enemies nearby, no Americans could search the area around the crash site. Musil, now 38, waited three decades for an answer.

He has one now. At last, the Department of Defense has found some of his father's remains at the site and identified them through a DNA match using a piece of a right patella and a length of rib.

"My dad deserves to be buried on American soil," said Musil, an architect who lives in Jupiter. "His final resting place needs to be exactly what he fought for. He fought for this free soil."

The discovery takes one name off the list of the more than 88,000 who are missing in action, including 1,871 from the Vietnam War. Making the list shorter is an ongoing project for the Defense Department.

On May 31, 1971, Capt. Musil climbed aboard an OV-1A plane with pilot Jack Brunson. They were to fly over a Viet Cong base camp in a valley in the Savannakhet Province of Laos and gather information about the enemy's supplies and communications. It was a mission Capt. Musil, who was 30, wasn't supposed to go on. Someone else was scheduled to fly the mission, but Capt. Musil demanded to go because he knew the terrain so well, Larry Musil said.

Historian of his dad's life

The plane flew over the camp several times, coming under "intense enemy aircraft fire," according to an account explaining why Musil won a posthumous Silver Star for the mission. On the fifth flyover attempt, the plane didn't complete a sharp left turn and crashed into the mountainside, an area of dense forest. Passengers in another Army plane saw a fireball when they came around the bend.

So, aside from the hazy memories of youth, Larry Musil got to know his dad as a historian does his subject: through paper documents, photos, video and word of mouth.

He learned his dad became a military man very young, lying about his age to get into the Marines a year early, right out of high school in Minnesota. He spent several years with the Marines before switching to the Army.

And a good soldier he was, collecting not only the Silver Star but also a Purple Heart, two Bronze Stars and a Distinguished Flying Cross, among others.

"He would hear the Marine Corps hymn and he would cry," said Larry Musil's mother, Lois Riley, who lives in Highland Beach.

Capt. Musil loved the military so much that after his first tour of Vietnam, he signed up for another, even though Riley promised to divorce him if he did -- a promise she followed through on right away.

"Even though he dearly loved me and his children, he dearly loved the military," Riley said. "It had been his family at a very young age."

Riley kept the memory of their valiant dad alive for her children. Every year on May 31, she had a memorial service, a time to talk about Capt. Musil with his picture in the room.

But Larry Musil wanted more. He found that the adage "time heals all wounds" didn't apply to this. The more mature he became, the more he realized he didn't know about his father, and the greater the burden became.

"The older you get, the harder it gets," he said.

Every year, either Larry Musil or his younger sister, Allison, or his older brother, Clinton Allen Musil Jr., who goes by Allen, would attend a meeting of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, a group that helps bridge the gap between the military and the families of those lost.

Larry Musil said he's been to eight or nine of those meetings. He gave out more than a thousand POW bracelets that loved ones keep until their soldiers are found.

Making matters worse, villagers in the area would call the American government saying they'd seen Capt. Musil or that they had his dog tags -- information that the Defense Department passed on to the family. Most were just playing a hoax to try to make money.

Then, after several attempts at a dig were spoiled by heavy rains, the crash site was excavated in 2002. Military workers, helped by local villagers, cleared the dense foliage and began digging like scientists searching for dinosaur fossils.


DNA matched with brother's



One tooth they found exactly matched the contours of a tooth in Capt. Musil's dental records. Another was fractured in precisely the same place and at the same angle as in the records.

Then came the final evidence: The DNA from a piece of a right patella and a rib, each no more than a few inches long, matched the DNA of Capt. Musil's brother, Richard.

Nothing found could be identified conclusively as the remains of pilot Brunson.

Capt. Musil's remains, now at the Department of Defense's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, will soon be flown to the mainland. Larry Musil or one of his siblings plans to accept the invitation to accompany on that flight what they now have of their dad.

A funeral at Arlington National Cemetery is planned for May 28 -- the day closest to the anniversary of the crash that the military could schedule. It will be a ceremonial occasion with a horse-drawn carriage and an array of musicians. That will be one memory that won't grow fuzzy.

"We know he loved us," said Musil, who saw pictures of his dad's barracks, where the young officer had posted pictures of his children. "We just didn't know him well enough."

thomas_collins@pbpost.com
© 2004 The Palm Beach Post"