With husbands missing, 4 sought answers from N. Vietnamese
By PAUL MEYER / The Dallas Morning News
In the fall of 1969, four North Texas women channeled a nation's voice when they flew 4,900 miles to ask North Vietnamese diplomats a simple question:
Are we wives or widows?
For a country at war, it was a moment that embodied rising strength among relatives of missing and captured American soldiers.
For Paula Wetherell, it was the beginning of a Homeric journey. There would be whirlwind meetings with world leaders, help from a Dallas billionaire and bitter court fights.
This week, her family's odyssey will come to a somber conclusion at Arlington National Cemetery.
Air Force Col. Gregg Hartness is returning for burial.
"To be honest, when it comes down to it, I'm worn out. I know that sounds kind of strange," Ms. Wetherell said from her home in La Conner, Wash.
"There were so many years there that we worked and hoped. Sometimes, I still see Jane Fonda sitting on that tank with her arm in the air."
Col. Hartness, a Highland Park graduate, was discovered this year buried beneath the Laotian jungle, 37 years after his plane was shot down.
His return, in some ways, is a story of the perseverance of Vietnam-era military families, many still waiting for answers.
"The four of them - because they were the first wives to meet with the North Vietnamese - they became a kind of symbol," said Murphy Martin, the former local TV anchor who accompanied the women on their 1969 trip.
"I think it's a legacy that should not be cast aside for the people who are losing loved ones in Iraq or wherever the military is today," he said. "Hopefully, it is not lost on them what these wives went through to organize others."
• On Nov. 26, 1968, Col. Hartness took off in a Cessna airplane for night reconnaissance, looking for truck traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
He had just a few flights left before returning stateside, his co-pilot recalled recently from Ohio.
"We felt a thud, and the plane started jumping around, and then it flipped over and started spinning. We knew we had been hit," said Allen Shepherd III.
Col. Hartness gave the order to bail out at 8,000 feet. Lt. Shepherd jumped first and was later rescued.
"I spent the rest of the night in a jungle," he said. "I never heard from him again."
Word filtered home to the Hartness family, as it did to thousands of families of missing or captured soldiers struggling to find a unified voice.
The government, relatives recall, had discouraged them from speaking out, preferring quiet diplomacy to force the North Vietnamese to account for the missing and comply with the Geneva Conventions for treatment of prisoners.
"We just felt very much alone. It was a very lonely time," Ms. Wetherell said.
By the late 1960s, small groups of families banded together and began speaking up.
At a local military base, Ms. Wetherell met Bonnie Singleton, Sandy McElhanon and Joy Jeffrey.
They all had young children. They all had missing husbands. They all wanted answers.
"There was no end in sight. We began asking the government why this policy [of silence] was what it was and why we couldn't speak out about it," Ms. Singleton said. "They didn't seem to have answers."
With the help of Mr. Martin and bolstered by growing media interest, the four women decided to fly to the Paris Peace Talks, begun just a year earlier, and try to talk with the North Vietnamese.
On Sept. 17, 1969, they arrived at a hunting lodge in Choisy-le-Roy, on the southern outskirts of Paris.
"I don't know if it was out of desperation or if they were just tired of getting our phone calls, but they finally agreed to a meeting," said Mr. Murphy, who produced a documentary on the visit.
Over tea, the wives met for two hours with North Vietnamese representatives to the peace talks, opening the door to visits by other families.
"By the time they became the first group of wives that the peace delegation had met with, it became big news," Mr. Martin said. "Not just with the United States or over the wire services, but worldwide."
• The four wives were promised answers, but none arrived.
Ms. Hartness would later meet with the Swedish prime minister, Vatican officials, and scores of local and national politicians. Ross Perot, inspired by the wives' stories, began his United We Stand campaign to highlight treatment of prisoners of war and push for inspections of prison camps.
By 1970, families across the U.S. had formed the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.
But with new vocal leadership came a tricky diplomatic game, recalled Roger Shields, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW/MIA affairs.
On the one hand, added pressure on the North Vietnamese meant greater accountability for the safe return of troops.
It also, however, increased the hostage value of captives, making them pawns in peace negotiations.
"Once this [families speaking up] started happening," Dr. Shields said, "I think, for better or for worse, the North Vietnamese did use that as a propaganda tool.
"For all the years the negotiations were going on in Paris fruitlessly, the big issue was prisoners of war and the missing."
Dr. Shields looks back with admiration on "the valiant women" who traveled the world to help their husbands and sons.
"The game did change," he said. "A lot of the family members would have to say to themselves what they did was instructive and instrumental in obtaining much better treatment.
"Down the road, that was obviously true."
• In 1973, two of the four Dallas wives - Ms. Jeffrey and Ms. Singleton - watched as their husbands returned home from prison camps.
Ms. Wetherell waited. There were brief moments of hope - tantalizing photos and promises - followed only by disappointment.
"They promised us they would never pull all of our troops out without finding out what happened to MIAs. Of course, they pulled out the troops," she said.
In 1978, she sued President Jimmy Carter and Defense Department officials in federal court, challenging the decision to change her husband's status from missing to presumed dead.
Two years later, she gave up her fight. Col. Hartness was legally dead. She remarried a year later.
"I felt nobody would care anymore or continue looking," Ms. Wetherell said.
Still there was hope, however irrational, that Col. Hartness could be alive. Until there are bones to bury, there's always an open question, family members said.
"I think that if you don't have that, you have an incredible amount of guilt when you continue to live your life," said Glen Hartness, Col. Hartness' son who was 6 when his father vanished.
• Through the 1990s, Col. Hartness' parents, now dead, continued to fight for answers.
Between 1993 and 2003, joint U.S.-Laotian investigators interviewed more than 60 witnesses in 39 settlements in Laos, eventually selecting a site for excavation.
In January and February of this year, U.S. officials, with assistance from the Lao government, began work on a site in Salavan Province.
They recovered human remains, aircraft wreckage, life-support equipment and personal effects. Dental remains were analyzed at a Hawaii laboratory.
Then, on Mother's Day this year, Kimberly Hartness' cellphone rang as she was driving her son to catch a flight to Marine boot camp.
Her father had been identified.
"It's something we never thought would be possible," she said. "I'm just grateful to the Air Force for continuing to pursue him."
Of the four wives who first flew to Paris, only Ms. McElhanon is still waiting for word on her husband.
Ms. Wetherell, meanwhile, said she has maintained conviction in the role and mission of U.S. troops.
"I believe so strongly in this country," she said. "I believe that it's worth fighting for."
E-mail pmeyer@dallasnews.com
© 2005 The Dallas Morning News Co.