After 34 years, soldier's family finds some peace
By ELISE CASTELLI
Special to New Hampshire Union Leader
ARLINGTON, Va. - A long blue line of soldiers wound its way through the sun-filled green fields of Arlington National Cemetery yesterday, passing stones that mark the resting places of those who fought and died in the nation's wars since the 1860s.
Behind the procession of the 3rd Infantry Division honor guard, a caisson drawn by six white horses carried the flag-draped coffin of U.S. Army Col. Sheldon Burnett, whose helicopter crashed 34 years ago in Laos.
"He's finally home and not lying in a shallow grave all alone," said Burnett's daughter, Trish, of Derry, N.H. She was 6 years old and living in Pelham, N.H., with her family when her father was shot down during the Vietnam War.
"I wish we could bring every single one of them home," she said.
On March 7, 1971, Burnett and three other soldiers were flying along the border of Vietnam and Laos on a mission to provide support to American troops fighting the North Vietnamese. Their helicopter was hit and crashed near the landing zone. Burnett and Warrant Officer Randolph Ard, the pilot, were pinned alive under the wreckage.
The two other passengers, who survived and escaped, reported that Burnett and Ard were alive but severely injured when last seen. When South Vietnamese troops arrived 11 days later, Burnett and Ard were gone and presumed missing, said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Defense Department's Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.
Yesterday's burial was an honor Burnett's children had fought to bestow on their father. Their mother, Margaret, wrangled for years with the government, filing repeated freedom of information requests to uncover some tidbit of information that might reveal where Burnett lay and what happened all those years ago.
When Margaret Burnett died in 1998, the torch was passed to her children, who continued to track government efforts until last fall, when investigations by the Laotian, Vietnamese and American governments discovered Burnett and Ard's shallow graves in the Laotian jungle.
Yesterday, daughter Leigh, 48, who lives in Charleston, S.C., said her mother "would have been awfully proud." The ceremony showed "the kind of respect she thought he deserved."
It was a funeral with full military honors. A riderless brown horse, with a pair of boots backward in the saddle's stirrups, followed the caisson, an honor reserved only for those of the rank of colonel or above.
At the gravesite, Trish, Leigh, their brother Mike of Henniker, N.H., and their families wept as three volleys of gunfire rang out from the seven-member firing party of "Old Guard" soldiers. Taps was played by a lone bugler.
With mechanical precision, the eight military pallbearers folded the flag into a triangle and handed it to the chaplain, who, kneeling before the family, presented the flag to the siblings "on behalf of a grateful nation."
"I thought he deserved that," Mike, 49, said afterward. "It was nice to see that they went all out."
Mike said he was also touched to see that 20 members of Rolling Thunder, an organization of Vietnam veterans that works to bring home prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action, came to pay their respects.
The veterans, who followed the procession on their motorcycles, presented the family with a plaque marking the recovery of Burnett's body and his burial. Then one by one, they stepped beside Burnett's coffin and laid on it strings of purple, green, white and yellow beads symbolizing the Purple Heart and the Vietnam campaign ribbon. The group comforted the tearful Burnett family with hugs and handshakes.
"It's just an honor bringing these people home, and it's our honor to be here," said Ted Daniels, the sergeant-at-arms for the group's Virginia Chapter Three. "I hope it makes the family feel good to know they have someone behind them."
The burial does not mark the end of the family's struggle to uncover the mysteries surrounding Burnett's disappearance. Trish and her siblings still have questions. Why was he in Laos and what does the Ard family know about what happened that day? These are questions that the stacks of censored documents failed to answer.
Ard was buried in Alabama last month, the Pentagon said.
Despite the questions, there is a sense of "resolution," Leigh said. "It's more clear now what happened, when it happened and where he's been for all these years."
"Relief," Trish added. "I can't believe he is home. It's almost disbelief."
Elise Castelli is an intern with the Boston University Washington News Service.