An MIA veteran's return gives a Weyers Cave family new freedom to share memories once locked away
By Cindy Corell/staff
The News LeaderÊ-ÊStaunton, Va.
WEYERS CAVE Ñ One day long ago Keith Leetun's father just didn't come home.
It seemed that one day Air Force Lt. Col. Darel Leetun rolled out a parachute in the street of Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa and his 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter, Kerri, would grab on, along with all the other kids on the block.Ê
They'd lift their arms as high as they could, then watch as the current carried the flimsy material into the air. The gigantic bubble of fabric and oxygen would give way, and the tiny arms and Leetun's strong ones would buoy it back up. The children squealed as they watched what they had done.
On Sept. 17, 1966, enemy fire blasted into Leetun's F-105, Thunderchief. His wingman got no reply when he called to Leetun.
His wingman saw the plane spiral. He didn't see a parachute. On his 97th and final mission, Leetun disappeared.
This weekend marks the second Memorial Day that Keith Leetun has "known" his father. Identified through forensic science and DNA, Darel Leetun's remains were buried last July in Arlington National Cemetery. But that was only the beginning, for his son who 40 years after saying goodbye to father, learned to pretend the nightmare had never happened.
Now Keith Leetun tells the whole story whenever, and wherever he can. On Thursday night, he and his family told the story to a few dozen Vietnam veterans passing through on their way to the Memorial Day ceremonies in Washington, D.C.
"For a Vietnam story, it has been a good ending," Keith Leetun said. "To take the worst nightmare for a boy and to turn it into glory and honor."
When he was shot down, Darel Leetun's family was home in Ohio. After his 100th mission, he'd be going home, so his wife took the children ahead.
A military car drove up to the house. Uniformed officers with formal faces gave his wife the news.
"My mother told us, 'Your father died serving his country,'" Keith Leetun recalled. "Then everything was put away Ñ the medals, everything went into a closet."
The little boy grew up. His mother moved the family to Hampton Roads where there was a strong network of families of POW/MIAs.
Each summer, his mother would put Keith on an Air Force plane to his father's family home in Hettinger, N.D., for two weeks. He learned his father was well loved, but his aunts and uncles didn't tell him stories. No one talked about his dad. So Keith didn't ask.
The flicker of hope was found in his dad's Aunt Jeanette. She had no children of her own, so she claimed Darel as her own. She would travel around the world to visit him on his Air Force deployments. There's a photo of her taken in England with the family when Keith was only 2.
While the rest of the world called his father Missing In Action, Aunt Jeanette considered him away from home.
"She would grab me by the shoulders and say, 'Your father's going to come home one day. Don't you ever forget that.'"
It wasn't forgotten. But like those medals, like those early photographs, Keith Leetun put his father's memory away.
He got his MBA at Old Dominion University and went to work for IBM. He met a colleague named Rene (pronounced "rain"). They married in 1991. They started attending church more fervently and planned their family. The Air Force had been sending packets of information Ñ in the confusing jargon it appeared they were trying to determine if they'd discovered Darel Leetun's remains. Forensic scientists at that Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command laboratory in Hawaii gathered DNA samples from Darel's siblings.
Keith Leetun read the documents, then put them away. "It's like I had been programmed," he said. "I just never wanted to think about it."
He worked, and he golfed.
Early one morning in 1991, while living in Williamsburg, he hit the greens. Only one other golfer was there. At his first tee, the fellow golfer asked him his name.
"I told him, and he just looked at me. He said, 'You wouldn't be Darel Leetun's son, would you?'"
Keith Leetun was swinging irons with his father's wingman, Mike Lanning.
"It was one of the moments when time just stops," he said.
For the first time, someone told him stories about his father.
"He said, 'Your dad was my mentor. He was the heart and soul of the crew.'
"He said, 'Did you know we called him Gravel?'
"I said, 'No, never heard of that.' He said, 'He had this really scratchy voice. That's why we called him that. Did you know that he was the life of the party?' I said, 'No, I've never heard any of this.'"
Bits and pieces of his father's life came out. He got more information from the government. But Keith Leetun still held the news at bay. In spite of the positive signs the investigation was taking, he wasn't ready to believe.
The "flicker of hope," Aunt Jeanette, had died in 1983.
Keith's wife Rene said she knew her husband's father was missing in action, and she found his medals and photographs when she unpacked things in a move. She would display them in the house, but still there was little information.
In the meantime, Keith and Rene moved to Weyers Cave. Their son, Jack Darel, is 13. Their daughters are Joni, 12, and Jane, 10. They knew Jack was named for their grandfather, that the elder Darel Leetun hadn't come home from war, but the details are few. There were even fewer answers to their questions.
Like their father before them, they didn't hear many of their dad's childhood stories either.
Several years ago, the family went back to North Dakota. A tournament was going on at the Darel Leetun Memorial stadium. They stopped in a diner and asked someone if they knew any of the Leetuns. When she heard Darel's name, she said, "Oh, the good-looking one."
As they traveled farms once owned by the family, the stories started popping out.
Jane likes the one about the splinter her dad got on a wooden seesaw when he was little and had to go to his grandmother for help.
While she tells the story, Keith Leetun grins. "She had to pull the splinter out of my rear end," he said, finishing the story while his children laughed.
Soon everyone in the family would be able to pitch in and tell details about their father and grandfather.
In April 2005, the government program identifying veterans' remains had telling information. They had Darel Leetun's remains in a laboratory in Hawaii. The first decision was who would accompany him back home. It took Keith's faith, his family and a neighbor to help make the decision. A neighbor compared it to the story of Joseph in Genesis 50.
"I read that, and it just hit me: I needed to go," Keith said.
On July 8, 2005, Darel Leetun was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. His story has been told across the world, and "Leetun relatives came out of the woodwork," Keith said. There was a ceremony at the statehouse in Bismarck, N.D. Darel Leetun has been nominated for the Rough Rider Award, usually reserved for celebrities and given by the state of North Dakota.
Suddenly everyone had a story about Darel, and everyone has their favorite.
"Like the one about the teacup," Jane said. Darel Leetun had gone to a party at a general's house. A cup slipped from his fingers and broke. The next day, he replaced it with another. It was the wrong color, but the general's wife still has it.
And 13-year-old Jack is especially fond of how his grandfather, at 14, already was a bit of a speed demon.
"He'd be going out somewhere like the store, and he'd drive really slow down the lane. Then when he hit the road, he'd hit it," Jack said. "He loved speed."
And there's the story of the POW bracelets each member of the family wears. In the 1970s, young men and women often wore metal bands engraved with the names of missing soldiers. Jana Isle had worn one for years with Darel Leetun's name on it. When she saw he'd come home, she sent it to Keith. He had it replicated and similar bracelets were given to the grandchildren at the luncheon after the ceremony at Arlington.
That was right after, in their grandfather's memory, the children each took hold of a parachute and lifted it into the air.