Funeral is final chapter for family
Vietnam vet's remains return for burial
Brian Albrecht
Plain Dealer Reporter
Army Master Sgt. Norman Payne moved through the Laotian jungle, searching for other members of his reconnaissance patrol. An enemy attack suddenly filled the night with bullets and confusion.
Payne and the others were part of MACV-SOG (the Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Operations Group) - elite combatants including Green Berets and Navy SEALs who conducted highly clandestine operations during the war in Vietnam.
The patrol's mission on Dec. 18, 1968, was to scout enemy activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a conduit for supplies and troops moving from North Vietnam.
The day after the attack, rescuers were able to find all the patrol members except Payne. The last indication that he may have still been alive was a garbled emergency radio transmission, signing off with what sounded like "Bison," Payne's code name.
Thirty-eight years later, the former Clevelander and Special Forces soldier is coming home, following a search that started in 1993 and ended with identification of Payne's remains this year.
The identification was made by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii.
A wake for Payne will be at 9 a.m. today, with a service to follow at 9:30 a.m., at E.F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home, 2165 East 89th Street, Cleveland. The burial will be at Cleveland Memorial Gardens, 4324 Green Road, Highland Hills.
His homecoming is bittersweet for Linda (Payne) Carter, of Cleveland, who was only 7 years old when her father (who had joined the service in 1957) was declared missing in action at the same time of year.
"I remember really believing in Santa Claus because each year around Christmas he'd come home with a big bag of goodies," she said. "After that year, our Christmases became sad all of a sudden."
She always hoped that some how the man she remembered as a big, fun-lov ing dad might still be alive. Then came word in September that his remains had been found and identified, and "there went my ray of hope," she said. "I was devastated."
Carter said her mother, Bobbie Jean Payne, 67, of Cleveland, was hit hard by her husband's loss in 1968, and the recent news came as a second shock mixed with relief and sorrow.
Norman Payne, 43, of Cleveland, still remembers the last time he saw his father -- how his dad, who always seemed to have a smile on his face, gave him a 50-cent piece but made his mother cry with news that he had to go back overseas.
For years after the disappearance, he'd have dreams that his father had made it back home and that they all happily joined for Thanksgiving.
When he first heard that his father had been found, he was stunned, and seized on the remote chance that the soldier had been discovered alive. The truth, he said, "hurt me. I feel better that he's here now, but it isn't the same as being with him."
Carter said she twice considered enlisting in the military but couldn't overcome her grandmother's reaction. "It made her so sad, I just wiped that idea totally out when I saw the expression on her face," she said.
Nor did her brothers, including Victor Payne, 41, of Jacksonville, Fla., or a stepsister, Josephine (now deceased), ever join the service, Carter said.
Norman Payne, born in 1939 in Greenville, Ala., also is survived by nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Faith, pride and a sense that a last chapter has finally been written sustains his daughter now.
"I think of my father as a hero. Plus, there's a certain closure I definitely needed -- to know that my father has finally come home to rest," she said.
"It was very hard, growing up, and I know I'll be more at peace now, being able to say he's gone, rather than just missing."
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