Lost for almost 40 years, a serviceman comes home
By CHRIS VAUGHN
Star-Telegram staff writer
In the late summer of 2002, a team of Defense Department MIA hunters in Ho Chi Minh City got a call from their counterparts in the Vietnamese government.
Some Vietnamese fishermen had discovered human bones and airplane wreckage off an Phu Quoc island in the Gulf of Thailand. They wanted to turn over the remains and believed that it would guarantee them an opportunity to immigrate.
The Americans took the remains and wreckage given to them and attempted -- unsuccessfully -- to get to the underwater site a few miles offshore. Some months later, the bones were flown to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, where they stayed in a laboratory for five years.
On Monday, those remains come home, to a hallowed ground that overlooks the old Naval Air Station Dallas, where a young Fort Worth man took the naval officer's oath in 1964.
That was before Lt.j.g. Frank E. Hand III left for the war in Vietnam, before he and 11 other young men went down trying to find Viet Cong gun-running boats.
Growing up
Frank Hand could be found most days in the mid-1950s on the playground of Oakhurst Elementary School, leading a touch football game of neighborhood boys.
His parents' house backed up to the school, and it was there and at the Riverside Baptist Church where Frank and his younger brother Bruce spent much of their youth.
Frank was born in 1942 in Charleston, S.C., when their father was an instructor pilot for the Navy during World War II. But the family had moved to a house on Westbrook Avenue in the summer of '51 when Frank Hand Jr. took a job with the Federal Aviation Administration in Fort Worth.
He was an outgoing boy at Carter-Riverside High School, an Eagle Scout, an accomplished swimmer. He, and later his brother, worked summers as lifeguards at the Ridglea Country Club.
"He made enough money to buy a nice car," his brother said. "He was mechanically inclined, so he could work on it. It was a black, two-door Pontiac Bonneville, a '58, if I remember. Talk about a cool car."
After graduation in 1960, Frank started at what was then Arlington State College to study architecture. He did that for three years but decided to take a break and work for an architecture firm to earn money.
The draft board noticed the change and reclassified him as eligible.
So Frank Hand, presumably unwilling to chance the Army or the infantry, went to NAS Dallas to compete for a spot in officer candidate school and a shot at naval aviation.
Romance in Florida
Linda Merriman, a local girl in Pensacola, Fla., thought she had met the most gorgeous man in the world.
A Texas boy, a Navy officer candidate and pilot in training. He drove a new Corvette. He was, without a doubt, living the high life.
"It was like Officer and a Gentleman," Bruce said of his brother's relationship.
After a year of dating, Linda and Frank Hand wed on a warm August day in 1966 in the First Baptist Church in Pensacola, an arch of crossed swords over their heads when they left the sanctuary.
They moved frequently over the next several months, going from flight school to more flight schools. Finally in 1967, he was assigned to Patrol Squadron 26 in Brunswick, Maine, and immediately prepared for deployment to Southeast Asia.
He wrote Linda a letter every day he was gone, beginning in November 1967.
"He just wanted me to stay busy and pass the time because I had so much free time on my hands," she said. "He would tell me all was going well and 'I wish I could be with you.' They were great love letters. I kept all of them.
"He called me at Christmastime. I believe that's the last time we were able to speak."
The last flight
When Frank Hand, 26, took off on April 1, 1968, with three other officers and eight sailors in a P-3 Orion from an air base in Thailand, the biggest news in Vietnam centered on the military's efforts to break through the siege at Khe Sanh.
Hand's crew was on a routine mission, though, scanning the waters off Vietnam for Viet Cong.
His airplane -- he served as the co-pilot -- was hit by anti-aircraft fire from a Cambodian gunboat, according to news accounts. The pilots attempted to fly to land to improve their chances for rescue, but the four-engine aircraft didn't make it. No one survived.
Search and rescue crews recovered something from every man on board, so none were ever listed as missing in action. All searchers found of him, according to the Defense Department, was a boot bearing his name.
On April 24, 1968, he was laid to rest in Barrancas National Cemetery in Pensacola, where Linda wanted him buried.
The service was held in the First Baptist Church, 20 months after his picture-perfect wedding.
Hand's parents went on, of course, though they grieved terribly.
His mother, Dottie, was especially close to Frank. His father, Frank Jr., grieved more quietly, choosing to channel his feelings into a years-long search to find out more about his son's last flight.
Years later, his son Bruce discovered paperwork indicating that his father had been planning a trip to Vietnam to go to the crash site.
"Dad was very quiet," Bruce said. "He was of that generation where you kept your feelings to yourself."
Linda and Frank Hand had planned exactly six children. They would all be boys, they decided jokingly.
After a few years, Linda remarried and started a family. She now lives in North Carolina.
But Frank has never left her.
"I still share his love and will forever," she said.
A memory revived
Thirty-eight years after Hand died, an official with the Department of the Navy called Bruce and requested a blood sample.
To say it was a surprise is a wholly inadequate description for what it did to Bruce, who felt as if he had been struck by lightning on a cloudless, sunny day.
"I got excited," Bruce said, Frank's closest living relative. "But then I had to tell myself to sit down, nothing is going to come of this."
It did.
The Navy followed up a few months later, at the beginning of the summer, to tell Bruce the story of the Vietnamese villagers and the successful DNA match with several bones of Frank's. No other crewman's remains were found.
Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office in Washington, said finding additional remains of servicemen happens more often than people would think.
"It amazes me when I hear that Vietnamese villagers or fishermen have gone to the trouble of finding who to give these to," Greer said. "It tells me that they are very much aware of the U.S. commitment to the recovery effort."
Bruce called Linda, other family members, members of the Patrol Squadron Association. He heard from officers on active duty today in Frank's old squadron in Maine, and he learned about the memorial there with an etching of Frank's name from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.
For the first time in many years, Frank and his memory have been very much alive.
"The Navy wanted to know what I wanted to do, but I needed to take a breath and consider all this," he said. "Well, the summer went by pretty quick, and I decided that the fall would be a nice time for this."
The Department of Veterans Affairs gave Bruce permission to place Frank's remains in a columbarium at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery, ordinarily not allowed because he already has a spot at a national cemetery.
"While this has presented a unique situation, for reasons of compassion, we decided to honor the Hand family's request," said Ron Pemberton, director of D-FW National Cemetery.
The Navy agreed to provide four F/A-18 Hornets to perform the "missing man" formation over the cemetery on Monday, a particularly special gesture for Bruce. The executive officer of Patrol Squadron 26 is coming to Texas for the service.
"This has all been good," Bruce said.
"Everything has just come together beautifully."
Linda Shoemaker will be there, too, with the friend that introduced her to Frank 42 years ago.
"I never, ever dreamed of something like this," she said. "I've shed many tears since we got the information. I am thrilled to bring him home. But it opens up a lot of hurt, and a lot of happiness, too."