Clouded case
BY MARY CATHARINE MARTIN
THE DAILY IBERIAN
Forty years after New Iberia native and Air Force pilot James W. Grace was shot down over a jungle in Laos, the mystery surrounding his disappearance remains.
Maj. Grace, then a captain, was an F-4D Aircraft Commander and Forward Air Controller who flew more than 90 missions in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. He was lauded for his "superior performance," "outstanding leadership" and for being "exceptionally cool and calm at all times regardless of the severity of the environment," according to an Air Force evaluation.
But on June 14, 1969, Grace disappeared.
The official story, according to The (New Orleans) Times Picayune, the POW Network, family and friends, runs like this: Grace was shot down over the jungle. He and Lt. Wayne J. Karas parachuted to safety; Grace, however, landed in a dense area that made
rescue difficult.
When a rescue crew swooped in to haul him to safety, he fell from the hoist dangling from the aircraft when he was only 10 or 15 feet from safety, but 500 feet in the air.
According to Department of Defense records, Grace is one of 24 Vietnam War POWs from Louisiana listed as unaccounted for. He is one of 12 listed as "presumed dead."
In 1975, his wife, now Lillian Bickel, asked for the declaration so she could remarry.
Bickel, however, said some of Grace's friends later heard a story different than the official one from members of the helicopter crew.
"The other story (from crew members) is when they were lowering the hoist, they damaged the back rotor blade, aborted the rescue and left him on the ground to save their crew," she said.
Over the years, the official story has been clouded by other factors.
Bickel and some of Grace's best friends, also fighter pilots, identified a prisoner in a Soviet propaganda film as Grace, and in the early 1990s more than 50 people in New Iberia signed affidavits attesting to it.
Shortly after Bickel returned home to Colorado, however, the pictures, the affidavits and the film were stolen, she said she believes by the CIA. Another man was later identified by the government as the one in the film.
Bickel met with the man, a repatriated POW for whom the military was a career. He told her he was not captured the way the film depicted it, but would not contradict the Defense Intelligence Agency.
According to the POW Network, an Air Force form from Nov. 1, 1972, shows Grace's medical and personnel records were ordered transmitted to Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, "in anticipation of his eventual return," listing him as a "repatriated MIA," according to The Times Picayune.
He was not, however, one of 587 American prisoners released by North Vietnam in 1973.
Also, in 1982 Bickel received a postcard from Hawaii with a picture of the volcano Mauna Lau. Printed on the address side was the message "After years of dormancy, the volcano Mauna Lau comes to life."
It was postmarked June 14. At the bottom, where a sender might have signed their name, were the initials "JW" in her husband's handwriting.
What most made her believe the postcard was from Grace, however, was that at the top of the volcano Ñ in very small printed letters - were the letters "JMJ."
Soon after they met, when they were only in the eighth grade, Grace asked Bickel why she wrote "JMJ" at the top of all her papers. It stood for "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," and she did it for good luck, she told him.
He began to put the initials on his papers, too - and he continued to do so all through high school and college. No one else, Bickel said, would have known about that.
In more recent years, the military examined the "incident site," finding the personally engraved wedding ring Bickel gave Grace at age 19, a cigarette lighter and a piece of a boot.
After 40 years fraught with questions, however, those discoveries provoke more.
"How did they get the wedding ring? Was he not flying with it that day?" Bickel said. "It's kind of weird that a wedding ring would show up. If there was a dead body, the villagers would have showed up and taken everything of value."
The investigation found no bones, no teeth, and "nothing that they could use for DNA to prove that he was actually dead," Bickel said.
Bickel believes once the government declared all POWs had been returned, it repressed information to the contrary.
"It's a deep black hole in the government," she said.
Remembering
On the 25th anniversary of Grace's disappearance, childhood friend of the couple Fern Waguespack started the "Major James Grace Aim High Award" for college-bound New Iberia Senior High seniors, funded entirely by contributions from family and friends. This year, the $2,000 award went to NISH senior James Picheloup III.
The scholarship, she said, is "the way we keep his memory alive."
"We have young people today who are somewhat in the same situation in the military with things going on overseas," she said.
"We do it to let them know it's an honorable thing Ñ that other people have made sacrifices as well.
"It's just such an unanswered mystery. It's one of those things we hope in the next life we'll find out what happened and be reunited."
When Grace disappeared, the couple's children, Guy William Grace and Trina Elizabeth Grace, were ages 4 and 3.
Grace would be turning 70 years old this year, said Bickel.
"We live for the day, my children and I, that there will be some closure and a bonafide accounting for Maj. James Grace," she said.