ARDEN KEITH HASSENGER
ARDEN K HASSENGER
4E/37
REMEMBRANCES
POW/MIA Bracelet
forever remembered
Final Mission of SSGT Arden K. Hassenger
Remembering An American Hero
As an American, I would like to thank you for your service and for your sacrifice made on behalf of our wonderful country. The youth of today could gain much by learning of heroes such as yourself, men and women whose courage and heart can never be questioned.
May God allow you to read this, and may He allow me to someday shake your hand when I get to Heaven to personally thank you. May he also allow my father to find you and shake your hand now to say thank you; for America, and for those who love you.
With respect, and the best salute a civilian can muster for you, Sir
Curt Carter
A long-ago war, a missing plane and an enduring mystery
By Matthew Schofield — McClatchy Washington Bureau, May 2013
Part I TA-OY, Laos — Maj. Derrell Jeffords bounced his roaring Spooky 21 down and off the runway at Da Nang Air Base in Vietnam. It was just before 7:30 a.m., on Christmas Eve 1965. The big camouflaged belly of his twin-prop AC-47 was easily visible against a blue sky as he banked west.
The cargo plane-turned-gunship was on its way to Laos; its mission was top secret.
Jeffords put the South China Sea at his back and the plane lumbered over a landscape mimicking the twists and folds of an unmade bed. The flight plan showed that he and his five-member crew would be returning to base in under six hours. Back in time for a late lunch.
But that was without complications, and this was the Vietnam War.
Just over halfway through what had been up to that point an uneventful flight, at 10:56 a.m., two U.S. planes in the area picked up a UHF radio broadcast:
“Mayday, Spooky 21. Mayday.”
Then the plane disappeared, swallowed up in the dense green foliage of the Southeast Asian jungle.
This is a story of that flight, and the nearly half-century it took to find and bring home its six crew members. Guiding that effort through all those years was the pledge that those who go into battle make to each other: No matter what, we will come back for you. You will not be forgotten.
You will not be left behind.
It is also the story of how a six-hour combat mission at a time when America was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam would test the limits of forensic science, and the faith and patience of the grieving sons, daughters, wives and parents of the six lost airmen.
Besides Jeffords, a 40-year-old pilot from Florence, S.C., the Air Force crew was made up of the navigator, Maj. Joseph Christiano, 43, of Rochester, N.Y.; the co-pilot, 1st Lt. Dennis L. Eilers, 27, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and the weapons and ammo gang of Tech Sgt. William K. Colwell, 44, of Glen Cove, N.Y.; Staff Sgt. Arden K. Hassenger, 32, of Lebanon, Ore.; and Tech Sgt. Larry C. Thornton, 33, of Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Two months before, 2-year-old Jeffrey Christiano had clung to the frame of his family’s front door, crying, “Daddy don’t go!” as he watched his father walk away.
As the crew members lifted off that morning, their families back home in the states were preparing for their first Christmas without them. They received the news that the plane had vanished that same day. Christmas Eve became one of the hardest days of the year.
This was what those who began the search for Spooky 21 knew: It had been headed for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and its crew had never been seen again.
Case file 0222 notes that the initial actions included “extensive searches” in the immediate aftermath of the plane’s disappearance, near the “strike location and in a fifty-mile-wide corridor on the route from Da Nang.” But that brief description went on to state, “Subsequent search efforts were terminated on 26 December 1965.”
There was a war on, after all.
Spooky 21’s mission was covert but vital to the war. It was part of a secret combat operation known as Tiger Hound, a search-and-destroy mission aimed at the trail, a series of dirt and stone paths hidden in the Laotian jungle that served as an enemy supply line. It connected the communist North Vietnamese military with its allies in the Viet Cong insurgency hiding in the south.
The winding, narrow, jungle-covered corridor through neighboring Laos enabled the fighters from the north to avoid the South Vietnamese army and its American allies digging in along the demilitarized zone 80 miles north of the airfield in Da Nang. But the trail, named for the North Vietnamese leader, was more like a network of capillaries than a set route. And it was keeping Vietnam from becoming a traditional war, fought along a single front.
“Without the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” said military historian James Willbanks, “the war doesn’t go on.”
Along the Ho Chi Minh Trail
The morning it disappeared, Spooky 21 roared west toward Laos, passing peaks crowned by tall trees and valley floors cut by fast rivers, covered in rice paddies or choked with bamboo. Villagers moved up and down the knife-sharp slopes with ease. But the heavy tree cover made it a hell of a place to find and fight an enemy.
The plan was for the crew to find and destroy its target – a way station hidden beneath the thick foliage, typically home to ammunition depots and anti-aircraft batteries. They were expected back at Da Nang about 1:30 p.m.
But on a clear morning, like that Christmas Eve day, gunners hidden beneath the jungle leaves could spot a big fat target like Spooky etched against the blue sky long before the crew could see them.
Most Laotian villagers had fled the region to escape the war. But they weren’t the problem. It was the North Vietnamese moving along the trail, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail had never been busier.
By 1965, the U.S. military resolved to do something about it. Bomb one path and the North Vietnamese army’s Group 559 – a military team strung along the trail like a version of Pony Express way stations, and tasked with keeping it open – simply redirected traffic several hundred yards over to a similarly primitive route while it patched up the first one.
But the trail ran through Laos and Cambodia, and cutting it in half would have meant expanding the Vietnam War into a regional war. Closing it would have required an invading and occupying ground force, a prospect that had little appeal.
The U.S. was stepping on the gas, however, as far as expanding its presence in South Vietnam. The 23,000 troops stationed there in 1964 had risen to 185,000 by the end of 1965, when Spooky 21 left Da Nang. The number would continue to climb until it peaked in 1968 at more than half a million.
But as the number of American troops increased, so did Soviet and Chinese support for the North Vietnamese. The American air campaign wasn’t enough to stop the flow of weapons, ammo – even food – often stacked onto comically overloaded bikes or stuffed into baskets and lashed to donkeys, sometimes even to elephants.
Desperate for a more accurate and lasting way than bombing to hit and continue hitting a target, the old workhorse C-47 cargo plane had been outfitted with three electric miniguns, bolted to the floor and pointed out holes where windows had been.
After a year of tests, the plane was in its first month as a response to the increased activity on the trail. “Spooky” was its call signal, a homage to its ability to break Viet Cong night attacks on American bases.
But among the enemy, its nickname was “Dragon.” Tracer rounds, especially at night, made it look like the propeller-drive plane was spitting fire at the ground.
Jeffords controlled the aim of Spooky’s guns from the pilot’s seat. In the plane’s belly, Hassenger helped make sure the ammo didn’t jam. The only blond in an otherwise brown-haired group of airmen, his was job simple: Once they started raining fire on the enemy, the fire didn’t stop.
Hassenger had volunteered for the job because he thought it was the future. Also, his family could use the combat pay. His wife, Sherrie, said that her husband was a military man and made for his role.
Still, like the rest of his crew, he was new to this war, and he hadn’t volunteered for an easy task. A three-second burst from Spooky could cover a football field-sized area with a bullet every couple of yards. The plane carried a lot of ammo, about 24,000 rounds. But if things got hairy, the guns could burn through that in less than three minutes.
Beyond the challenge, however, was the danger. Spooky was fearsome in fight, but vulnerable. These early missions, like the Christmas Eve 1965 sortie over Laos, were part of the learning curve.
Shortly after takeoff, Christiano – the runt of the crew at 5’6”, but stocky and packing as much weight onto his frame as his taller crewmates – got instructions to redirect to different target coordinates. The original destination had been a patch of jungle about 100 miles straight west. The new one was another patch about 23 miles south of that, still about 100 miles from Da Nang.
Records indicate Spooky 21 turned west toward the target. Jeffords’ airborne chatter during the next couple of hours revealed nothing unusual. Everything appeared to be going according to plan.
Then came the “mayday” call.
Wrestling with loss
For years, only rumor surfaced about the plane or its crew. There were stories that the airmen were alive but captive. Some of the wives, not even certain if they were truly widows, quietly hoped their men had simply been captured, and had carved out new lives half a world away. Sherrie Hassenger figured her Arden would have been an asset in Laos, teaching villagers the finer points of woodworking and furniture making.
The U.S. military dutifully tracked down each rumor but could never substantiate any. Still, the resulting limbo was torture for the families.
By 1982, when Christiano’s son, Jeffrey, was an 18-year-old senior wrestling for his high school team in Rochester, N.Y., the crew had all been declared dead.
At that time, Jeffrey was hoping to get into the U.S. Air Force Academy, to follow in his father’s footsteps. In February of that year, on a date he had long ago circled on his calendar, he was focused on a wrestling match. Win it and he’d qualify for the state championships. He was good, and he had figured he’d be in a position to go for state.
Just as the match started, he quickly glanced up at the stands, as he always did, hoping somehow his dad would be there. He knew it was impossible. Still. . . .
His mom was in the stands, but she didn’t really get wrestling.
The match didn’t go well. Jeffrey still thinks the referee awarded a few points to his opponent too easily. After he lost, his mother approached him in the hallway.
“Did you win?” she asked, smiling.
Jeffrey loved his mom, but he recalls thinking, “I could really use a dad today.”
He thought about that a lot in those days.
“Until they’re home'
Finally, after years of little progress, a possible break came on Jan. 19, 1993.
A joint U.S.-Lao People’s Democratic Republic team went to a village in Xekong Province, near their target site, spoke to villagers about Spooky 21 and surveyed the ground. Still, the result was the same: no information, no wreckage.
A local village chief also stirred optimism at one point during a search for a different missing crew when he said that a two-propeller plane had gone down five to eight kilometers away, close to the Spooky 21 target area. But a subsequent search found nothing.
Case file 0222 recounts the fruitless chases. It was tucked away in a cabinet at Hawaii’s Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in the Joint POWMIA Accounting Command. Its motto: “Until they’re home.” Like tens of thousands of other files, it outlines how the military hunts down the remains of missing troops. It also included records of the post-disappearance promotions of the crew members, as well as correspondence with surviving family members, like the letters from wives who disagreed with the ruling that their husbands were dead.
Then on Jan. 13, 1995, three decades after the crew disappeared, a Laotian identified only as “Mr. Thongkhoun” in Savannakhet Province, about 70 miles northwest of the previous search, spoke to a different investigating team.
He said that he’d seen a large propeller plane in December 1965 or January 1966 flying low, with heavy smoke pouring out. It hit a large tree and spun into a rice field.
Mr. Thongkhoun didn’t see any parachutes or other aircraft in the area, nor did he hear anyone mention a surviving pilot or crew. But he hadn’t actually poked around where the plane had hit until 10 years later.
His account put Spooky 21 far off course, outside what was thought to be the likely search area. But by expanding the area, records showed that three planes, including Spooky 21, had possibly crashed in that region of Laos, and two had been accounted for.
Mr. Thongkhoun sounded sure of the story. And the plane he described sounded like an AC-47.
The team began to wonder: Could this finally be Spooky 21?
Part II TA-OY, Laos — In military lingo, the location of the lost crew of Spooky 21 was a classic SWAG:
Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.
That’s the term investigators use for figuring out something as unpredictable as where a plane should have crashed when it got shot out of the sky.
Guesswork, backed up by some old data, was pretty much all the military had to go on for years in the hunt for the cargo plane-turned-gunship and its crew of six that disappeared over Laos during a Christmas Eve combat mission in 1965.
It wasn’t until 1995, decades after the Vietnam War had ended, that a military team scouring a rice paddy in southeastern Laos found a small amount of wreckage that could have been from the plane. But the crash site was more than 70 miles from where they’d expected to find it.
The Air Force crew that had manned Spooky 21 had long ago been declared dead. But there never had been anything definitive. Without some evidence of the plane or the missing airmen, their families would continue to seesaw between faint hope and heartbreak.
The imprecision of the search made anything definitive a tough mission. In 1999, after several visits to the rice paddy, search teams felt confident enough to call for a full excavation of a site the size of three football fields. Because of red tape, weather and other delays, they didn’t start digging for two more years. Eventually they excavated the rice paddy four times between 2001 and 2011.
Guiding their work was a sacred military trust and the motto of the Joint POWMIA Accounting Command, known as JPAC, to not stop looking for troops lost on the battlefield “until they are home.”
In the case of Spooky 21, that meant pursuing the fates of men who’d been missing so long they’d now been promoted: Col. Derrell Jeffords, pilot, 40, of Florence, S.C.; Col. Joseph Christiano, navigator, 43, of Rochester, N.Y.; Lt. Col. Dennis L. Eilers, co-pilot, 27, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Chief Master Sgts. William K. Colwell, 44, of Glen Cove, N.Y.; Arden K. Hassenger, 32, of Lebanon, Ore.; and Larry C. Thornton, 33, of Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Such searches were commonplace in Laos. More than 330 U.S. troops disappeared there during the Vietnam War. In its dense jungles and steep hills, even finding a site worth searching was difficult.
In the beginning, the hunt for Spooky 21 relied on villagers who recalled that a large two-propeller plane had crashed in the rice paddy sometime around late 1965. No wreckage was visible, and while telltale evidence doesn’t get up and walk away, the team knew that it can be carried away, piece by piece.
Desperately poor villagers scavenge aircraft wreckage. The metal sheeting becomes a new roof. Beams frame doorways, or are used to lift a hut above the flood zone. Wiring is used to tie walls together. Old bombs are hollowed out and used as water basins.
But Gregory Berg, a forensic anthropologist with JPAC out of its Hawaii base, said, “Something is always left behind.”
Sherrie Hassenger met her husband in 1954 back in Lebanon, Ore. She was 17 and more than a little nervous when her brother-in-law gave her phone number to his friend, Arden Hassenger.
He was older, and home on leave from the Air Force. She was still in high school. When he called, he reinforced her fears: His easy, friendly manner meant forward and eager. She knew what boys like that wanted.
But as she tried to figure a way to end the phone call, he cheerfully said, “Why are we talking on the phone? I want to see you.”
“You can’t. I just washed my hair.”
“Oh, I don’t mind a little wet hair.”
So before he showed up, Sherrie stuck her head under a faucet.
“I can’t have him thinking I’m a liar,” she recalls thinking.
During the next 11 years, they’d marry and have two boys and a girl. She’d move with him to Topeka, Kan., where he’d be trained as a gunner for this new style of warfare they were trying out with the old C-47 cargo plane. She followed him down to Florida just months before he left for Vietnam late in 1965.
Digging for closure
Sherrie had never remarried. She spent those years waiting for him to return. Sadness was a frequent companion. But she still could smile, remembering how their romance began with wet hair.
He had been missing for 34 years in 1999 when the military thought it had finally identified the crash site of his plane.
JPAC case file number 0222 documents what had been done during all that time to find Hassenger and his five crewmates. It was kept at the Central Identification Laboratory in Oahu, Hawaii, at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. The file was just one among many tracking efforts to find more than 82,000 Americans missing in action. Almost all served in the U.S. military.
Most were service members lost at sea, who won’t ever be found. But of the 73,000 still missing from World War II, the 8,000 from the Korean War and the 1,700 from Vietnam, about a quarter are thought to be recoverable.
Searches continue along Cypriot shorelines, and in French fields and Korean meadows. The obstacles include everything from the difficulties of tracking anyone who falls in combat to the delicate nature of international politics. When relations with North Korea sour – and the Hermit Kingdom is thought to be where more than 4,500 U.S. troops remain unaccounted for – recovery efforts cease.
The last search for Spooky was two years ago, but JPAC officials said they all usually follow a set pattern. They agreed to allow McClatchy to accompany a search team involved in an entirely separate investigation, but in an area of Laos near where the hunt for Spooky 21 took place.
“Digs are more similar than they are different,” said Army Capt. Jessie Lee, who served as the search team leader on this excavation.
This case involves a Marine who died in 1970 during the Vietnam War when a helicopter landed hard and exploded into flames. It happened about 25 minutes by air from what is now the base camp that U.S. forces share with the Laotian military.
It’s a morning in early November 2012. The jungle mist burns off slowly. Lee and his 10-member team clamber onto a Lao Air MI-17 helicopter warming up for flight at the base camp deep in the mountains.
The troops are unarmed and wearing civilian clothes, a concession to the Lao government, which gets uneasy with the idea of American military personnel openly moving about inside the country. The conditions are spartan: crisp canvas tents on cement slabs, male and female latrines and showers, and a laundry room.
Lee knows these searches are vitally important. No one in the military can accept the idea of leaving someone behind. He also sees it as part of a pact with troops in years to come, should they need to look for him.
But the searches can be tedious. Lee says his role is to keep his people alert and focused, and the best way is to be enthusiastic from the moment he wakes until he drifts off to sleep. It is in those quiet moments, though, in the dark, when he often wonders if those who vanish here in this isolated world, like the crew of Spooky 21, die afraid that loved ones would never truly know their fate.
He knows that slapping backs and telling jokes, trying to get spirits high for the hours of painstaking labor to come, matter. The slow pace of progress can eat away at your zeal for the work.
When the chopper finally swings over the excavation site on a steep hillside, then lands in the only secure bit of clearing, it’s next to a remote bamboo and thatched hut village. The site is across a deep and swift river. When the searchers first arrived, the only route across was three strands of bamboo the villagers had suspended by vines from a tree.
The angular Lee notes that he might have made it across the old bridge, but the brawnier members of his team would have had trouble, especially carrying the heavy digging tools and coolers of water in the 90-degree heat and swampy humidity.
Their first task was to build a simple bridge, and then they cut a path through a thicket of bamboo and dug 237 steps into the steep hillside, reinforcing each step with a sand tube.
The terrain held perils. The wreckage was hidden by more high bamboo. In its shadows lurked poisonous snakes, bees and jungle leeches. Across the valley on an opposing hillside, villagers spotted a tiger.
'Everything is about getting closer to our guy'
Forensic anthropologist Nick Passalacqua has flown in from Hawaii to oversee the actual digging. He’s fairly new to JPAC, but not to searching for lost people. It’s the focus of his year-old doctorate from Michigan State University, and he’s been involved in more than 75 human forensics cases.
“Finding the wreckage is important,” he says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re looking in the right place for the body. But if we find life-support equipment, that means we’re getting closer. Everything is about getting closer to our guy.”
But decades later, flesh and muscle will be long gone. The wind, rain and animals will likely have cleaned and broken bones into shards, and often have moved them elsewhere. The hope is some survival equipment will have moved with any remains. The searchers can never have enough clues.
The team runs a metal detector over the cleared hillside, marking each hit with a red plastic flag. Clicks reveal anything from a wedding ring to bombs and bullets. Each hit is checked out by an explosives expert.
Passalacqua studies the pattern of the wreckage on the hillside because it can possibly tell him something about how the chopper crashed and if it moved afterward. He’s satisfied that in this case, the chopper hasn’t moved much.
He divides the ground into a grid and calls for the dig to start on what he deems the most likely resting place for the lost Marine – a patch of ground between the chopper’s rotors and carriage.
But before the digging can begin, Petty Officer Elizabeth Mongkhonvilay, 24, from Emporia, Kan., talks with the villagers to make sure they’re at ease with what’s going on.
They have been recruited by their communist central government and the village chief, but they insist on a short spiritual ceremony before the digging for human remains begins.
“We’re looking for bones, and bones that have been at home here for a long time,” she explains. “Before they could touch a screen, or a shovel, they had to make peace with the dead.”
The dig is painstaking. Each shovel scrapes less than an inch deeper than the last, as dozens of black buckets are slowly filled with the dirt. Eventually, they’ll dig down about a foot. The villagers form a bucket line and rush the dirt uphill and over to a series of screens to filter out anything out of the ordinary and possibly important.
Passalacqua looks over what the screens are catching: sticks, rocks, a few bullet casings. But there are a few scraps of fabric that could have come from a survival vest, or might simply be long decayed debris from inside the chopper.
He reaches into a screen and picks out a small piece to study. Hard to tell if it’s rock, wood or even bone.
“It won’t likely be large pieces,” he says of the search for bones. “Sometimes you get lucky, and a body is buried by villagers and you find an entire skeleton. But these men died in a war, and often far from anyone.”
What Passalacqua decides is worth a closer examination will be shipped back to Hawaii. On a day when the contents of hundreds of buckets are screened, the material worth further review would barely fill one.
“It’s not fast,” Passalacqua explains. “We have to stay focused.”
“Not fast” is an apt description of the hunt for Spooky 21.
On June 13, 2011, what the Spooky search team uncovered in Laos, in a dig similar to the search for the Marine who died in the helicopter fire, arrived at the lab in Hawaii, and the question on the fate of the six crewmen became simple:
After 46 years missing, 16 years of searching the site and a decade of digging, had JPAC teams found enough to officially bring the crew home?
Part III ARLINGTON, Va. — Nearly half a century passed before the suspected remains of six airmen made the journey from a rice paddy in southeastern Laos to a forensics lab near Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
But once those remains arrived, the experts preparing to study and identify them knew that at best the men were only halfway home.
Getting them all the way would be a challenge.
The crew had vanished Christmas Eve 1965, when their American cargo plane-turned-gunship, call sign Spooky 21, had apparently been shot from the sky during a mission over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It took searchers decades to find what they believed to be wreckage from the plane.
And after another decade of excavations in a rice paddy tucked between steep Laotian hillsides, recovery teams had come away with a small amount of debris that they hoped were bones. But even if they were, they had no way of knowing if the bones belonged to the crewmembers, or even if they were human.
And what they found wasn’t much.
Take two hands, cup them together, and then fill them with dry, blackened chips and slivers of material. That’s what investigators had left to study after the lab run by the military’s Joint POWMIA Accounting Command sifted through the debris and figured out that some of it was just rock and wood.
Only one piece in that small pile of material looked vaguely human – a single, broken tooth.
Forensic anthropologist Robert Maves was running the investigation of the materials once they arrived in Hawaii. Maves, 52, is a serious man. At JPAC for 18 years, he speaks about reuniting missing service members with their families as a moral obligation.
Frequently when remains arrive, lab workers have more to go on than what the suspected Spooky 21 evidence offered. A full skeleton might be rare; entire bones are not.
But this was not a Hollywood-style forensic cop show where the mystery is solved inside an hour, between commercials. To the casual eye, a handful of bone chips wouldn’t even look like bone chips, especially if they’d been in a fire and were discolored.
The first chore was to identify what they might be. While not ideal, bone chips have helped to identify other lost service members. Even small ones have meaning.
Maves’ team determined that these were, indeed, bone chips. They were identified as “post-cranial”; they came from the back of a skull. It was a small victory because they could move onto the second stage of the investigation:
Whose skull?
“It was time to check to see if we could pull DNA,” Maves recalls.
The crew on Spooky 21’s flight had been promoted, several times, since it vanished 48 years ago. By the time it reached Arlington, that crew consisted of Col. Derrell Jeffords, pilot, 40, of Florence, S.C.; Col. Joseph Christiano, navigator, 43, of Rochester, N.Y.; Lt. Col. Dennis L. Eilers, co-pilot, 27, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Chief Master Sgts. William K. Colwell, 44, of Glen Cove, N.Y.; Arden K. Hassenger, 32, of Lebanon, Ore.; and Larry C. Thornton, 33, of Idaho Falls, Idaho.
The military had been looking for the crew from Spooky 21 ever since it disappeared. Jeffrey Christiano had been waiting his entire life.
Now 49, but only 2 when his father left for South Vietnam, he’d chased his father’s ghost throughout his childhood. He married at age 22, seeking what he’d longed for since his father vanished, but it didn’t last.
“I just wanted to be intact,” he said. “I’d felt a hole in my childhood. I kept trying, and failing, to fill it. I just really wanted my dad.”
Knowing there were many relatives with similar tales, Maves never let himself forget just how high the stakes were.
Climbing the spiral staircase
Spooky 21 vanished two decades before the first DNA “fingerprinting.” By the time the remains arrived in Hawaii, DNA testing had become a routine identification tool. But when the crew disappeared, the entire concept had all been so new. It had only been a 12 years since James Watson and Francis Crick told the world what DNA looked like; essentially, a spiral staircase.
In scientific terms, DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid – is a double helix: tightly coiled, 2-meter-long strands commonly known as the building blocks of life. They carry 3 billion pairs of molecules known as nucleotides and are considered 99.9 percent similar among all humans. Using DNA to identify an individual requires focusing on the 0.1 percent of difference.
The surest identification is made when separate samples of a person’s DNA are compared with each other. But the military didn’t have DNA samples of the Spooky 21 crew. The next best thing is to test the DNA of a person’s children, as they have the greatest genetic chance of carrying the same traits.
Maves’ team arranged for the necessary cheek swabs as it prepared to try to extract DNA from the bone chips. But a big obstacle loomed.
“The report from the field was that the plane was smoking as it fell to earth,” Maves said. “And we could see the chips had been subjected to flames. The evidence of fire was troubling.”
DNA doesn’t normally survive heat more intense than 600 degrees. As the lab tried to recover DNA from the chips, “we estimated the fire to have burned at more than 1,000 degrees,” Maves said.
Still, they had to pursue every option. But it turned out to be fruitless.
The official entry in the Spooky 21 case file stated: “No DNA possible due to size and conditions.”
Without DNA, the JPAC identification team was down to one final shot at identifying at least one crew member: the broken tooth.
Nothing from Spooky 21, it seemed, had survived intact. The roots of the tooth, unique enough to help in identification by themselves, were missing. Some bow, some splay, and most are different sizes.
Investigators did have the crown, however, the top of a “left maxillary first molar,” from the upper left side of someone’s mouth. It’s the first one, and crowns, like roots, can be equally unique and aid in identifications. The top of a tooth is like a landscape, with distinct ridges, peaks and valleys; not unlike the landscape that had swallowed up Spooky 21.
Maves had the dental X-rays for each member of the crew. But his job suddenly became easier when he realized that he didn’t have to bother comparing the records for five of them, because one crew member was missing his first left upper molar and four others had fillings in theirs.
Only one showed an intact left upper first molar: Hassenger.
The next step was obvious. They needed to make an X-ray of the broken tooth to try to match it against the exact angles of the molar in Hassenger’s dental records.
On Sept. 22, 2011, they compared them. The match was perfect, in the way that any two maps of the same piece of geography would match.
And that was it.
After 46 years of loss and searching, this was success. Hassenger, at least, had finally come home.
The identification team then noted that because Spooky 21 had been identified, “both by type of plane and location” – meaning all other AC-47s that had been in that part of Laos had been accounted for – and with Hassenger’s identification through dental records, case file 0222 could finally be closed.
Case closed
“The available evidence suggests that Col. Derrell Jeffords and his five member crew died on 24 December, 1965 when their AC-47 gunship crashed in Savannakhet Province, Laos,” military records state.
But there was one important task still to complete before the U.S. military had truly brought the Spooky 21 crew home.
The morning of July 9, 2012, is overcast.
The white headstones in Arlington National Cemetery seem to march off into the mist in every direction from plot number 10047. This will be one of 24 burials on this summer’s day at the national military cemetery. The plot, seven feet by three feet, has been dug eight feet deep.
About 168 square feet of dirt have been removed to make room for the remains of six men, which will share a single silver casket. What was found two years ago, almost half a century after they had vanished, would barely fill a coffee mug.
The caisson crests the hill near the gravesite in a light rain, as the Air Force Band plays “Going Home,” a piece based on Antonin Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Six airmen walk besides the casket; behind them, 18 family members: two wives, 15 children and one niece. They will receive American flags, folded into tight triangles.
The morning is muggy, the burial a little late in starting. It proceeds as military funerals do, an enduring ritual, comforting in its precision, tragic in its reason. Family and others pour across the soggy grass toward the casket.
Sherrie Hassenger, who never remarried, never stopped believing that her husband would return home. On this morning, she welcomed him back. In the casket was a single tooth from her husband. She’d always hoped he’d survived, and might return intact. But she admits it was time to finally say goodbye.
Just as on the day they met, her hair gets a little wet, this time, though, from the light rain, not her faucet.
Jeanne Jeffords, wife of Derrell Jeffords, would later sum up her feelings in a note to friends: “Those 6 wonderful men are no longer MIA (missing in action), they are finally home.”
Even now, Jeffrey Christiano says that Christmas Eve, the date his father and the others disappeared so long ago, remains a tough but vital time. His mom always made an extra effort to make sure the kids didn’t dwell in sorrow on what for many is the happiest night of the year. He thinks that effort drew his family even tighter.
Now he and his siblings keep that same spirit alive.
Christiano also says that he learned something at the burial that he hadn’t expected.
“My earliest memory of my father is clinging to the door frame and shouting, ‘Daddy don’t go!’ as he deployed to Vietnam,” Christiano says. “But really, I don’t know if those are my memories, or the way my mind interprets what I’ve been told time and again by others about how I reacted as he left that day.
“See, the thing is, my brothers and sisters, they were older. They knew my dad. They knew what he smelled like, what he looked like. They knew what made him smile and what made him angry. They knew him. I didn’t, or at least I don’t remember knowing him. So people ask me if the burial was finally closure for me, if it helped me put an end to the story of me and my dad.
“But that’s not it. July 9, 2012, was the day we finally met, really. It wasn’t closure. After 47 years, it was the beginning of my story with my dad.”
(Image: Captain Jessie Lee works with a local villager at a JPAC dig site near Ta Oy, Laos. This wreckage is not far from where Spooky 21, an AC-47 gunship crashed during Vietnam)