THE WALL OF FACES

I was honored to be able to attend the "coming home" ceremony in Madison, Indiana on 7-7-06 for Donald Hoskins. He had been MIA for 34 years and now is back home in Indiana. It was an impressive ceremony including a fly-over. The Patriot Guard Riders & Indiana Rolling Thunder rode approx. 150 strong with their American Flags flying in the breeze. May this bring peace to his family and may he rest in eternal peace. Men like him have served OUR great nation and have made it FREE and what it is today. We must never forget their great deeds and dedication and we must insure that future generations are told their stories.

The following article appeared in the 2 May 2006 online edition of The Washington Post:


Remains of D.C., Indiana Air Sergeants identified

By Michael E. Ruane


The Defense Department announced yesterday that it had identified the remains of two Air Force crew members -- one of them from the District -- who were killed when their plane was shot down in Vietnam 34 years ago.

A spokesman identified the two as Staff Sgt. Calvin C. Cooke of Washington and Tech. Sgt. Donald R. Hoskins of Madison, Ind. Their remains were identified in March at the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.

Cooke, who was known as Grady, and Hoskins were among seven people aboard a C-130 cargo plane that was trying to conduct a low-level air drop to resupply South Vietnamese forces surrounded at the city of An Loc, said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.

On April 26, 1972, the plane left Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside Saigon for a hazardous night drop. During its run, the aircraft was hit by ground fire and crashed into the countryside, killing everyone onboard. Cooke, one of the airplane's loadmasters, had just turned 26.

Greer said information and artifacts from the plane and its personnel had been gathered piecemeal since 1975, when a Vietnamese search team first checked the site. Over the years, as artifacts were recovered and sorted, and DNA tests were run on fragments of bone and teeth, remains of other crew members were identified.

Greer said several of those onboard remain unaccounted for. Cooke's remains will be buried next month in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

One of Cooke's daughters, Angela, of Everett, Wash., said her father was married and had three young daughters at the time of his death. She said in a telephone interview last night that she has vague childhood memories of him but a clearer recollection of the day the family learned of the crash.

"Just the sadness," she said, "and I always kind of wondered if he would ever come back. It's just kind of nice to finally have closure. He was a hero, definitely."

U.S. Department of Defense
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense
(Public Affairs)

NEWS RELEASE

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 380-06

01 May 2006

MISSING IN ACTION AIR FORCE SERGEANTS FROM VIETNAM WAR ARE

IDENTIFIED AND RETURNED TO FAMILIES FOR FULL MILITARY HONORS


The Department of Defense POW/ Missing Personnel Office ( DPMO ) announced today that the remains of two servicemen, missing in action from the Vietnam War, have been identified.

They are ...

Technical Sergeant

DONALD RUSSELL HOSKINS

of Madison, Indiana

and

Staff Sergeant

CALVIN COOLIDGE COOKE JR

of Washington, D.C.

A third person from the crew,

Major

HARRY ARLO AMESBURY JR

has been previously identified.

The funeral for Calvin Cooke will be at Arlington National Cemetery, in Arlington Virginia, near Washington D.C. on 20 June, with full military honors.

On 26 April 1972, Amesbury was piloting a C-130E Hercules to An Loc City, South Vietnam for an emergency resupply mission.

Hoskins and Cooke were among those aboard the aircraft when it was hit by enemy fire and crashed.

Enemy activity prevented any recovery attempts until three years later in 1975 when a Vietnamese search team recovered artifacts and remains that were later identified as belonging to another crewman.

In 1988, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam ( SRV ) confiscated remains from a Vietnamese national in Ho Chi Minh City and returned them to U.S. custody.

The Vietnamese attributed the remains to Cooke.

In April 1989, a Vietnamese woman living in Thailand told U.S. interviewers that she witnessed the crash of a C-130 Hercules in 1972 near An Loc City.

She was a schoolteacher at the time of the incident but moved due to hostilities in the area.

She told interviewers that two of her former students found the complete remains of one of the crewmen, a uniform, identification tags and other items they were keeping at one of their homes.

The students gave her a bone fragment and information from the identification tag of Amesbury, both of which she turned over to the interviewers.

The SRV repatriated additional remains to the United States in June 1989, and in January and November of 1991 which were attributed to Cooke and Amesbury.

In 1992, a joint U.S.-SRV team, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), interviewed several Vietnamese nationals who claimed to have recovered remains from a C-130 crash site near An Loc.

The villagers recalled finding a flight suit and almost the complete skeletal remains of one of the crewmen.

One of them led the joint team to the crash site and another turned over several small fragments of bone and an identification tag rubbing for Amesbury.

Another joint team returned to the crash site for excavation in 1993 where they recovered additional remains, personal effects and crew related artifacts.

The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia contacted JPAC officials in 1998 about a woman living in Georgia who had remains and personal artifacts attributed to Amesbury.

Those were turned over to JPAC as part of the evidence associated with this case.

JPAC scientists and Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory ( AFDIL ) specialists used mitochondrial DNA as one of the forensic tools to help identify the remains. Laboratory analysis of dental remains also confirmed their identifications.

Of those Americans unaccounted for from all conflicts, 1,805 are from the Vietnam War.

Another 841 Americans have been accounted for in Southeast Asia since the end of the war, with 601 of those from Vietnam.

For additional information on the Defense Department’s mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO Website at http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call (703)-699-1169.


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Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

Mary Frye – 1932