Abandoned: MIA in Vietnam

by Bill Yancey

  Kimura smiled. “It broke my father’s heart when he quit the Naval Academy. Made him angry, too. He stopped talking to Jim for two years. They spoke briefly on the telephone right before Christmas 1967. Oriskany was on R&R in Hong Kong then. I remember my father crying during that conversation, and again when the navy told us Jim had committed suicide. He was devastated by that news.”

  The sudden buzz of a smoke detector interrupted their conversation. “Uh-oh,” Kimura said. She stood and walked quickly toward the dining room. Wolfe followed her through the dining room into the kitchen. Smoke poured off a pan sitting on the stove. “Mother!” Kimura said loudly.

  After turning off the burner, Kimura opened the back door, allowing the smoke to escape into the yard. The smoke detector eventually shut off. After scanning the room to make certain there was no fire, she went down a hallway to the den. Wolfe followed. There they found Mrs. Byrnes asleep in a recliner in front of the television. It displayed a news broadcaster who spoke in Japanese. English translations scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

  “That’s her favorite show. Noon news from Japan,” Kimura said. “The Alzheimer’s affects her memory and her ability to stay awake. She occasionally forgets she has turned on the stove to warm the noodles. I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything more about Jim today, Addison. I have an appointment this afternoon. Can you come back tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” Wolfe said. “What time would be good for you?”

  “Mother goes to the senior day care center for six hours tomorrow. I take her, but I’ll be back about 9:00 a.m. Anytime after that is good.”

  “Tomorrow about ten, then,” Wolfe said. “I have a newspaper clipping and some information I’d like to share with you tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Wolfe returned about 10:15 a.m. the next morning. With him he carried his notebook and Chief Clemons’s little black book. He waited for a good time to show them and the article from the St. Augustine Record about the attempted murder to Kimura. She showed Wolfe to her brother’s room on the second floor, a virtual shrine to the dead sailor.

  Jimmy Byrnes’s family had framed and hung on the walls every sports letter he had earned, many academic awards, his letter of appointment to Annapolis, even grade school pictures he had drawn. Pictures of Mt. Etna, taken by Jimmy on a brief vacation to Italy between high school and the Naval Academy, hung next to pictures of Mt. Fuji photographed from his father’s quarters at Atsugi. Yearbooks from plebe and youngster years at Annapolis lay open to his class picture on a teak desk. Tabs held the places of other entries with his picture, most notably to the 150 pound football team on which he played.

  “They had to weigh in at less than 154 pounds the Wednesday before the games on Saturday,” Kimura explained. “Jim never had trouble making weight, but he said some of the players had to sweat off as much as twenty pounds in order to play. He told me it sometimes took them three days to regain their strength.”

  Wolfe saw the list of teams Navy played against, all Ivy League schools and West Point. In the 1965-6 yearbook, the Navy 150 pound team had defeated Army 21-15. Wolfe pointed to the picture of Byrnes intercepting a pass. “They beat Army that year,” he said.

  “Jim paid too high a price for that victory,” Kimura said. “When he was tackled at the end of the play, he twisted his knee. They never did figure out what he did to it, but it was never right after that. When he wanted to return to regular duty, they put him through a complete physical. Because of his knee, they told him he would never qualify to be a pilot. He was devastated. All he ever wanted to do was to fly off carriers like our father. In retrospect, I believe he quit the Naval Academy because he was so depressed. My father never forgave him for giving up. My mother could not accept it either.”

  In addition to the high school and college yearbooks, Kimura showed Wolfe a thick binder. It held at least a hundred letters and the envelopes in which they had arrived, each in an individual clear plastic three-ringed pouch. “All these are letters from friends after they heard the navy said he jumped overboard. Not a single person thought he was capable of killing himself.”

  The final pouch held twenty or thirty small cards, all addressed in the same tiny handwriting to Mrs. Byrnes and family. “That’s how we know he didn’t commit suicide,” Kimura said. She pulled one of the letters from the pouch. “This is from Colonel Richard Rhodes. He was a POW with my brother in South Vietnam. He says Jim saved his life after the Viet Cong shot down his aircraft. Mother receives a card from him every Christmas reminding us of that and thanking her for having such a wonderful son.” Tears again formed in Kimura’s eyes. She sniffled slightly and they disappeared, almost too quickly for Wolfe to have seen them.

  Stunned, Wolfe stood with his mouth open. “He didn’t commit suicide?” He sat on the bed in the room. “I’m sorry, Tammy, I’m having a hard time adjusting to these rapid changes. Until a week ago, I thought your brother had lived through his tour and probably retired somewhere after a long career. A guy with whom we served on Oriskany told me he disappeared from the ship and the navy presumed him dead, a suicide. I thought you confirmed that yesterday. Now you tell me he was a POW. Did he come home after the war ended?”

  “Colonel Rhodes is sure he died from friendly fire, a B-52 bombing raid,” Kimura said. “I have Rhodes’s telephone number. You can call him, if you like.” She leafed through the binder and found a sheet of paper from which she copied Rhodes’s address and telephone number. She handed the information to Wolfe.

  Leaving Jimmy’s shrine, Wolfe followed Kimura down to the main floor and sat in the small, wood paneled den. She sat in silence while Wolfe used his cell phone to call Rhodes. Enshrined on the walls of the den Wolfe found Admiral Byrnes’s career. Pictures from Annapolis, of aircraft he flew, squadron mates, and ships he commanded decorated the walls. “He retired from the 6th Fleet in 1977,” Kimura said. His last ship was the USS Nimitz. He supervised its construction and then retired.”

  Rhodes’s telephone requested callers to leave a number and a message. “Colonel Rhodes, I am a friend of Jimmy Byrnes’s. I’ll call you again,” Wolfe said, and left his telephone number.

  Walking around the room, Wolfe examined each photograph carefully, noting the size difference between Jimmy and his father. The latter had played football at Annapolis, too, long before they had the 150 pound team. He was a fullback and linebacker, playing offense and defense at 190 pounds. Wolfe had no difficulty finding him in the team picture. “Navy won all three Army-Navy games my dad played in,” Kimura said. “I believe he was more proud of that than of being an ace. He shot down seven enemy aircraft.”

  Finished examining the pictures, Wolfe sat again. He opened his notebook and took the newspaper clipping from it. Handing it to Kimura, he said, “This is why I am here. Initially all I wanted to know was if the Jimmy Byrnes mentioned in the note was your brother. Then Chief Noble told me about his disappearance. So I thought I’d pay my respects. Still don’t know if the note refers to Jimmy, but the man who died in the hospital was on Oriskany with us.”

  He handed Clemons’s black book and his notes to Kimura. “Could you go through these notebooks and see if you recognize any names. People Jimmy liked, or hated, too, I guess.”

  “I can’t today or tomorrow,” Kimura said. “My mother has two doctors’ appointments. And my sister will be coming over from Maryland to visit. We will be extremely busy. We are trying to find a nursing home in which to transition my mother. It will be necessary fairly soon.”

  “I’m in no rush,” Wolfe said. “I can come back in a week, or so. Do you suppose I could borrow Jimmy’s Hammond High School yearbook and the two from the Naval Academy? I promise I won’t lose or damage them.”

  Kimura surprised Wolfe by agreeing readily. “My sister and I will have to decide what to do with all Jimmy’s stuff when my mother goes into a home. We will probably sell the house. Neither of us worships him the way my mother does. We may end up donating the year
books to his schools. Sometimes they let people who have lost their books scan the pictures and upload them to their computers. We are not as attached to them as you might expect, but please take care of them.”

  Rhodes returned his call seconds before Wolfe pulled into a parking place at his hotel in Crystal City, in Arlington. Not feeling guilty about leaving the expensive hotel, Wolfe asked for and received a late checkout time. In an hour he managed to find I-66 west and later I-81 south, toward Virginia Tech. Rhodes had retired from teaching, but still lived near the campus. The seventy-three year old ex-assistant commandant to the VT Corps of Cadets said he would be happy to talk with anyone, anytime, about Jimmy Byrnes.

  Two hundred fifty miles southeast of Washington, Wolfe took the exit to Virginia 460 west from I-81 south, toward Christiansburg and Blacksburg. The drive was a homecoming of sorts. He had graduated from Virginia Tech before attending the Medical College of Virginia and had not been back since trying to convince his twin children by his first wife to apply to college there. Neither did.

  CHAPTER 18

  “We lost two more Spads,” Byrnes told Wolfe, referring to the A-1 propeller driven attack aircraft, nicknamed after the Spads of WWI. They strolled back onto the hangar deck after chow. Byrnes had friends in most of the squadrons of Carrier Air Wing 16, plane captains he had known from the previous cruise. They shared the squadrons’ gossip with him. “The pilots are going to be listed as MIA, although they think there’s a chance they can be rescued. Choppers are looking for them now. Other pilots saw two parachutes. Both planes were hit by small arms fire.”

  “Damn,” Wolfe said, “that’s almost a plane a day and a pilot per week for the cruise. Five A-1 Skyraiders this week alone. The SAMs keep knocking down the A-4s, too.”

  “They’re calling this month Black October in the ready rooms,” Byrnes said.

  As the two men walked past Hangar Deck Control, they heard a loud BANG! Spinning toward the sound, they saw an A-4 with its nose on a jack stand, nose wheel about a foot off the deck. Actually, only half the nose wheel remained on the strut. A shredded rubber tire hung from the remaining half of the metal nose wheel. Behind the aircraft, Wolfe saw a sailor lying on the deck, arms and legs outstretched, widening pool of blood surrounding his head.

  Sprinting to the aircraft, Wolfe and Byrnes arrived at the same time as the man’s squadron mates. An aircraft mechanic knelt next to the injured man. After a brief assessment, he pulled a small tarpaulin from one of the nearby tractors and laid it over the injured man’s upper body and head. “He’s dead,” the AME said to other men dressed in green shirts. “Get a corpsman and a wire stretcher.”

  “Wheel blew up,” Byrnes explained, walking with Wolfe to Hangar Bay 3. “They are supposed to either x-ray the wheel for fractures or place a chainmaille cover over it before pressurizing new tires. The tires wear out quickly hitting the deck at a hundred plus miles per hour. The wheels sometimes have hairline fractures.”

  “Well, I guess we don’t have to worry about Gorecki not tying his jacks down in the future,” Sluggo Maxwell said, and laughed loudly. The remainder of the hangar deck crew looked at him in disbelief. “What?” Maxwell asked. “You were all thinking it. I just said it.”

  “That’s morbid, Sluggo,” Wolfe said.

  “Fuck you, Boot,” the airman said. “Everything we do is dangerous. If you haven’t noticed, this is an unsafe place to work even without the enemy shooting at us. Sure, the pilots have a dangerous job, but more people die from accidents in wartime than from enemy action. Remember the fire? Or fires, now that the USS Forest Fire has had one, too.”

  “I’m no longer a boot,” Wolfe protested. “Made airman last month.”

  “I’ve been an airman for three years and you’ll always be a boot to me, Wolfe,” Maxwell said. The dark curly-haired man stalked away, followed by three crewmembers who agreed with him.

  “Byrnes!” a deep voice from behind the men made Wolfe jump. He turned to see Chief Powell saunter into Bay 3. The spindly-legged, pot-bellied, balding, older man with an alcoholic red complexion rarely left Hangar Deck Control. In fact, Wolfe had never seen him in Bay 3, only on his way to chow or his quarters through Bay 2. The Chief laid his cup of coffee on the spotting dolly. He chewed on an unlit cigar. Stenciled on his yellow jersey above his stomach bulge were the words Hangar Chief.

  “Yes, Chief,” Byrnes said, turning to face the chief.

  “Who’s your best driver?” the chief asked, standing with legs spread and hands on hips, eyes boring into Byrnes.

  Without hesitation, Byrnes said, “Wolfe.”

  “Wolfe?” Powell’s eyes widened. “Hell, he’s only been driving for three weeks.”

  Silently, Wolfe stood next to the tractor. He didn’t realize Byrnes thought he was especially good, much less the best. And he certainly didn’t know that Chief Powell knew exactly how long he had been driving.

  “He’s got the touch, Chief,” Byrnes said evenly.

  “Okay. If you say so, but if this don’t work out and he goes in the drink, the fact that you recommended him is going in the report,” Powell said. “Get your crew together. We have to spin an F-8. The port elevator is tied up with the accident. They’re taking pictures and doing a brief forensic study before they’ll let us move the A-4. And they still have to put a nose wheel on it. The starboard elevator is loaded with aircraft on the flight deck. The mechs in VF-111 want to swap engines on an F-8. It will be a lot easier to do if we spin it for them.”

  “I can do that,” Byrnes said. “It’ll be tight, though.”

  Powell chuckled, a hearty laugh that originated in his large beer belly and worked its way up to his gravelly throat. “I am certain I’m the only director who can do this, but I’m willing to let you watch and learn.”

  “Okay, Chief,” Byrnes said. He knew better than to argue with Powell.

  Powell gathered the entire Bay 3 crew together, in addition to the elevator operator, and the plane captain who would be manning the aircraft, his feet on the F-8’s brake pedals.

  “We’re going to have thirty minutes to spin this bird and it will take every second to get it right and not drop the plane or the spotting dolly in the drink,” Powell said. “Plane captain, you pay very close attention to me. If I close my fists and cross my arms, you lock those brakes up as tight as they get. Got it?” The plane captain nodded. He wore a brown jersey and soft brown cloth helmet with built in ear protection.

  “Harris,” the chief said to the elevator operator, “you are going to have to override the stanchion safety. The lifeline will have to be down in order to do this. We need more room. And you keep communications open with the bridge. If they turn this boat while Wolfe is out over the edge, we’ll lose the dolly and the bird.”

  “Yes, Chief,” Harris said.

  “Wolfe,” Powell said, studying Wolfe’s eyes. “I can get someone else to do this if you want. No pressure.”

  Not entirely certain what the chief expected of him, but interested in the challenge, Wolfe said, “I’m your man, Chief.”

  The Bay 3 blueshirts gathered around the VF-111 squadron’s F-8 Crusader and crawled underneath. Wolfe slid the spotting dolly under the red and white shark’s teeth painted on the jet engine intake below the nose of the fighter plane. As soon as he locked the two hydraulic arms into the nose wheel, the chief gave the hand signals for the crew to remove the chocks and tiedowns. The chocks clanked and chains rattled as they hit the deck.

  Powell put his right thumb in the air and Wolfe pushed a button. The two hydraulic arms on the spotting dolly raised the interceptor’s nose wheel about a foot off the deck. “That’s good,” Powell said. “Now you do exactly as I say and you’ll be fine.”

  Following Powell’s directions Wolfe rotated the aircraft and moved the nose toward the stern side of the open space where the elevator sat when it was at the hangar deck level. As he watched, the metal stanchions dropped into the deck, as if the elevator awaited the aircraft and d
olly. The metal cable lifeline sank into the deck with the stanchions. Instead of elevator, open ocean beckoned.

  Wolfe drove the dolly backward until it was three or four feet from the edge of the deck. “Harris?” Powell yelled to the elevator operator, after motioning Wolfe to stop.

  The elevator operator held his thumb up. “Captain says we’re going twenty knots. Straight ahead. No turns anticipated.”

  Chief Powell looked into the cockpit. “Plane captain?”

  “We’re good. Have hydraulic pressure for brakes,” the man yelled from the cockpit.

  “Wolfe?”

  Wolfe looked at the wide expanse of the ocean, and swallowed hard. “Ready, Chief,” he said.

  “Okay, eyes on me,” Powell said. “Byrnes, get your crew out from under the aircraft. Are your safety men in place?”

  “Yes, Chief.” Byrnes said. He stood next to the chief, where Wolfe could see them both.

  Following the chief’s hand signals, Wolfe turned the motorcycle-like throttle of the dolly and swung the arm that controlled power to its two main wheels. He steered the yellow tractor by swinging the control arm. Whichever main wheel he pointed the arm toward got power, almost like steering a tank by changing power to the treads. If he twisted the throttle clockwise the dolly moved forward. Twisting the throttle counter-clockwise moved the dolly backwards. Wolfe sat over the third wheel of the strange, squat machine. Shaped like a block letter Y, the two main drive wheels were at the top of the Y. A castor wheel sat under the stem and Wolfe sat at the extreme bottom of the Y. Beneath and slightly in front of him the smaller, castor wheel spun freely and went wherever the two drive wheels pushed it.

  The entire Bay 3 crew, and not a small number of aviation mechanics and other ship’s company, watched in awe as the chief swung the F-8 in an arc, within inches of the other aircraft surrounding it. The usual sounds of machinery whining and tapping stopped as men held their breath.