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Laverne Ransbottom finds it hard to shift gears after 38
years. The idea of “closure” doesn’t rest
easily with her. She’s not sure what the word means. “Normal” is
another such word, its meaning having changed too much over
the course of so many years when she couldn’t be sure
if her son was alive or dead. In January, at long last, she
buried that son, 1st Lt. Frederick Joel Ransbottom, in Edmond,
Okla.
“It’s been ingrained in my psyche for such a
long time,” she said. “I don’t know what’s
normal anymore. I think that if he had been dead in the beginning,
we could have coped with that, and we would have gotten over
that. We would have come to terms with it. I think our biggest
problem was always with putting them (her son and other Kham
Duc MIAs) in a prisoner of war category.”
There were
reports of POWs, and one in fact was taken prisoner and later
released in 1973. So in the back of her mind the questions
festered: Was he alive? Had he been taken prisoner? And if
he was alive, was he cold and hungry? Did he have food to
eat? Was he being mistreated?
Back home in Oklahoma, she just
tried to get through the day.
“You try to shut that
out of your head, and you just can’t,” she said. “Not
as a parent you can’t. No matter what you do, no matter
what you say or how hard you work at it, there’s no
light at the end of the tunnel.”
Her husband, a World
War II veteran, thought he could solve the mystery himself.
He told the governor of Oklahoma that if he could go to Kham
Duc, he’d find Freddy himself.
He knew he could find him. He just knew it.
It was difficult
to talk about Freddy at home, “the
husband and wife thing,” Laverne calls it. He didn’t
know how to talk to her about it, and she said she was the
same way with him. The not knowing changed everything.
“You
try to be nice,” she said. “You separate
yourself from the working world, and you separate yourself
from a lot of people, because you absolutely cannot talk
about it. And you know that they don’t even want to
hear about it.”
Not everyone didn’t want to talk
about it, though. The Ransbottoms went to meetings in Washington
with family members of other men who were missing. Laverne
thought the meetings were geared more toward the wives of
the missing, but they went nonetheless. Back home, they found
closeness still hard to find. The world had changed too much.
“We
could not get back to where we were, and so we both had to
move away from it a little bit,” Laverne
said. “You’ve got to move it out far enough so
that it’s not an all-consuming thing. You can’t
keep it close to you all day long, or you’re going
to lose your mind. You’ve got to move it out far enough
so you can look at it almost like it’s happening to
someone else.”
And it was happening to someone else.
It was happening to many people, one of them a young Texas
woman, Vickie Gannon, barely out of her teens when Laverne
Ransbottom met her at one of the POW-MIA family meetings
in Washington. Her brother, Danny Widner, was one of the
missing from Kham Duc and remains MIA today. She thinks it
might have been 1979 when she met Laverne at the meeting
in Washington.
“I love her to death,” Vickie said. “We’ve
bunked together in all kinds of places. She’s been
such a huge advocate for all the guys.”
Each seizes
on the word “family” to describe
not only their relationship but everyone they’ve met
on the long road to finding the missing—the Kham Duc
survivors, VVA, Tim Brown, the JPAC archaeologist Brad Sturm,
other families of the missing.
“Oh, absolutely, family,” Laverne
said.
Vickie Gannon was two weeks shy of her thirteenth birthday
when she walked home from school one day and saw a group
of people at her house. When she went inside, nobody spoke
to her, but she knew something was wrong. She could see it
in the faces, feel it in the room, and she didn’t want
to know what it was. She went straight back to her room.
“One
of my brothers came back and told me,” she
said. “I remember not being able to move.”
What
did MIA mean? Had they lost him? Danny never told her he
was going to a dangerous place.
The next morning, her mother
woke her and told her to get ready to go to school. She said
Danny would be all right. They thought at the time that Danny
would be found soon. Any day, they’d be hearing something
good.
“I don’t think that ever changed for me,” Vickie
said. “I think I’ve spent the last 38 years never
expecting that I would never know or that my mother would
never know. It was always what has to be done to get to that
point. I don’t think that ever changed for me.”
She
spent her high school years going to POW-MIA meetings. When
other girls in her class were interested in who they might
date that weekend, or the prom, or any of the other myriad
details of high school social life, Vickie was interested
only in finding out if her brother was still alive.
Over the
years, she set aside a week to dedicate herself to Danny.
“I
called it My Week for Danny,” she said. “I
would go to Washington, do everything I could to find out
more information, and then go back home and live life as
usual. I started in 1979, when my mother was no longer able
physically to make the trip. My sister, Debbie, went every
year from the first year. Debbie died in 2000. After awhile,
I just kind of adopted all of the people involved in Kham
Duc, because so many were not able to come anymore. I had
met Bill Skivington, and when he wasn’t able to come,
Laverne, Debbie, and I just kind of incorporated him and
all of them. It was like a glass of water was filling up.”
On
the surface, Laverne Ransbottom searched for a son and Vickie
Gannon for a brother, but each makes it clear that the meaning
of all the years goes deeper than two men, and it stretches
to the future more than the past. Vickie remembers her mother
and sister frequently reminding her that all the work they
did wasn’t just for those missing in Vietnam.
It was for all the men and women who would go into battle
in the future.
“My mother and sister said this all my
life,” she
said. “I can remember when Desert Storm began that
I thought, my God, we can’t do this yet. We don’t
have it fixed.”
Allen “Doc” Hoe, the medic in Fred Ransbottom’s
recon unit, called Vickie late at night to give her the news
that Snoopy 6 and Skip Skivington had been found. Vickie
called Donny Ransbottom, Fred’s brother. Donny told
his mother.
“This will be the strangest thing you ever
heard, but I expected it,” Laverne Ransbottom said. “From
the time I met (JPAC archaeologist) Brad Sturm and some of
the others, I felt they would be successful. I just knew
they would. Brad told me, ‘When we found them, when
we realized what we had found, we stopped everything. I’m
not ashamed to tell you that I wasn’t the only one
who cried.’”
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2011, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8719 Colesville Road, Suite 100, Silver Spring, MD 20910