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The Long Journey Home
BY JIM BELSHAW
Ua ku keia welo mauliauhonua
(This family is old and well-established)
—Hawaiian warrior verse
In the fall of 1968, the writer
Joan Didion met World War II veteran Bill Skivington in Las
Vegas at the 101st Airborne Association’s 23rd annual
reunion. She wrote of that meeting: “He reached into
his coat pocket and brought out a newspaper clipping, preserved
in clear plastic, a story about his son: where he had gone
to school, the report that he was missing, and before he
put it in his pocket again, he looked at it a long while,
smoothed out an imagined crease, and studied the fragment
of newsprint as if it held some answer.”
Thirty-eight
years later, the answer came, itself the product of other
fragments—stories
carried in hearts as well as newspaper clippings, memories of familiar voices
and faces, stories of veterans, families, dedicated military personnel, and civilians
willing to endure great adversity, if not risk their own lives, so that grieving
families might find a measure of peace. For almost all of those 38 years, the
fragments floated through individual lives, sometimes touching one another, but
never pulled together into a coherent whole that might provide the answer Bill
Skivington looked for on the day he showed a newspaper clipping to Joan Didion.
His
son, William “Skip” Skivington, Jr., came home
38 years after disappearing in the miasma of a three-day
battle at a place called Kham Duc in the mountainous jungle
of the Vietnam-Laos border. He was one of seventeen men from
Recon 2/1, 196th Infantry, who died or were declared MIA
on Mother’s
Day 1968. In January 2007, Skip’s father, elderly and in failing health,
buried his son at Arlington National Cemetery.
In August 2006, the remains of
11 Marines and an Army soldier were found at Ngok Tavak,
five kilometers away from Kham Duc. The unflagging persistence
of a survivor of that battle would be instrumental in the
finding of others a short distance away at Kham Duc, and
in so doing, he would draw attention to those still missing
from the old Special Forces camp. In December 2006, Skip
Skivington and 1st Lt. Fred Ransbottom—“Snoopy
6”—the recon team’s leader,
were identified and brought home for burial.
Vickie Gannon,
the sister of Danny Widner, still listed as MIA in the Kham
Duc battle, said: “It was time. It was finally time,
and everyone had this role to play. I feel, without any of
these people and entities, none of this would have happened.
It’s like a play, where everyone was brought in and
it worked. Everyone played his role perfectly. I have never
loved so many people in my life.”
The cast members in
Vickie Gannon’s play frequently speak of themselves
as “family,” adopted sons and daughters, adopted
mothers and fathers, and of course the brothers whose ties
were forged in combat’s long hours
of boredom and explosive moments of terror. “Family” comes
easily to them when they speak of the last 38 years and the
people they met along the way.
Skip Skivington’s best
friend, Allen Hoe, a medic who brought his Hawaiian warrior
tradition to Vietnam, would become a second son to Skip’s
father, and in 2005, the medic would come to know the heartbreaking
sadness that Bill Skivington knew for so long when the medic’s
own warrior son was killed in combat in Iraq; Tim Brown,
a former Marine, would lead the way through years of tenacious
effort to find the missing from his own platoon at Ngok Tavak,
a handful of kilometers away from Kham Duc; Vietnam Veterans
of America, through years of patient diplomacy with the Vietnamese,
would build trust and open doors; in Washington and Hawaii,
officials in the DPMO (Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office)
and JPAC (Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command) moved to collect
the fragments of memories and evidence into a whole; at JPAC,
an archaeologist who didn’t
give a second thought to spending 100 days in the field,
would go back to Kham Duc three times before finding his
missing countrymen and bringing them home; a young woman
barely out of her teens whose brother remains missing would
become a daughter to the mother of the Oklahoma lieutenant
found alongside Skip Skivington. The women speak of everyone
they met as family.
Ua ku keia welo mauliauhonua
Allen “Doc” Hoe, now an attorney in Hawaii, was
drafted in 1966. He was 19 years old. He pulled good duty
stateside at Travis Air Force Base, near San Francisco, but
as he listened to other medics returning from Vietnam tell
their war stories, a question nagged Hoe: “This is
like one of those meaningful life experiences, and if I let
it pass me by, I will always wonder how I would have done.”
“Hawaiian
warrior tradition factored into that,” Hoe said. “For
me, it was kind of a sense of honor. You can only claim to
have a warrior heritage for so long before people ask you, ‘What
is that based on?’ In part,
it has to be based on ‘I lived it.’”
He arrived in Vietnam in December 1967 and was assigned to
a line platoon. Hoe met a young lieutenant there who had
fallen in love with Hawaii and its culture. The lieutenant
and the medic hit it off, and when each battalion was asked
to form up its own long-range reconnaissance team, the lieutenant
said he wanted Hoe to be the medic on his team.
“We
created this very close-knit, cohesive group of guys, and
we set about to do long-range recon,” Hoe said.
In March,
Skip Skivington came to the unit, designated as a replacement
radio-telephone operator. But the unit already had an RTO
and so the three of them—Skivington,
Hoe, and RTO Joe Blanford—hung out together. With the
two RTO’s on
one side of the lieutenant and the medic on the other, they
would spend long hours together, where conversations went
on late into the night and friendships were forged. It was
in those conversations that Skivington frequently told Hoe
of his father, a decorated veteran with the 101st in World
War II.
“We talked about family,” Hoe said. “He
talked about his brothers and father and how he wanted to
make his dad proud of him. Because I was introduced to his
father at such an early stage, it was one of the things that
compelled me to find his family when I came home and let
them know how much Skip thought of them and how much he loved
them.”
In late March, a new lieutenant reported to the
unit—Frederick Joel Ransbottom,
an Oklahoma country boy who would be called “Snoopy
6.” The recon
team had taken to calling themselves Snoopy anyway, and they
all thought Ransbottom bore a striking resemblance to another
more famous Snoopy.
“He didn’t look a day older
than any of the rest of us, but he looked fresh,” Hoe
said. “We were all curious about this guy. Within a
matter of hours, we were all saying, ‘Great choice.’ He
was a soldier’s
soldier. He wasn’t with us more than 90 days before
Kham Duc, but if you asked me now, he was with us for 50
years.”
The battle of Kham Duc spread across three days,
May 10-12, the last day being a Sunday, Mother’s Day.
Hoe’s unit didn’t normally operate
in the Kham Duc area, but the battalion had been “volunteered” to
provide security in the area while the Special Forces camp
there was evacuated. The North Vietnamese Army had been systematically
clearing the area of such camps and Kham Duc was the last.
In
late April, things seemed to be calm. Hoe, who had already
delayed a planned R&R, got word that his time off would
begin May 1. John “Doc” Stuller,
whose remains would be found by JPAC, would fill in for Hoe.
Skip Skivington would take over as Ransbottom’s RTO
with Blanford going on R&R, too.
Hoe went home to Hawaii,
returning to Vietnam on May 10, the day the NVA attacked
Ngok Tavak. In Chu Lai, people told Hoe there was no rush
for him to join up with his unit. He could just wait until
his outfit got settled into Kham Duc, and then he could catch
a ride on a chopper and fly up.
On May 11, he still waited,
but now the wait came amid reports of how bad it was at Kham
Duc. Greatly outnumbered by NVA forces, the camp was under
a brutal assault. Low on ammo, low on medical supplies, the
situation looked dire. Hoe was again told to go down to a
chopper pad and wait to see if a bird showed up that could
take him to Kham Duc. He brought his medical bag to the pad
and waited. No chopper came.
On May 12, he heard the word “overrun.”
“I was sick, heartbroken,” he said. “You
know, who made it, who didn’t make it. You suck it
up and tell yourself it will work out. Then when the reality
is that it won’t work out all right, you say, ‘OK,
I just have to keep going on with the mission.’ By
the end of the 12th, that night, late Sunday, when guys started
getting back to battalion headquarters, and you started hearing
the stories, I knew what happened to Skip and the others.”
May
13 began a 38-year wait for the men who disappeared at Kham
Duc.
Before attacking the Special Forces camp, the NVA hit Ngok
Tavak, an old French redoubt only a few kilometers away.
Until 2006, 11 Marines and an Army soldier were listed as
missing from the battle. One of the survivors, former Marine
Tim Brown, resolved to find them back in the early 1970s
when he saw an ad in Leatherneck magazine by the parents
of a Marine missing at Ngok Tavak. That was the beginning
of the search for Brown. As far as he knew, no one else was
bothering to look.
In 1983, he joined VVA. In the ensuing
years, he brought Ngok Tavak to the attention of the VVA,
particularly Bill Duker, then chair of the National VVA POW-MIA
Committee. In 1994, when the Veterans Initiative Task Force
conducted its first mission to Vietnam, Tim Brown and two
fellow VVA members, Dan Carr and Don Waak, traveled with
the delegation, their hope being that they could negotiate
permission from the Vietnamese to visit the Ngok Tavak battlefield.
They succeeded and returned in 1995.
VVA, using its contacts
made over the years through the Veterans Initiative, would
continue to encourage the Vietnamese to allow JPAC field
teams to inspect the site.
“Tim is reluctant to take
credit,” Duker said. “But without
him, we never would have known about Ngok Tavak or Kham Duc.
If Tim hadn’t
come to the POW-MIA Committee, who knows? For his part, Brown
says he did nothing that any of his Marine buddies wouldn’t
have done if he had been one of the missing.
“We have
a bond and it’s about the guy next to you,” he
said. “It
happened because of the good work of a lot of people and,
in particular, the Veterans Initiative and the good offices
it established with the Vietnamese government. It led to
a step-by-step progression that brought some peace to people
who have been waiting for years.”
Duker underscored the step-by-step nature that has been the
defining element of the Veterans Initiative through its inception
13 years ago.
“It took literally years,” he said. “And
it would get a little bit better and a little bit better
and a little bit better. It happened because we did what
we said we would do. We kept coming back, and from what I
understand, consistency is what the Vietnamese look at. Your
message is very important with the Vietnamese. You have to
stay on message, and they like to see familiar faces, too.
It takes a long time to develop trust. That relationship
has become one of mutual trust now and it’s really
helped.”
Duker said the same even-handed approach was
used when bringing cases to the attention of JPAC and DPMO,
as well.
“We ask questions on specific cases,” he
said. “We tell them
it’s a case we promised to stay on top of. I think
we were successful in doing it that way.”
“Doc” Hoe
began corresponding with Skip Skivington’s father
in 1969. Over the years, they would become like father and
son, and in 2005, they would share something neither wanted,
the terrible sadness of losing a son to war. Hoe’s
son, 1st Lt. Nainoa Hoe, was killed by a sniper in Iraq.
“Bill
calls me his son now,” Hoe said. “I think in
the last couple of years, or more so in the last year, when
I lost my son. It was when we began to get very hopeful about
the efforts of JPAC with the recovery efforts.”
JPAC
Archaeologist Brad Sturm had worked in the prehistoric archaeological
field for 20 years before landing at JPAC. A friend heard
about JPAC needing people with Sturm’s experience,
and Sturm thought the opportunity a particularly unique one.
He’s been at JPAC for 10 years.
“I’m really
glad I chose to do this,” he said. “As you
might imagine, the rewards for this job are like nothing
you’ll
find anywhere else.”
Two previous digs at the last-known
position of Skivington and Ransbottom—OP2
(Observation Post 2), one of several bunkers at Kham Duc—had
produced no results. The first time the team visited the
site, it stayed for 30 days. The second time, Sturm was at
the base camp for about 100 days. It was Sturm’s
team that found Fred Ransbottom’s high school class
ring.
“It’s an amazing feeling to find evidence,” he
said.
Last year, Sturm and Dickie Hites, a JPAC official,
went to a Kham Duc battle survivors reunion to give a presentation
on their work at Ngok Tavak and what they were in the process
of doing at Kham Duc and OP2. Meeting the families was something
of a revelation for the archaeologist.
“The thing is
when you meet the families, when you come face to face with
them for the first time, you know how important the work
is, but seeing them firsthand underscores how important it
is to them,” he said. “You
know when you’re out there working that it’s
important to the families that you succeed, but when you
meet them, well, Mrs. Ransbottom said she was willing to
fly to Vietnam and help us dig.”
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for DPMO Robert
Jones said the need for families finding peace of mind was
paramount.
“In a nutshell, it’s a humanitarian
mission to bring to rest the grieving, surviving members
of family and that they have an answer to what happened to
their loved one,” he said. “There’s a lot
of need for closure in the minds of these families, and there’s
been a lot of grief they’ve
carried for years and the doubt as to what happened. The
bureaucrats will put dollar signs on it. They’ll say
it’s a waste of energies and money
and resources and so on, but it serves a meaningful purpose
and clearly demonstrates to young folks that we’re
serious about bringing you home, no matter what the circumstances.”
When
they found Skip, the midnight call went to Doc Hoe, who was
vacationing with his second son and a nephew, both of them
Iraq war veterans. It would be Doc who told Bill Skivington
the news.
When Hoe went to tell him about Skip, Bill Skivington
met the medic at the front door. He sat in a wheelchair and
wore his 101st Screaming Eagle cap. Doc Hoe wore his 196th
cap, a long-practiced habit. When representing “our
young warriors,” he doesn’t go anywhere without
his recon team’s
cap. They joshed for a while, 85-year-old Bill ribbing 59-year-old
Doc about his advancing years and pretending to be shocked
by Doc’s sudden “distinguished” appearance.
Doc
thinks Bill knew why he was coming to visit. He doesn’t
know why. Just intuition, he says. Bill said he kind of figured
that Doc had come to talk about Skip.
“I told him we learned that Skip’s remains had been recovered,” Doc
said. “Of course, he had tears in his eyes, and he
said, ‘I guess
I always kind of knew that he had been killed.’ From
the very beginning in that first conversation in 1969, I
told him what had happened. I told him the last radio transmission
we got from Snoopy 6 was: ‘We’re all
wounded. We’re killing them as they come through the
door.’
Back
then I said it was my opinion that they were all killed.
The sad thing is that the Army had played with those families
all these years. For whatever reason or purpose, I don’t
know.”
Ask him today if Doc Hoe is family, and the frail
voice of Bill Skivington becomes stronger. “Absolutely,” he
says, adding that he doesn’t
like it when too many days have passed without hearing from
Doc.
Hoe says Bill Skivington and his wife are his heroes.
“I don’t know how I could have carried myself
or even survived for 38 years not knowing what happened to
my son,” he said. “I am blessed
from Day One because I knew what happened to my son. It made
me so proud to hear the stories of how he conducted himself,
how his men loved him, just like we loved Lt. Ransbottom.
Bill
is my hero and I don’t have any problem saying
that. If I had to live, if I had to go through what they
went through for 38 years, it’s absolutely horrendous.”
At
the VVA National Convention in 2006, as Doc Hoe spoke, reporting
on the news of Skip’s discovery, another fragment of
the 38 years presented itself. Scott DeArman, a member of
the VVA Elections Committee, stood in the back of the hall,
preparing to take the stage to announce candidates when Hoe
was finished. When he heard Hoe say the name “Skip
Skivington,” and
it became clear what Hoe was saying about Skip, DeArman said
he found it hard to breathe.
“I almost lost it,” he
said. “I actually had to leave the building.
I had to take a walk. It was just amazing. It took me right
off my feet. I listened to Doc’s speech with tears
running down my face.”
Skip Skivington wasn’t
just a name or another MIA story to DeArman. Skip was a high
school pal in Las Vegas. They had classes together, they
ran track together, they worked as ushers in the same movie
theater—when Skip went
missing, DeArman was in Vietnam with the 101st, the same
outfit Skip’s
father served with in World War II. DeArman’s unit
worked in the same general area as Skip’s, but DeArman
would find out his high school friend was missing in a strange
way.
“I found out he was missing when my parents sent
me a newspaper clipping about it,” he said. “You
never think that in life there will be any kind of closure
to something like this and to see it happen while Mr. Skivington
is still alive was just amazing to me. It’s a miracle,
a great miracle, a wonderful miracle. Now Mr. Skivington
can go to his rest with peace of mind. He knows Skip was
found. It’s just awesome to me.”
“Doc” Hoe,
Bill Skivington, and Scott DeArman went to Arlington to bury
Skip. “Being in Arlington, I think he and I were in
peace,” Hoe
said. “The journey is always the hardest part. The
arrival is kind of like, ‘all
right, we’re here.’ I said to him, ‘Mission
accomplished, Bill. You did it. Skip will rest in peace.’ He
said he wanted only to fulfill his promise to have Skip buried
in Arlington.”
Doc Hoe spoke at Fred Ransbottom’s
funeral in Oklahoma, as well. Laverne Ransbottom, the mother
of Snoopy 6, speaks now of miracles and large families created
by circumstance and shared grief and a loyalty at which she
marvels.
“We were lucky enough to find dedicated people
from the get-go,” she
said. “We had VVA, we had all the people in JPAC—this
was a mission that they all really wanted to do. That’s
what made it happen. They were willing to take the brunt
of the political side of it to get it moving. They really
wanted it to happen. I can think of time after time when
somebody always stepped in. We have no trouble believing
miracles in the Bible, but somehow or other, we can’t
believe that miracles happen on Earth. But that’s
what this is, a miracle.”
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