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Obituary:
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July 26, 2010
Bringing him home: Don Wann died in 1971. It took 39 years
to get him back to the country he loved
Kirk Kramer
Phoenix Staff Writer
Skip Butler can recall clearly
the day 39 years ago when he heard that Don Wann’s attack
helicopter had been shot down near Khe Sanh in South
Vietnam.
“I was flying my helicopter back to base for
the night,” Butler said. “On my radio I heard, ‘Give me the
tail number of the aircraft that went down.’ When it came
back ‘002,’ somebody said, ‘Was that Don?’ The company radio
operator said, ‘It was Wann and Magers.’”
But in
2008, Wann and Magers were found.
On Aug. 21, the
remains of Chief Warrant Officer Donald L. Wann of the
United States Army — missing in action no longer — will be
laid to rest with full military honors at Fort Gibson
National Cemetery.
The Cobra helicopter flown by
Oklahoma native Chief Warrant Officer Don Wann and Nebraskan
Lt. Paul Magers came under enemy fire above a dense jungle
on the side of a mountain in Quang Tri Province, according
to an official military account.
“The (helicopter)
crashed, burned, exploded, and slid down a steep hill,
before the ammunition on board started tearing apart what
was left of the aircraft.
“All witnesses stated that
the crash was non-survivable. The hill was under heavy fire
and no recovery attempts could have been made.”
Unexploded ordnance surrounded the crash site, and fighting
raged on in the jungle nearby, so it was impossible to
search for Wann’s and Magers’ remains. The two soldiers were
declared missing in action. The war came to an end, Vietnam
was closed to the West, and the jungle swallowed up the
crash site.
Wann and Magers were shot down June 1,
1971, the day after Wann’s 34th birthday. A few days later,
soldiers in dress uniforms arrived at the Midwest City home
of the Wann family to deliver a telegram with the news that
Wann was missing in action.
Shannon Wann Plaster, his
elder daughter, who was 10 at the time, remembers the day.
“I was sitting on the couch watching TV,” said Plaster.
“Someone knocked on the door. When Mom answered the door and
saw them in their dress blues, she just started bawling.
They didn’t have to say anything. When military people come
to your house in dress blues, you know something has
happened.”
On March 20 of this year, Plaster was at a
hotel in San Antonio, Texas, for an Army update for family
members of soldiers missing in action. When Plaster got to
the banquet room where the briefing was to be held, she was
hoping to see Carolyn Floyd, the civilian casualty officer
assigned to Wann’s case. Plaster had known Floyd for more
than 10 years.
“Carolyn walked over to my table,”
said Plaster. “She said, ‘Shannon, we’ve got your dad. We’ve
found him.’ She hugged me, and she told me they’d found Paul
Magers, too.”
Off that mountain
Plaster’s road to that meeting in San Antonio and to Fort
Gibson National Cemetery has been long and painful.
“Not knowing the truth left a blank void,” she said. “It
drove me to the point where I had to find out. It’s
something I had to do. I had to get him off that mountain.”
Plaster’s search began with a 1990 letter addressed
simply to “The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.”
“I said in
my letter that I wanted to know if my dad is alive or dead,”
said Plaster. “A lieutenant colonel called me from the
Pentagon and said, ‘I can’t answer the question, Shannon.
But your dad’s case is open.’”
In 1993, a crash site
that correlated to her father’s was found by the Joint
POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), the military agency
charged with accounting for servicemen missing in action.
The same year, Plaster traveled to Washington, D.C., for
one of the annual government briefings with the National
League of POW/MIA Families.
“I had felt alone my
whole childhood,” Plaster said. “I met all those people in
the same boat. I thought, ‘My God, I’m not alone.”
In
about 2000, a brigadier general told her that JPAC would not
continue the search for her father’s remains, saying the
crash site was too dangerous. During one search for another
site, an aircraft carrying JPAC personnel crashed, killing
all seven people on board.
“When he told me, I was
crying, but I said I understood,” Plaster said.
Then
five years later, Plaster received a letter saying that JPAC
had decided to start looking again.
The effort was
aided by a lead from an unexpected source: a North
Vietnamese soldier whose unit had shot down Wann and Magers’
helicopter.
The former soldier, Pham Thiet Hung, told
searchers that he had approached the wreckage the day after
the crash in 1971. About 20 meters from the crash, he found
the burned body of an aviator, and placed it in a nearby
shallow mortar crater.
With Hung’s help, Vietnamese
and American search teams located the remains of Wann and
Magers in July of 2008.
Using DNA and dental records,
Wann and Magers were identified at JPAC’s Central
Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.
Last March in
San Antonio, Plaster finally received the answer to the
question she had asked in her letter to the Pentagon 20
years before.
A special place in my heart
Don Wann was born in Kosoma, grew up in Fairfax, and
after high school considered Shawnee his home. He never
lived in Muskogee. But his daughter has formed strong ties
with the community.
Pat Davis, historian for the
James F. Smith American Legion Post 15, invited Plaster to
Muskogee last year during a controversy over placing flags
at the Muskogee Civic Center. Davis arranged for Plaster to
explain the significance of the POW/MIA flag to local
officials.
That association turned into a love
affair.
“Muskogee has become a very special place in
my heart,” Plaster said. “These people opened their arms to
me.”
Plaster has given the museum at the USS Batfish
and War Memorial Park her father’s uniforms and much else
associated with his life and the attempt to bring him home.
“People can go to the museum to see my dad’s things,”
Plaster said. “He’ll be just down the road at the National
Cemetery.”
Some time next month, Plaster will fly to
Hawaii, then accompany her father’s remains back to
Oklahoma.
Wann’s funeral will be held at Southeast
Baptist Church at 10 a.m. Aug. 21. Plaster, a divorced
mother of two and Yukon resident, will be joined at the
ceremony by her mother, who remarried several years after
Wann’s death, and by her sister Michelle Wann. Butler plans
to travel to Oklahoma from his home in Virginia for the
occasion. Many other friends and old comrades-in-arms from
all over the country are also expected.
The funeral
is open to the public.
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