Bio, Boyer, Alan L.

http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2008/03/30/news/top/news01.txt

Never forgotten: Disappearance of Alan Boyer in Laos in 1968 still haunts family
By KIM BRIGGEMAN of the Missoulian

Alan Boyer, missing in action in Laos since 1968.

In those days, Judi Boyer lived on the eighth floor of Jesse Hall.

A freshman from Illinois, Boyer had followed older brother Alan's footsteps to Missoula and the University of Montana. She routinely dropped a letter in the dorm postal box addressed to Alan in Vietnam.

Sometimes she found one from Alan waiting for her.

It was early April 1968 when Judi went down to check her mail. A card she had sent her brother had been returned.

�It said �Missing' on it,� said Judi Boyer Bouchard, who lives in Leesburg, Fla., and still has the card she got back.

So began a heart-rending wait that has stretched to 40 years.

A call home to her parents confirmed what Judi dreaded. Three days after Alan Boyer and two other Green Berets had been left behind by a helicopter fleeing heavy fire, Dorothy and Charles Boyer received the knock on the door that families of all soldiers dread.

It was early in the morning, and the Boyers were getting ready for work, Dorothy, 88, recalled recently from her home in Rockford, Ill.

�This car pulled up with uniformed personnel,� she said. �They were not officers; they were in the Army Reserve or something. They came to the door and wanted to see both of us.�

Their son was missing in action in Southeast Asia, they heard. Something about a helicopter, an evacuation and heavy enemy fire. That's all that was known. When more was discovered, the Boyers would be notified.

It took a while, but the Boyers did find out more. They found, five years later, that Alan wouldn't be coming home with hundreds of American prisoners of war when the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam.

Then they learned where Alan was when he disappeared - and it wasn't in Vietnam.

The aborted evacuation took place across the border in Laos, in the province of Savannakhet. By then the United States' role in a �secret war� in Laos was widely known.

In 1990, the Homecoming II Project researched and released details about the incident.

On March 28, 1968, Boyer, fellow rifleman Charles Huston of Ohio, and intelligence Sgt. George Brown were on a reconnaissance mission with eight South Vietnamese soldiers in rugged jungle-covered mountains 15 miles inside Laos. It was a sector that housed the North Vietnamese control center on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The patrol came under fire and, realizing they were outnumbered and outgunned, requested a helicopter to extract them. The chopper dropped a rope ladder through the dense jungle, and the Vietnamese soldiers clambered to safety.

In the face of heavy enemy automatic weapons fire, Boyer grabbed the ladder and started to climb. At the same time, the helicopter began to vacate. The ladder caught in the foliage and broke. Boyer fell to the ground, apparently unhurt.

When last seen, he, Brown and Huston were alive and �successfully defending their position,� according to reports.

A six-hour ground search for the men on April 1 found nothing. That was the day after Dorothy and Charles Boyer were notified Alan was missing. They decided to wait until they heard something more to tell Judi in Missoula. Judi's returned mail trumped them.

Of the 1,763 Americans still unaccounted for in Southeast Asia, 18 are listed as coming from Montana. Six of those disappeared in Laos. Boyer and U.S. Navy pilot Lt. Michael Bouchard, who grew up in Bonner, are two of the six.

Bouchard was shot down in the same sector of Laos nine months after Boyer went missing, and though there was no conclusive evidence that he died at the time, his official status is �presumed killed in action.�

Boyer, Brown and Huston, originally deemed missing, were eventually moved to the �dead/body not recovered� list. There's a reasonable chance that one or all of them were captured by enemy forces and interred in prison camps.

That's what the Boyers say they were led to believe.

�We really hung on that. There was not a doubt in my mind that he would come home,� said Judi, who in an ironic twist, married a man named Bouchard who was not related to the Missoula pilot.

Then, after the U.S. troops left Vietnam and the POWs were sent home, a telegram informed the Boyers that Alan was not on the list.

�I just � I couldn't believe it,� Judi said. �I remember watching as the POWs came off the airplane when they got to Clark Air Force Base (in the Philippines). There was like 581 of them.

�You were so thrilled to see every one of them walk off that plane, but it was like, why can't just one more walk off that plane? Why can't Alan come home?�

She had good reason to think he'd make it. Alan wasn't a great student, but he was very bright, she said. He was resourceful, gregarious and �very, very athletic.�

While the Boyers had no idea what his special operations duties were, they knew he was trained �in escape and evasion,� his sister said.

�He was strong. He wasn't that big a guy, probably only 5-10 maybe, but very muscular and in great shape. We thought if anyone can come out of this � Alan will surely show up.�

Boyer had been vice president of the student council at his high school in Decatur, Ill. He spent the summer of 1964 after graduation working at Yellowstone National Park. Always oriented to the outdoors, Alan set his sights on forestry school at the University of Montana.

There he studied and joined a fraternity, Theta Chi. But as the Vietnam War escalated, Boyer started having second thoughts about a career in forestry, his sister said. When he came home for Christmas one year, he asked his parents what they thought about him joining the service.

�I think a recruiter from Butte got hold of him,� Dorothy said. She and Charles, who died in 1995 during bypass surgery, weren't keen on the idea, but said they'd support any decision he made.

�He was very idealistic because, you know, we're going to save everybody from communism, we're going to make the world a better place,� Alan's mother said.

Judi followed her only sibling to Missoula and UM in the fall of '67. She found it �hysterical� when she discovered Alan's photo on the cover of the course catalog that year, his eyes riveted to a microscope.

An anthropology major, Judi graduated from UM in three years, returned home to the Midwest for a time, then moved back to Missoula. She stayed for nine years, working in the human resources at the university and living in Lincolnwood before moving east again.

A few years after Alan disappeared, Dorothy and Charles Boyer started a scholarship fund at UM, which still gives at least two $1,000 scholarships a year to needy students with good grades.

The Boyers have no more family ties to Montana, but the granddaughter of a friend of Dorothy's just moved with her husband to Missoula.

Dorothy and the friend just might jump on the train and pay a visit this fall. Although she has traveled extensively - �My mother is a very active 88,� Judi said - it will be Dorothy's first glimpse of Missoula.

For their own reasons, perhaps related to Alan Boyer's role in the covert war, the Army and Defense Department have long been reluctant to dole out information about him.

�They didn't tell us, and they still won't tell us, much of anything about what he was doing,� Judi said.

She figured the least they could do was let the Boyers talk with someone on the search and rescue team.

�They wouldn't give us names, wouldn't tell us anything,� she said. �I tried to find out some things on my own. � I just ran into a bunch of dead ends.�

Finally, just a couple of years ago, the identities of the searchers were revealed.

�They were all dead,� Judi said.

For going on 40 years, Dorothy Boyer and her daughter have been active in the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing In Southeast Asia. They rarely miss the league's yearly meeting in Washington, D.C.

They watched over the years as the Vietnamese and Lao governments denied there were live Americans in prison camps in their countries. Ample evidence, some of it based on firsthand reports, indicated otherwise.

According to one POW Web site, an Asian prisoner who escaped from the Vietnamese in Laos in 1989 was interviewed by U.S. officials in Thailand.

�He stated that he spoke with (Huston), who told him if he ever got free to let the world know, �That my name is Huston, and there are other Americans held with me,' � a report on www.powfoia.org reads.

Years after the wars ended, search teams were finally allowed to look for evidence of Americans. There were several excavations at the site where Boyer, Huston and Brown were last seen.

Most of them turned up nothing, Judi said.

�Then, just a few years ago, they found one tooth,� she said.

After DNA analysis, it was determined to belong to George Brown.

�I told my mom that gives me no closure,� Judi Bouchard said. �I mean, it could have been knocked out. It's not like they found a mass gravesite, or other effects and bones or whatever.

�A tooth didn't do it for me.�

So the wait continues.

In 2001, Dorothy and Judi learned of a tour group going to Southeast Asia. They'd been thinking about visiting Vietnam.

�When we found out they were going to Laos, we said, �We've got to go, at least just to be in the country,' � Dorothy said.

Imagine the surprise when Judi and her 81-year-old mother showed up unannounced at the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

�They were so gracious, these military guys,� Judi said.

One, a man involved in POW/MIA recovery activities, had hung on the wall a photo of the first site he'd helped excavate in Laos. Incredibly, it was the site of Alan Boyer's disappearance, or thought to be.

�They didn't put it up just for us, because they didn't even know we were coming,� said Judi. The Boyers learned that the site was heavily forested and virtually inaccessible.

The women say they didn't learn much else.

�We really didn't expect to,� Dorothy said. �But we got into the embassy and talked to people. So that was, I don't know, comforting to a degree.�

Judi Bouchard doesn't really expect to ever see her brother walk through the door. Neither does Dorothy. But she will always hold onto a glimmer of hope.

Dorothy is also heavily involved in Vietnow, a group of veterans based in Rockford that concerns itself with issues of veterans and their families from wars in Vietnam to today.

Alan's birthday was March 8. He would have been 62 years old.

When Judi thinks of Alan, she still sees him as the strapping 22-year-old he was in 1968.

And Dorothy?

�Yes and no, because of the Vietnow guys who have been so wonderful to me,� she said. �Everybody calls me Mom, because they're all Alan's age, between 58 and 63. I can think maybe this is what he might look like.�

Dorothy keeps a flag and Alan's medals and other mementoes in her den in Rockford.

�I don't know where the 40 years has gone really, but it's something we think about all the time,� she said. �I mean, there isn't a day that I don't.�

�I can empathize with anyone who's had a loved one missing,� Judi said. �You can't even imagine what it's like, that one day they're there and then - you know nothing.

�Had he gone over there, been killed and they return the body, you can kind of grieve and go on with things. But when you don't know, it's just like this open wound. A day doesn't go by when I don't think about Alan and wonder what happened.�