CONLON, JOHN FRANCIS III Remains Id announced 06/13/2006
Name: John Francis Conlon III Rank/Branch: O2/US Air Force Unit: 21st Tactical Air Support Squadron, Pleiku AB SV Date of Birth: 18 February 1941 Home City of Record: Wilkes Barre PA Date of Loss: 04 March 1966 Country of Loss: South Vietnam Loss Coordinates: 133700N 1090000E (BR836079) Status (in 1973): Missing In Action Category: 3 Acft/Vehicle/Ground: O1E Refno: 0262 Other Personnel In Incident: Stuart Andrews (missing)
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 01 May 1990 from one or more of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews. Updated by the P.O.W. NETWORK 2006.
REMARKS:
SYNOPSIS: Major Stuart M. Andrews was the pilot of an O1E aircraft on which his observer-in-training was 1Lt. John F. Conlon III in March 1966. Andrews and his observer were sent on a cross-country visual reconnaissance mission in South Vietnam.
The O1E "Bird Dog" was used extensively in the early years of the war in Vietnam by forward air controllers and provided low, close visual reconnaissance and target marking which enabled armed aircraft or ground troops to close in on a target. The O1E was feared by the enemy, because he knew that opening fire would expose his location and invite attack by fighters controlled by the slowly circling Bird Dog. The Vietnamese became bold, however when they felt their position was compromised and attacked the little Bird Dog with a vengeance in order to lessen the accuracy of an impending strike by other craft.
Andrews and Conlon departed Qui Nhon Airfield on March 4, 1966 at 3:20 p.m. At 3:40 p.m. they made radio contact with a Special Forces Camp in the area and were asked to check campfires that had been spotted. That radio contact with the Special Forces camp was the last word anyone heard of Andrews and Conlon. There was at that time no indication that anything was wrong, but when the plane failed to arrive at its destination, both men were declared missing.
When 591 Americans were released from prisoner of war camps in 1973, Andrews and Conlon were not among them. Nearly five years later, in December 1977, they were presumptively declared dead, based on no information that they were alive.
Alarmingly, evidence continues to mount that Americans were left as prisoners in Southeast Asia and continue to be held today. Unlike "MIAs" from other wars, most of the nearly 2500 Americans who remain missing in Southeast Asia can be accounted for. Many U.S. Government officials have said it is their belief that Americans are being held, but have not yet found the formula that would bring them home. Detractors claim that not enough is being done to bring these men home.
Stuart M. Andrews was promoted to the rank of Colonel and John F. Conlon III was promoted to the rank of Major during the period they were maintained missing.
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Posted on Tue, Jun. 13, 2006
"I can't believe after storming the heavens all these years, we finally have an answer." Long wait finally over
By TERRIE MORGAN-BESECKER tmorgan@leader.net
DALLAS - Claire Evans heard the man's voice on the other end of the phone line and immediately knew the 40-year-long wait was over.
"United States Air Force, Department of Mortuary," he said.
Her body shaking, Evans tried to steady her hand to take down the information she had longed, yet so dreaded, to hear.
"Your brother's crash site has been found," the man continued. "We've made a positive ID."
It was official: Forty years, two months and 22 days after he disappeared flying a reconnaissance mission in the Binh Dinh Province of Vietnam, U.S. Air Force Maj. John F. Conlon III would finally come home.
"Once I stopped shaking, I was so grateful," Evans said Monday. "I thought, `There is a God in heaven.' I can't believe after storming the heavens (with prayer) all these years, we finally have an answer."
With the help of elderly Vietnamese villagers, a search team assembled by the Joint POW/MIA Operating Command began a nearly month-long excavation in Dak Pling Village on Feb. 16, 2006, on what would have been her brother's 65th birthday.
Four teeth, a belt buckle, eyeglass frames and two emblems from a Colt handgun that belonged to Conlon, as well as a dog tag from Col. Stuart M. Andrews, the fellow aviator killed with him, were recovered from a densely forested hillside, she was told.
Evans, 71, of Overbrook Road, had no idea the military was searching for her brother until she got the phone call three days before Memorial Day announcing the discovery.
On Saturday, military officials presented her a bound report documenting how her brother died, and how the military developed the information to find him.
Conlon, of Wilkes-Barre, was 25, single, and fresh out of college in 1964 when he decided to join the Air Force. He had been infatuated by planes his entire life and was determined to be a military aviator, even though he knew he would likely be shipped to Vietnam, Evans said.
Their parents, John and Margaret Conlon, were "crushed," but they accepted his decision, Evans said.
"John was patriotic. He felt someone had to do it. Because he was single, he should go."
Blonde-haired and blue-eyed, her brother was a handsome man with many friends, male and female, Evans recalled. Somewhat quiet and reserved, he loved to paint and ski, and was an avid car lover.
While training, he distinguished himself by becoming the first pilot in his class to fly solo in the T-38 Talon supersonic jet, the worlds' first supersonic jet trainer.
He was four months into his tour of duty in Vietnam when, on March 4, 1966, he boarded an 01-E Bird Dog piloted by Andrews.
Waiting and then losing hope
The aircraft took off from the Qui Nhon Air Field at 3:20 p.m. Andrews, then a major, and Conlon, then a lieutenant, were headed for a reconnaissance mission in the Binh Dinh Province of South Vietnam.
About 30 minutes into the flight, the men were asked to check out some camp fires in the area, according to a report of the crash included in the Joint Command's report. The radio communication was the last contact anyone had with Andrews and Conlon.
The plane was declared missing about 2 « hours later. An extensive air and ground search was conducted for six days. Periodic, weak emergency beacon signals were heard throughout the search, but searchers never located the aircraft or airmen.
Evans, who was 31 at the time, can't recall much about the day she first heard her brother was missing in action.
"All I remember is getting off the phone and going to church," she said.
In the first decade after his disappearance, she, her sister, Peggy, and mother and father, John and Margaret Conlon, held out hope he would be found alive. That hope all but disappeared in 1973, when the bulk of POWs being held by the Vietnamese were released.
"I can remember sitting and watching TV. The phone was ringing till midnight. National reporters were calling, `Did we hear anything?'" Evans said. "We watched all those men come off the planes, and he's not there."
The family relinquished all hope in 1975, when the Air Force officially changed Conlon's status from MIA to presumed killed in action.
In the ensuing decades, Evans became a member of a national POW/MIA group. She kept herself apprised of ongoing developments in the search for soldiers' remains, but had pretty much given up hope her brother would be found.
"When you think about a whole country, it's unfathomable to think he would be found," she said.
Finding was unexpected
The mission that ended with the recovery of Conlon and Andrews actually started out as an investigation of a different aircraft that was believed to have crashed in the same area in 1971.
The first break in the case came in May 1993, when a team searching for remains of servicemen interviewed a Vietnamese villager who recalled seeing a plane crash in the Gia Lai Province around 1967 or 1968. At the time, the team suspected the plane was a missing aircraft that had disappeared in the area in 1971.
Three years later, another search team interviewed several more villagers, including Dinh Mek and Dinh Chek, who recalled going to the site of a downed plane and removing and burying the charred bodies of two aviators.
Based on that information, the Joint Command, still believing the plane was the one that crashed in 1971, decided to search the area. It was only after the team came across Andrews' dog tag that they realized they had found the site where Conlon and Andrews had crashed.
The Joint Command's report does not indicate what caused the plane to go down, but Evans said officials suspect it was shot down.
The low flying O-1E Bird Dog was a prime target of Vietnamese troops because it was used in reconnaissance missions to target areas for other aircraft and ground troops. Evans said interviews with villagers revealed the plane was on fire as it was on its way down.
For Evans, the news of how her brother died elicited mixed emotions. While she cringes at the thought of his fiery death, she says she is thankful that he never became a prisoner of war.
"They went through hell and back," she said.
She's also thankful to finally achieve the closure her parents and sister never did. Her father died in 1978, followed by her mother in 1989 and sister in 1994.
Today she treasures the mementos her brother left behind, including an oil painting of a seascape he painted for her when he was 16. Now she also has the belt buckle and gun emblems that were recovered from the excavation site. His remains will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery at a date yet to be determined.
She's looking forward to sharing the news of the recovery of John's remains with those who for decades have supported the search for POW/MIAs by wearing metallic wristbands emblazoned with the names of servicemen who have yet to be recovered.
Evans said she's been in contact for some time with a woman from Massachusetts who wears John's wristband. When they began corresponding, there were 1,805 U.S. servicemen still listed as missing in action in Vietnam.
She can't wait to share the news:
"Now there's 1,803," she said.
ON THE WEB
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To see some of the government's evidence concerning the recovery of Maj. John F. Conlon III's remains, log on to www.timesleader.com.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Terrie Morgan-Besecker, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 829-7179
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June 21, 2006
AIRMAN MISSING FROM VIETNAM WAR IS IDENTIFIED
The Defense POW/Missing Personnel (DPMO) announced today that a U.S. Air Force officer missing in action from the Vietnam War has been identified and is being returned to his family for burial with full military honors.
He is Maj. John F. Conlon III, Wilkes-Barre Pa. His funeral is tentatively scheduled for Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C., in the fall.
On March 4, 1966 Conlon and another crewmember took off from Qui Nhon Air Field, Binh Dinh Province, South Vietnam, in their O-1E Bird Dog light observation aircraft. They were on a visual reconnaissance mission to Cheo Reo, an airstrip approximately 60 miles southwest of Qui Nhon. The last radio contact with the crew was with a U.S. Special Forces Camp about 30 minutes after take-off. The crew reported the aircraft's position but made no mention of problems. When the aircraft failed to arrive at Cheo Reo, a search and rescue effort was initiated, but failed to find the aircraft or crew after six days of searching.
Between May of 1993 and August of 2005 teams from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) conducted six investigations in the Binh Dinh Province. They developed leads which took them to a site which was later scheduled for excavation.
In February of 2006 a joint JPAC-Vietnamese team excavated that site and found aircraft debris, personal effects, human remains and a dog tag that related to Conlon's crew. JPAC scientists used Conlon's dental records to confirm his identity from those remains excavated at the site.
Of those Americans unaccounted-for from all conflicts, 1,803 are from the Vietnam War.
For additional information on the Defense Department's mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO website at http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call (703)-699-1169.
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Grave of two missing pilots found in Vietnam after 40 years ID tag, four teeth only remains THE ASSOCIATED PRESS MONTGOMERY, Ala. - A Montgomery woman whose husband's military ID was recovered from a grave in Vietnam after 40 years said she's relieved to know he had not been captured and tortured.
"After so many years, I had no hope that he was still alive," Ann Andrews said.
The Defense Department in May informed her that Air Force Maj. Stuart M. Andrews and a co-pilot apparently were buried by villagers after a plane crash.
Andrews, then 37, had taken off from Qui Nhon Air Field in South Vietnam's Binh Dinh province on a reconnaissance flight on March 4, 1966, flying with 1st. Lt. John Conlon. They never returned.
Despite a lack of remains, Andrews was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on June 13, 1978, and that same year, his name joined a list of 33 Yale University graduates on a memorial tablet at the university, honoring those who died in the Vietnam War.
"You'd hear stories about people who were captured and tortured, and you'd just pray that nothing like that could have happened. Knowing that it hadn't, that it had been quick, was a relief," Ann Andrews said.
Claire Evans, Conlon's sister who lives in Dallas, Pa., agreed.
"That was the worst part of not knowing - not knowing how they died," she said.
The grave was discovered after military officials followed up on a tip in August 2005 from a villager in the Gia Lai province about a plane crash.
On Feb. 6, investigators began an archaeological dig after hearing reports of villagers burying two men from the crash.
They found a metal military ID bearing the name Stuart M. Andrews. Because the grave was shallow and dug in what the report called "an erosion area," searchers found only four teeth, but an expert at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii identified them as Conlon's.
Evans plans to bury her brother's remains next month at Arlington. She's doing it for her children, she said, one of whom is named John Conlon Evans after her brother.
"When I got the news, I found myself thinking this is awful," she said. "But it isn't because at least now there is closure, and in my heart, I have the feeling that they have finally come home."