CHANDLER, ANTHONY GORDON
Remains Returned 1993, ID'd 06/2001

Name: Anthony Gordon Chandler
Branch/Rank: United States Navy/E5
Unit:
Date of Birth: 21 October 1944
Home City of Record: WARNER ROBINS GA
Date of Loss: 16 June 1968
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 165922 North  1070955 East
Status (in 1973): Killed In Action/Body Not Recovered
Category: 5
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: PCF19
Missions:
Other Personnel in Incident:
Refno:

Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw
data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews and CACCF = Combined Action
Combat Casualty File.

REMARKS:

CACCF/SEA CASUALTY/ARTILLERY/ROCKET OFFSHORE MR1

No further information available at this time.

==============================================

June 17, 2001

Vietnam casualty laid to rest after 33 years

By Travis Fain
The Macon Telegraph

CENTERVILLE --- Lest we forget, Anthony Chandler was buried here Saturday,
33 years after an explosion rocked his Navy ship off the coast of Vietnam.

A piece of Chandler's arm bone is all that made it back, but his family and
friends laid that to rest in Centerville City Cemetery, finally home in his
family's plot.

They buried a bit of themselves, too, and some of the questions that have
haunted them about that night, June 16, 1968, when Chandler and four others
died as Navy patrol boat PCF-19 sank off a foreign land.

Jack and Bessie Young --- Chandler's parents --- sat in the shade of a
funeral home tent, their daughter and son nearby. A contingent of old
soldiers, most of whom never met Chandler but called him brother anyway,
stood behind his coffin.

John Davis, who was there that night with Chandler, walked slowly to the
podium, showing the painful gait he earned so many years ago.

"I just want to say something about Chandler, and this is what it's all
about," said Davis, once captain of PCF-19. "Chandler was a boatswain's
boatswain. He stood out above everybody on our ship, on every ship."

Davis looked out upon the crowd, more than a hundred under a sun so hot one
member of a Navy honor guard collapsed, only to rise and keep his position,
a wet towel on his neck.

"Some didn't even know him," Davis continued. "But they're here today. To
honor him."

A black flag waved nearby. "P.O.W./M.I.A.," it read. "You are not
forgotten."

A group of bikers stood off away from the service, quiet in leather vests
and jackets. None of them ever met Tony Chandler, they said. But still, they
knew him well.

"He's our brother," said Stanley Amey, a Vietnam veteran living in Bonaire.
"We came to welcome him home."

June 16, 1968

Davis was "elbow to elbow" with Chandler that night in Vietnam, he told Jack
Young on Friday as they sat outside the family's home in Warner Robins.
Davis and about a dozen other men who were near the incident, or just
affected by it, traveled from across the country to meet the Youngs this
week and pay their respects.

Davis came from Ohio.

Jim Steffes, who never knew Chandler, flew in from California because he was
on a Navy boat just south of PCF-19 the night it sank.

Pete Sullivan was on shore that night and coordinated gunfire as an attack
broke out on the ocean before him. He never met Chandler, but came down from
New Hampshire just the same.

Larry Lail came from Virginia, never knowing Chandler either. He drew the
grim duty of diving through the Vietnamese waters that night, retrieving
bodies broken in the blast.

Bessie Young greeted each of them with a hug, her dark brown eyes near
tears.

"You know, it's just a mind boggling thing that they loved him so good,"
she'd say later.

As Friday stretched on, the Youngs' grassy front yard filled with cars.
Bessie Young served pecan pie as she rushed around the house, asking new
friends if they needed anything while Jack Young, a World War II veteran,
sat outside and traded war stories.

They talked about soldiering and the food you eat in war. It was generally
agreed that you needed a "cast iron stomach" --- Jack Young's words --- to
handle much of it.

But eventually the conversation turned to that night in June 1968, and to
Chandler, whose deep brown eyes --- his mother's eyes --- stared at the
group from a stand of pictures on the table.

It was dark and quiet on the water, Davis remembered. And out of nowhere an
explosion shook the boat, slinging Davis, blinded, into the water. When he
put hands to his face, it was like touching "a bowl of spaghetti," he said.

Davis and crewman John Anderegg floundered in the water. Anderegg tried to
keep fellow sailor Frank Bowman above the surface, but let him go, realizing
Bowman was dead. His body was never recovered.

Instead Anderegg, who has since died, swam to Davis, who was badly wounded
and still carries so much shrapnel from the explosion that it sets off
airport metal detectors, he said.

Chandler, then 23, was nowhere to be seen.

The men around the Young family's table Friday swear they saw Vietnamese
helicopters that night and have no doubt that an enemy attack sunk
Chandler's boat.

But the U.S. government maintains the North Vietnamese never used
helicopters in the war. An official investigation into the sinking of PCF-19
determined an American jet mistakenly targeted the boat and sank it with a
missile shot.

No disciplinary action was ever taken.

Lail also believes --- no, he knows --- that he recovered Chandler's body
from the scene. He remembers zipping four men into body bags and that Bowman
was the only PCF-19 crewman unaccounted for. But only three bodies made it
home, and Chandler's wasn't one of them.

"I don't know what happened," Lail said Friday. "I wish to God I did."

That night still haunts Lail. It affected him so much that he picked up the
phone 28 years later and called Chandler's family, tracking them down with
help from the Warner Robins library, he said.

He told them what happened that night and that their son wasn't just
missing. He was dead.

It was a hard thing to do, but it started the healing process for the
Youngs, they said, something they will be forever grateful for. Then they
learned just this year that a fragment of Chandler's arm bone had been
found, that it was recovered in 1993 from a Vietnamese fisherman who told a
search party he found the fragment and buried it near his home.

DNA testing confirmed in February that it belonged to Chandler, according to
military documents. It was sent home to Warner Robins.

Davis, who sometimes wonders why he was spared that night, believes he has
another piece of Chandler imbedded above his left eye, that the force of the
explosion drove it into his skull.

"I say, 'that's Chandler,' and I carry him around with me every day," Davis
said Friday. "If they ever have to operate on me ... I'll go blind before I
let them take that."

There was quiet for a while, then Lail leaned across the table and asked
Jack Young a question about his son --- stepson, really, though Jack Young
never thought of him that way. He asked the father how he deals with his
broken heart.

"I always dream about the boy," Jack Young answered. "But I always dream
about him being alive."

Lest we forget

There are 1,973 American servicemen listed as missing in action from the war
in Vietnam. All told, 88,000 are considered MIA from all American wars,
according to Department of Defense figures.

The government spends about $100 million a year on recovery efforts, and
every month remains are brought home "just like (Chandler's) were,"
according to Larry Greer, a spokesman for the department's POW/MIA office.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, the remains of 612 service members have
made it home, he said.

That's 612 American flags, just like the one draped over Tony Chandler's
coffin Saturday.

"This is hard," Davis said, placing his hand atop the flag's blue field of
stars. "But I miss you, Chandler. God bless you, and I love you, and I
always will."

Davis turned back to Chandler's family, then smiled and patted Chandler's
coffin one last time.

"This is my man," he said. "I'm finally glad he's home."

The crowd sang "Amazing Grace," old soldiers in the chorus. A 21-gun salute
cracked the hot and heavy air, and "Taps" rolled out across the cemetery.
Veterans saluted while Chandler's flag was folded tight and handed to his
mother, who held it in her lap and cried.

The funeral was over, but not the story of PCF-19.

"Not till we get the other boy," Lail said. "We get the other boy, it'll be
over. And we'll get him. Frank Bowman, quartermaster second-class,
Walterborough, South Carolina."