Some of them have been missing for more than 50 years, but they sure haven’t been forgotten.
How could Carolyn Whitford forget the happy day that turned into what she calls one family’s hell?
How could Ann Holland forget about lying to her kids after their dad went missing in action?
They were among about 200 people who participated in an event Jan. 11 for Northwest MIA families. Hosted by the Defense Department’s Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, the Portland session drew several participants from the Vancouver area, including Holland.
Air Force Tech. Sgt. Mel Holland was among 11 U.S. servicemen reported killed or missing after their mountain-top radar station in Laos was overrun in 1968. The 28-year-old mother of five was holding a Cub Scout meeting in her Woodland home when she got the telephone call: Her husband was missing.
Don’t tell the kids
It was a top-secret assignment, so Holland couldn’t tell anybody — not even their children.
“The kids would come home from school, and they would want to know if there was a letter from Daddy,” Holland told The Columbian in an earlier story. “I would pull out an old letter and read it.
“They declared the men dead after three months, and that’s when I could tell the kids,” Holland said.
Whitford, a Tacoma resident, was among those at the meeting who shared stories of loss. She was 7 years old when her dad, Master Sgt. Lawrence Gray, was serving in the Korean War. One day in 1950, her teacher told the girl to go home — but didn’t say why.
Realizing that she was out of school for the rest of the day, “I went skipping home,” Whitford said. When she got home, that’s when she was told “Your father’s missing.”
“Our life was hell as we waited for years and years,” she said.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
