One of the MIA's dad lives not to far from me.
News: Santa Ana father told son's remains found in Vietnam | - OCRegister.com
Father lays doubts to rest
Warren Orr Sr. is planning a funeral for his son, who died – he now knows – nearly 40 years ago in Vietnam.
By DOUG IRVING
The Orange County Register
SANTA ANA –The call came in the morning, same as the knock on the door all those years before.
Warren Orr Sr. was eating his Cheerios when his cell phone rang. The woman on the line said she was calling from the Pentagon. She had some information about his son.
It had been nearly 40 years since an Army officer had knocked on his door and told him about a plane crash in South Vietnam. He had never really doubted that his son, Warren Jr., had been on that plane. But, until the Pentagon called earlier this year, he had no way to know for sure.
The Department of Defense officially announced this week that it had identified the remains of two U.S. servicemen missing in action since the Vietnam War. One of them was a young officer with bright blue eyes who always carried candy to give to the kids he saw: Capt. Warren R. Orr Jr.
“There's always that faint hope flickering,” said Orr Sr., now 86 and living in Santa Ana. “Now that they're going to have a funeral, why, I can have closure, and know that he's in peace.”
His son grew up in small-town Illinois. He was one month shy of 20 years old when he boarded a bus for Peoria, and went to sign his name at a recruiting station.
He went to Vietnam first as a military adviser in 1963; later, he re-enlisted for the infantry. “His ambitious and forceful leadership,” his commanding officer wrote in 1967, “made every encounter with the enemy a resounding victory.”
Capt. Orr wrote his father in May 1968 to say he was on his way to a small base in South Vietnam, to help evacuate the families of South Vietnamese fighters. It was the last letter his father received from him.
On May 12, 1968, a military transport plane loaded with evacuees thundered down a remote airstrip in South Vietnam. It came under heavy fire, exploded, then crashed into a hillside.
Witnesses had seen Capt. Orr loading people onto the plane just before it left, but no Americans had actually seen him get on. An investigation in 1969 determined that he “could have sought cover from the mortar fire and become separated or he could have boarded the aircraft.”
It concluded: “Fate remains unknown.”
“I knew he was on that plane,” his father says now. “In my heart, I was positive he was on that plane.”
Orr Sr. had a memorial to his son placed at Arlington National Cemetery. He visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., and left flowers.
In the years that followed, people living near the crash site would find pieces of bone and wreckage when they scavenged the area for scrap metal. In 1993, they led a team of U.S. and Vietnamese investigators to the site.
They found pieces of old watches, dog tags, 10 keys, a penny, a nickel and a dime. And they found bones, including two pieces of leg bone that held enough DNA to make a positive identification.
On Sept. 19, a few weeks after the Pentagon had first called, an officer with the Army's Past Conflict Repatriations Branch came to visit the elder Orr. He gave him a spiral-bound booklet that laid out the evidence to prove, finally, that his son had died in that plane crash all those years ago.
The few bone fragments that remain will be buried with full military honors next month in Arlington National Cemetery, along with Capt. Orr's medals and uniform.
Orr Sr. still has his son's Army portrait hanging in the living room, above a small table with a case full of medals. He has his son's dog tag now, too, slipped into the corner of the portrait frame.
714-704-3777 or
dirving@ocregister.com
Contact the writer: 714-704-3777 or
dirving@ocregister.com
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