Local Documentarian Explores the Legacy and Cost of the Vietnam War By C. S. Satterwhite

Walking up to Wall South at Admiral Mason Park, the smallest statue is of a little child with a sad look upon her face.

This “Homecoming” monument recognizes military families, especially the children, and is “Presented by the Children of America’s Twentieth Century Heroes.”

For many military children, however, there was no homecoming. For thousands from the Vietnam War in particular, there was no return of their fathers.

Jill Hubbs was one of the children whose father never returned.

Nearly fifty years after the military listed her father as Missing in Action, Hubbs is now on her own mission—to share the stories of the grown children who lost their fathers during the Vietnam War and to document an organization founded by those children.

Hubbs produced and directed the documentary “They Were Our Fathers” for WSRE public television as a means to tell her story and ones like it. Hubbs’ film aims to show “the true cost of war” on families, with a special focus on the Vietnam War’s Gold Star Children—the gold star is the designation for a military family member who was killed in action.

While this is not Hubbs’ first documentary, it is by far her most personal.

“My dad was a navy pilot who trained here in Pensacola,” she said of her father, Commander Donald Hubbs.

Cmdr. Hubbs was a career military man on his second tour of duty in Vietnam and was the commanding officer of VS-23, the famed “Black Cat” squadron based on the USS Yorktown in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Hubbs’ last memory of her father was with her family, seeing him off for what would be his second deployment to Vietnam. After proudly showing the family his quarters aboard the Yorktown, they were leaving when she remembered a cake they brought for him was still in the car. Hubbs ran to back and brought the cake to her father and gave him one last hug goodbye.

“Be good, and take care of your mother,” he said as they parted.

Those would be his last words spoken to his daughter. 

Missing in Action

On March 17, 1968, Cmdr. Hubbs and his crew “went on a mission and their plane disappeared off the radar” near the coast of Vietnam.

“To this day, we’re not really sure what happened to him or his men,” said his daughter.

Hubbs was 10 years old at the time and was attending a Lutheran parochial school when the pastor came to get her and took her home. At first, she didn’t know the reason and thought something happened to her mother.

“I got [to the house] and there were a zillion cars in my driveway,” said Hubbs.  She described her home as being filled with Navy officers and defense officials relaying what they knew, which was little.

“The plane is missing, but they’re looking for him,” said her mother.

When Hubbs went back to school, her classmates understood little of what occurred and said less.

“They knew something happened, but the kids didn’t really talk about it,” said Hubbs.

Before her father’s disappearance, the war was more of an abstract concept, which merged with constant demands of a naval officer and his family.

“I didn’t really understand the war at the time. I wasn’t aware of Vietnam.” Her father deployed from time to time, but this was different. The Yorktown returned, but her father did not.

Without any more knowledge of the events surrounding her father’s disappearance, or even a body to bury, “we felt lost,” said Hubbs.

The Navy opened a case file after Cmdr. Hubbs and his crew disappeared, but news was sparse.

“Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into years,” said Hubbs.

Adding to the uncertainty of her situation was the unpopularity of the war, which left the Hubbs family feeling isolated.

“It was hard to accept the situation,” said Hubbs. “And it was hard to explain.”

The Hubbs family remained in the Yorktown’s homeport of San Diego, California, for some time, but eventually moved back to her mother’s hometown of Pensacola.

“We were pulling up roots, and I felt that he wouldn’t be able to find us,” said Hubbs. “It was hard for me to process.”

Although her father didn’t came walking through her door, his daughter never stopped looking.  Eventually, her search for answers brought her to Vietnam.

Searching in Vietnam

After possible sightings of her father were reported in the late 1980s, including a photograph, Hubbs made arrangements with U.S. and Vietnamese officials to look for her father in Vietnam.

“It wasn’t just like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Hubbs. “It’s more like an archeological dig. I didn’t understand the conditions [of the terrain] until I went over there.”

The closest Hubbs came to finding her father was a previously unknown Vietnamese graves registration listing for her father as having died in the Quang Binh Province of Vietnam.

Though she was unsuccessful in finding concrete information regarding her father, her trip to Vietnam proved eye opening in other ways.

In Vietnam, Hubbs had an official guide and translator to help with her search.

“He took us out to his house to have a meal and introduce me to his family,” said Hubbs.

The United States still hadn’t normalized relations with its former enemy, and Hubbs was concerned about being an American citizen in Vietnam. “I didn’t know how they’d receive me.”

Her guide’s father was in the house, but he didn’t speak English. He was a veteran of the war and fought on the opposite side of Hubbs’ father.

While she was in his house, she noticed an oil painting of an anti-aircraft gun hanging on the wall.

Being in this Vietnamese man’s house, knowing her guide’s father might have played a role in shooting aviators down during the war, her first thought was about her father. “What would my dad say?”

The old man noticed her looking at the picture and said to her in Vietnamese that her father was sent by his government to fight in the war just as he was sent by his government to fight in the war.

“Men don’t start wars,” said the Vietnamese veteran, “governments do.”

Later, Hubbs met a Vietnamese woman who suffered the loss of two of her adult children in the “American War,” as it’s called in Vietnam.

“She lost one son, and she had another son who was missing. Before I went over [to Vietnam], it had never occurred to me that they had such loss, too.”

After learning this about the Vietnamese mother’s children, Hubbs showed her a picture of her father in his military uniform.

“I had this picture of my dad,” said Hubbs. The Vietnamese mother had a Buddhist shrine for her two lost children. She then took the picture of Hubbs’ father and placed it between her two sons.

“Then she started saying something,” said Hubbs. “I didn’t know what she was saying, but I knew she was praying.”

“I found the people [of Vietnam] very forgiving. I found no hostility from the people, and all I found [of my father] was a graves registration with my dad’s name.”

With resignation in her voice, Hubbs said, “I will probably never know exactly what happened to my dad.”

Sons and Daughters in Touch

In her grief and loss, Hubbs was not alone.

Roughly 20,000 American children lost their fathers during the Vietnam War, but until the 1990 founding of an organization named Sons and Daughters in Touch (SDIT), few of these people knew each other.

“The very first time I knew of others was when I read this Parade magazine article,” said Hubbs.

The 1990 Parade article featured SDIT and their work to bring together the sons and daughters of those killed in the war.

One of the people featured in “They Were Our Fathers,” is Tony Cordero.

Cordero’s father was an Air Force navigator on a B-57 when it was lost over Vietnam on Father’s Day in 1965. Four years later, Cordero buried his father at Arlington National Cemetery. Cordero was only eight years old and would grow up with a similar sense of loss as Hubbs.

When Cordero turned 30—the same age as his father when he died in Vietnam— he wondered how he could get in touch with other Gold Star Children from the Vietnam War. Looking for answers, Cordero contacted an organization called Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and spoke with a volunteer named Wanda Ruffin.

Ruffin was the wife of Naval Aviator Lt. Cmdr. James Ruffin whose F-4 Phantom was shot down over Vietnam in 1966. He was killed in action and left behind a wife and a newborn baby girl.

So when Cordero asked if Ruffin knew of any sons or daughters who shared his experience, she knew of one in particular—her daughter Wendy.

“[Wendy] never knew anyone, outside of relatives, who knew her dad or shared her experience at all,” said Ruffin in the documentary. “It was very difficult. She grew up very beautifully and did well in school and did just fine, but I knew there was a big hole there.”

After Cordero and Ruffin met, Cordero soon established SDIT to meet the needs of other grown children of veterans whose names were etched on the Vietnam Wall.

As the organization grew, it began meeting at the Vietnam Wall in Washington for what became a Father’s Day tradition. The adult children of those killed during the war found many similarities.

Almost immediately, this group bonded as family, despite differences in gender, ethnicity, service, and rank. “The stories about growing up were so similar,” said Hubbs. “No matter who told the story, there were so many things I identified with.”

Longtime SDIT member Denise Reed lost her father, Harold Reed, in Vietnam when she was a young girl. “I remember the day he left [for Vietnam], and I remember the chaplain coming to tell my mother that he was killed on the Fourth of July,” said Reed.

“You can’t help but wonder how different my life would’ve been if my father had come back home,” said Reed.

Most grew up in a unique isolation with a deep sense of loss, and many of their parents never remarried. Bearing the cost of the Vietnam War long after many Americans relegated the conflict to history books or a bad dream, the nightmare these families lived through was ultimately their bond.

“It’s a family that no one really wants to belong to,” said Hubbs. Or as an article on the SDIT website reads, “the ‘Gold Star’ designation is un-chosen and unending,” thus making this Gold Star network that much more important to the community it serves.

“This is a group of people that you can always express yourself to,” said Reed.

“Express your anger, your disappointment, and express what your family went through… and what you’re still going through because of it.” 

Why the Movie Matters

“They Were Our Fathers” sheds light upon SDIT and the unique effects of war on the children of those killed. While their war was Vietnam, the group offers its experience to a new generation of Gold Star families.

“Unfortunately, there’s a new generation of children who’ve lost their fathers, and now mothers,” said Hubbs. She described one scene in particular as heartbreaking, seeing a large group of these young Gold Star children converge upon the Vietnam Wall to join with their older counterparts and leave roses in shared sympathy.

“It’s tragic for it to happen again. It was hard to bear,” said Hubbs.

“I looked at them, and that was us.”

Hubbs said that she wanted to make this film for a number of reasons, but first because no one has yet documented the SDIT experience.

She also wanted to make this film as a tribute to her father and “to honor our dads.”

“It’s a legacy to our dads. It’s awareness that there’s a cost to war,” Hubbs said.

Since the film’s completion, interest in Hubbs’ documentary has grown exponentially. Over one hundred PBS affiliates have expressed a desire to show Hubbs’ film, most in connection with an upcoming Ken Burns documentary series on the Vietnam War.

Besides PBS broadcasts, Hubbs recently presented President Obama with a personal copy of the film. The Reagan and Nixon presidential libraries also contacted Hubbs for potential screenings.

Although Hubbs is happy with the interest her film garnered, her greatest hope is to connect other sons and daughters who may not know of the organization. She also wants to reach out to the latest generation of Gold Star families so they know they’re not alone.

“The one thing that bonds us is that it was our dads [who died in Vietnam], and this is a piece of our heart that can’t be replaced,” said Hubbs.

“It’s a story that needs to be told.”

 “They Were Our Fathers” WSRE’s broadcast premiere of the Jill Hubbs documentary.

When: 7 p.m. Sunday, June 19 Where: WSRE (go to wsre.org/about/where-watch for channel information) Details: wsre.org