Navy pilot’s remains to finally be buried as bone fragments, his wedding ring and lighter are found in a Vietnam pond 50 years after he went MIA
· Lt Cmdr Frederick P Crosby had been deployed on the Bon Homme Richard, an Essex-class aircraft carrier stationed off the Vietnam coast
· His planed crashed in 1965 in front of Pham Van Truong’s house in Thanh Hoa City, Vietnam
· Family hoped to know what had happened to his body for more than 50 years
· Daughter Deborah Crosby found vital information about his whereabouts when she attended the National League of POW/MIA Families
· Crosby bones were found with fabric from his clothing and his wedding ring
By Matthew Wright For Dailymail.com
Published: 00:54 EDT, 27 May 2017 | Updated: 04:01 EDT, 27 May 2017
Deborah Crosby touched her father’s flag-draped casket as her three brothers hugged her in a tearful embrace on the tarmac at the San Diego airport Friday – ending a more than half century search to find and bring home the remains of Lt Cmdr Frederick P Crosby, shot down as a Navy pilot in the Vietnam War.
Deborah Crosby, now 58, was only six when she was sent home from the first grade to learn her father was presumed dead, though his body had not been found during Operation Rolling Thunder.
Lt Cmdr Frederick P Crosby had been deployed on the Bon Homme Richard, an Essex-class aircraft carrier stationed off the Vietnam coast.
Lt Cmdr Frederick P Crosby had been deployed on the Bon Homme Richard, an Essex-class aircraft carrier stationed off the Vietnam coast. He died when his plane crashed in a fish pond in north Vietnam in 1965. It took more than 50 years to find his remains and bring them back to his family
Deborah Crosby hugs her brother John Crosby in front of her father’s casket. They are surrounded by their brothers Douglas and Steven. Deborah played a crucial role in the investigative work in finding her father.
Crosby was one of 14 planes that were shot during the ship’s 1965 to 1966 cruise with nine of the pilots for those flights being killed and two being Prisoners of War.
Deborah’s mother could never talk about that day, but she gave Crosby and her brothers a binder with articles about her father’s plane zooming low through the clouds on a bomb damage assessment mission before it was gunned down by North Vietnamese ground forces in 1965. The 31-year-old pilot was armed only with cameras, his daughter said.
‘They were coming in low and fast on an enemy who is already spun up because he’s already been attacked,’ said Karl Zingheim, historian at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego.
The pilots wedding ring and clothes along with his bones were found in the pond. Crosby was one of 14 planes that were shot during the ship’s 1965 to 1966 cruise with nine of the pilots for those flights being killed and two being Prisoners of War
‘They were bearing the full brunt of the attack so they could bring the intelligence to bring back to the (aircraft) carrier.’
Crosby and her grandmother made a pact to someday bring home her father’s remains and bury him in his hometown of San Diego.
A year ago, military investigators found his remains in a fish pond in north Vietnam. On Friday, Deborah Crosby fulfilled her promise to her late grandmother.
Passengers watched through the windows of a Delta Air Lines jet as the flag-draped casket was removed from the hold by six sailors.
Deborah Crosby walked forward, touched the casket and embraced her three brothers. The aviator’s elderly sister, Sharon, and brother, David, also hugged, and he wiped an eye.
‘I’m just overwhelmed with seeing the plane drive up and all of the uniforms and all of the respect and the honors that he’s receiving,’ Deborah Crosby said.
The sailors saluted before the casket left in a hearse.
On Sunday, Frederick Crosby will be buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery with full military honors and a Navy flyover.
Navy sailors carry Lt Cmdr Frederick Crosby’s casket after it arrives in the airport in San Diego, California
Deborah touches her father casket. ‘I’m just overwhelmed with seeing the plane drive up and all of the uniforms and all of the respect and the honors that he’s receiving,’ Deborah said.
‘It’s nice to be able to let out the tears and to have some relief in our hearts,’ she said. ‘And now we’re able to talk about it. Before we didn’t talk much about this and now we can talk proudly and we have you know a happier ending and we can visit my dad’s gravesite’
Deborah Crosby never doubted the fact that her father was killed. But her grief seemed to linger in a deep space inside her until she received news that his remains had been recovered, finally giving her closure.
‘It just changed my life in so many ways,’ the energy consultant who lives in New York said earlier in an interview. ‘It relieved a lot of sadness that I’ve been carrying around in my heart very quietly.’
The U.S. military actively searches for missing service members from conflicts worldwide. According to the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, 969 missing service members have been accounted for since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, while the whereabouts of 1,611 remain a mystery
Deborah Crosby called to inquire regularly about the military’s progress on her father’s case starting in the 1990s.
Prior to then, the family hadn’t done much research due to the heavy anti-war sentiment surrounding the conflict according to the San Diego Union Tribune.
Almost 600 American prisoners returned from Vietnam in what was known as Operation Homecoming in 1973 and Deborah remembers checking a list to see if her father’s name was on it to no avail.
When her grandmother suggested they begin the search, Deborah ran into a roadblock as the Navy’s casualty office said that it would only give information to her father’s next of kin – Deborah’s mother.
‘They felt, don’t get your hopes up. There are probably no remains to recover because of the way the crash happened,’ Deborah Crosby told The San Diego Union-Tribune about mother Mary Crosby and her oldest brother Doug who had spoken to Frederick’s wingman after the crash.
‘I was never told that, so I guess I just wasn’t limited by that statement.’
After contacting the Library of Congress, Deborah was given access to declassified information including the coordinates of the crash site which she logged into Google.
Reports from the area yielded hopeful news.
‘They said something about the grass is not growing there because of the damage from the fuel from the aircraft crash,’ she said.
After attending the annual meeting of the National League of POW/MIA Families, Deborah learned that Pentagon’s recovery branch, now consolidated as the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, had been doing searches for her father as early as 1993.
Crosby’s aircraft fell in front of Pham Van Truong’s house in Thanh Hoa City, Vietnam and splashed the resident with mud and water
Decades passed and her mother and grandmother both died before investigators got a breakthrough on their third trip to the area when they met Pham Van Truong, a lifelong resident of Nam Ngan ward in Thanh Hoa City.
According to a 50-page report given to Deborah Crosby, the 89-year-old man told investigators he couldn’t recall the month or year, but he remembered during the war that he was cooking limestone to reinforce his house when he heard gunfire and ran to the nearby levee to investigate. He saw two planes headed toward his house, and one was on fire as it glided toward the levee. He said he could see its wing and tail surfaces were missing. The aircraft rolled as it hit the fish pond in front of his house, splashing Van Truong with water and mud. The other aircraft kept flying toward the sea.
Based on the new information, U.S. military investigators decided to comb the bottom of the pond in 2015. When they emptied it bucket by bucket, they found bones, pieces of fabric from the pilot’s uniform, his chrome lighter and wedding band.
Deborah Crosby felt she could finally shed the tears stored up inside of her.
‘It’s nice to be able to let out the tears and to have some relief in our hearts,’ Crosby said. ‘And now we’re able to talk about it. Before we didn’t talk much about this and now we can talk proudly and we have you know a happier ending and we can visit my dad’s gravesite.’
Crosby said her brothers want to keep the fabric, lighter and wedding band.
She said she wants the flag draped over his coffin to be able to ‘hold it close to my heart.’
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