Forty years of mystery

My latest lengthy feature article for the Kenly News. It’s the story of Jimmy Lee Watson, a Chief Warrant Officer in 1968 Vietnam who was shot down while piloting a Huey helicopter on a routine logistics mission. None of his Lucama High School Class of 1964 classmates ever knew exactly what happened to him beyond the fact that he survived the landing.

Until this year. Former detective Chris Raper, Class of ‘64 and Vietnam veteran, decided to renew his detective work for one last case, and this is what he found.

After 40 years, Lucama classmates know pilot’s fate
The fate of Lucama Class of 1964 member and U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Jimmy Lee Watson has been a mystery since his helicopter was shot down in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and he was declared missing-in-action on March 13, 1968.

With the Lucama High School Class of 1964 reunion approaching July 19, class president James Boyette wished to hold a recognition service for Watson, as 2008 marks the 40th anniversary of his going MIA.

Classmate Chris Raper, a Vietnam veteran residing in Elm City who worked as a detective for 25 years, decided to use his information-hunting experience to uncover Watson’s fate.

“Our prayer was that, before we had our reunion July 19,” said Raper, “That we would know something other than what was general knowledge. We wanted to know something more about what happened.”

From late January until the middle of June, Raper plugged away at Library of Congress databases, spending hundreds of hours poring over government records.

What he eventually discovered solved a mystery that had plagued Watson family members and classmates for decades.

• • •
Watson graduated from Warrant Officer training in January 1967 and began his year-long Vietnam tour June 12 that year, according to Raper, who served in a separate area and concluded his tour months before Watson went MIA.

“During that time, the military, especially the Army, was in very desperate need for helicopter pilots,” said Raper. “Those who were smart enough and could hack the program were selected from those volunteers for the WO program, and Jimmy Lee was smart enough to make it through that.”

Watson’s job as Chief Warrant Officer primarily consisted of piloting Bell UH1 Iruqois helicopters (a.k.a. “Huey”s), the standard assault helicopter of the U.S. Army at the time. He was a member of Company A, in the First Battalion of the Ninth Calvary, which was in the First Calvary Division of the U.S. Army.

In Vietnam, Watson was stationed at Camp Evans, which Raper said was basically a helicopter base. Throughout his service, Watson made an “untold number” of support flights into North Vietnam, as the Hueys were used as both transport and attack helicopters.

In March 1968, the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne was attached to the First Calvary Division and stationed at Camp Evans.

According to records, March 13, 1968 was intended to be a routine logistics flight from Camp Evans to Phu Bai Airfield in the Thua Thien-Hue province of South Vietnam. Ten people were on board the Huey: Aircraft Commander Lieut. Peda, four members of the 101st Airborne, a U.S. Marine being shuttled from visiting his brother, and three members of the First Calvary Division.

According to official government records of the incident, the Huey was hit by small arms fire and was forced to make an emergency landing near the Quang Thai Village. Watson landed the chopper, no injury befalling him or his nine passengers.

Five of the passengers, members of the 101st Airborne Division, trekked five miles back to Camp Evans, while Watson and the other four remained with the Huey.

Within minutes of the five’s departure, Watson, who was the ranking officer, and his four men were descended upon by Viet Cong guerilla forces from a nearby village.

When the five members of the 101st returned to Camp Evans, at approximately 10 p.m. according to documents, a search-and-rescue (SAR) campaign was launched to aid their endangered brethren.

Two of those five, SFC Eugene Gubbins and PFC Larry Moore, were soon discovered dead, buried in shallow graves next to a creek near the Huey after apparently being gunned down by Viet Cong guerilla troops.

The remaining three – Watson, Sgt. Cleveland Evans Jr., and Specialist Steven Wayne Heitman – were never found, dead or alive.

That was the official story. The government’s last contact with the Watson family was in 1976, affirming that he was MIA, with no further information available. As far as the family knew, he could have somehow made it out alive, or was captured, which meant he’d have been tortured, or he was simply killed that afternoon.

They were left with nothing but questions.

Enter Raper, 40 years later.

Drawing on his detective experience, Raper slowly began unraveling the twisted twine of mystery.

He soon discovered that in the early 1990s, the American government passed the McCain Act, which set up a repository for all POW/MIA records in the Library of Congress.

This information was not widely advertised to the American public, nor made easily accessible.

“They just dumped all the records there and, over a period of time, set up a searchable database,” said Raper. “Remember, this was the early 90s when very few people had the internet, especially the older generation. Anyone who wanted to could search the Library, but to do so they had to go there and do it in the records, which was very time consuming and expensive.”

Since Raper did his searching this year, he was able to access most information via the internet, although he put hundreds of hours into it that he said, if paid minimum wage for such work, would have earned him a solid paycheck.

Despite the convenience of the internet, however, the search for Watson was a frustrating one.

“The more I searched for him, the less I found. There was very, very little information on him,” said Raper. “It was almost as if he never existed.”

A search for Evans turned up the same results.

It was in searching for Heitman that Raper finally began making headway.

“His family had relentlessly pursued the issue with the government,” Raper said. “I’m talking hundreds of pages of records of their correspondence including many pages of correspondence among family members and governmental officials including presidents, congressmen and senators.”

Over 300 pages of information turned up in relation to finding the missing crewmen, including Watson and Evans.

Slowly, Raper pieced together the puzzle.

• • •
In 1997, after diplomatic relations were restored between the U.S. and Vietnam in the 1980’s, the U.S. government performed a thorough investigation of the area surrounding Watson’s Huey landing site.

The first document Raper found on Watson allowed room for the desperate belief that Watson may still be alive. In interviewing a captured surgeon who had worked for the Viet Cong in the area Watson went down, a U.S. analyst wrote in the margins “possibly: WATSON, J.L.”

As Raper kept digging, however, he found evidence that strongly suggested Watson had not survived.

Records indicated that when the 101st five had left, guerilla forces gathered from the village and attacked the remaining five. Two were found buried by a creek.

The remaining three took cover in a nearby graveyard, which is where Evans (the only black member of the group) was killed and eventually buried, according to eyewitnesses interviewed by the government, who identified the man’s skin color as black.

Heitman and Watson retreated to a bomb crater. There, they fought off the Viet Cong as long as possible until they were killed, and, according to witness statements, were buried nearby.

“There is enough information that I can bring closure,” said Raper. “I am satisfied that Jimmy Lee was not captured, wounded or tortured … There’s probably people in prison who were placed there with less evidence than what’s involved in this case. Unless every record I found was fictitious – and I don’t think that happened – then there’s no doubt in my mind what happened.”

• • •
Raper said that the surviving members of Watson’s family were, for the most part, pleased to finally receive some closure to the mystery of Watson’s departure, and he expects his classmates to feel the same way.

“That was the motivating force that kept me digging for it,” said Raper. “I think to some degree we’ve all been wanting closure, and I would have to think that most friends and relatives of all MIA soldiers would want to know with a degree of certainty what happened.”

Since the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. government has received more than 21,000 reports of American POW/MIAs. Raper said that while those families may believe the government will notify them when they find information, the families are likely going to have to do their own research.

• • •
Watson will forever be remembered as perhaps the most vivacious member of the Lucama High School Class of 1964.

“His personality was as bright as his blond hair,” Boyette declared. “He was your typical small-town kid … full of life. He was everybody’s friend.”

He was a con, having swingled a cousin into a bad haircut for 75 cents. He was a charmer, skipping LHS for Rock Ridge High School, to talk to girls — and teachers — at lunchtime.

He was a ballplayer, as a catcher for the LHS baseball team.

And he was a worker, delivering newspapers by bicycle.

It is his ambitious intellect that landed Watson the role of Chief Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army, as the qualification process is a difficult one, according to Raper.

“Not very many were selected,” Raper recalled. “It was a pretty tough career to go into … Jimmy Lee could have done anything he wanted to do.”

March 13 of this year marked the 40th anniversary of Watson’s going MIA, while July 28 would have been his 62nd birthday.