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A MISSING PILOT AND LASTING LOVE -- When
visitors ask,
Joseph P. Dunn II tells them the pilot in the
photo is his father.
Story here...
http://www.capecodonline.com/cctimes/amissing25.htm
Story below:
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A missing pilot and lasting love
By GWENN FRISS
STAFF WRITER
HYANNIS - Behind the bar at The Island Merchant
is a photograph of Navy Lt. Joseph P. Dunn, of Hull, whose unarmed plane
was shot down off the coast of China on Feb. 14, 1968.
Lieutenant Dunn is one of 1,798 Americans unaccounted for after the
Vietnam War. He is one of only seven lost in Chinese territorial waters.
His son was 19 months old when he disappeared. The only father Dunn has
ever known is the one in this photograph and others like it, the one his
mother, Maureen Dunn, has brought to life for him with her stories.
''There was no disconnect. The hard part was for my mom, having to
listen to me talk about my dad all the time,'' Dunn says, sitting in the
Ocean Street restaurant with his mother, who drove from her Randolph
home.
Dunn grew up surrounded by his mother's unrelenting efforts on behalf of
her husband and other Vietnam troops listed as missing in action or
prisoners of war. He did his first press interview at age 6. His mother
brought Joe-D along to parades and protests, hearings and speaking
engagements. He did his homework at one end of the table while she
prepared mailings to Pentagon officers and elected officials at the
other.
''When you've been doing it since you were a little kid, you just think
of it as normal,'' Dunn says.
Maureen Dunn's quest to gain humanitarian treatment for POW/MIA soldiers
and rights for their families has put her in the spotlight so often -
she estimates 550 to 600 interviews - that it's difficult to find a
question she hasn't answered a dozen times over.
''She's known from Boston to Washington to the West Coast. When it
wasn't fashionable, she was a trouper and stuck in there and her great
determination kept the MIA movement alive,'' says Sidney L. Chase, a
Vietnam veteran and regional veterans agent for 13 Cape towns and
Wareham.
Chase adds, ''If you go back and look at any MIA event or issue, you'll
probably find Maureen Dunn involved at some level.''
While networking with some of the scores of people she's come to know,
Maureen met Associated Press reporter Melissa B. Robinson in 2002
outside a Washington, D.C., hearing. Listening to Maureen sketch out her
involvement in the National League of POW/MIA Families - working on
everything from POW/MIA bracelets with college students to pushing
legislation to improve benefits for POW/MIA families - Robinson saw the
possibility of a book.
In July, ''The Search for Canasta 404: Love, Loss and the POW/MIA
Movement'' was published by Northeastern University Press.
Maureen's years of political activism brought her into contact with many
well-known personalities. Blurbs touting the book came from Henry
Kissinger, Sen. John Kerry and Boston TV news reporter Dan Rea.
Although the book is named for the last radio call sign Lieutenant Dunn
used in 1968, it begins eight years earlier, when Maureen met Joe, a
friend's younger brother, at the Park Street subway station in Boston.
Their first date lasted until 2:30 a.m. and earned her a monthlong
grounding from her strict Irish-Catholic mother. Despite her mother's
misgivings, Maureen went to Joe's college prom with him after her
punishment was over. In a matter of weeks, she knew she loved him.
Maureen insisted the book include their love story. It was the basis of
the decades-long quest she's undertaken to make the government see lost
soldiers not as casualties but as individuals whose absence tore holes
in the people they left back at home.
''I will never let another wife go through what I went through,''
Maureen says. ''A lot of the young wives, they're handed the flag at the
cemetery and then they (the military) walk away when she needs them the
most.''
Although Maureen lived off-base with family, she was outraged by the
rule giving the family of a soldier killed in action just three weeks to
vacate military housing. Through Maureen's work with the National League
of Families, bereaved spouses now have a year to find new housing.
''Even though we can't get everybody home, we can help those who are
here,'' Maureen says.
In the early days, Maureen focused on finding her own husband, forming a
''Where is Lt. Joe Dunn?'' committee and pressuring the military and
elected officials to look for him and his downed plane. Another pilot
who escaped the Valentine's Day 1968 attack by Chinese fighter jets off
the island of Hainan reported seeing a parachute descend from the debris
of Lieutenant Dunn's jet.
For more than a year, Maureen wrote to Joe faithfully, sending her love
and catching him up on Joe-D's antics. She mailed the letters, hoping he
was alive someplace and would know how much she missed him. As years
passed with no word, Maureen turned her efforts to finding Joe's remains
for a proper burial. After President Richard M. Nixon normalized
relations with China, she applied for permission to go herself.
In the meantime, she continued working with the National League of
Families and raised her son. Robbed of the chance to give her only child
the nine or 10 siblings she'd hoped he would have, Maureen raised Joe-D
in a cocoon of cousins, aunts and uncles from her own and her husband's
big Irish-Catholic families.
''I have 89 grandnieces and -nephews and one great-grandnephew,''
Maureen says. ''Joe thought he was the 10th Gallagher,'' she says of her
sister's nine children.
One of those cousins, Dan Gallagher, did two Navy stints and wrote his
master's thesis by reconstructing the case of his uncle.
''As an intelligence officer, getting a master's degree at Defense
Intelligence College, I had access to the classified documents,'' says
Gallagher, now retired from the Navy and serving as Cape Cod Community
College's chief information officer. ''By being able to rummage through
archives, I was able to find a lot of classified documents and get them
declassified.''
Statistics showed that 75 percent of Vietnam-era pilots who ejected
suffered a major injury, like a broken back. The survival time for a
healthy person would be, maximum, 12 hours. Gallagher concluded his
uncle was dead before officials even decided whether to risk a rescue in
Chinese waters. Pinpointing weather conditions for Feb. 14, 1968, let
Gallagher make an educated guess on where Lieutenant Dunn's body might
have washed ashore.
When Maureen finally received permission to visit China in 1991, her son
worried the trip would be too taxing for her because she was recovering
from a rare cancer. She thought Dunn deserved the chance to find any
remnant of his father that he could. Gallagher, an expert on the case
who also spoke Mandarin Chinese, was a logical choice to go with him.
It was a grueling trip, with Gallagher and Dunn making their way -
usually walking - from one tiny fishing village to the next. They sought
out the village's oldest residents, asking if anyone remembered the
crash of an American plane in 1968. One person talked of finding a wing,
most of which he sold but the rest he turned into two spoons and a
bucket. The implements were located and given to Dunn. Although forensic
tests later showed they were not made of airplane-grade aluminum, it
still meant a lot to Maureen and her son.
Dunn and Gallagher also met with the Chinese pilots who, for decades,
had been hailed as heroes for shooting down Lieutenant Dunn's plane. The
pilots had even written a book about their experiences, but were still
unable to shed any light on what happened afterward.
Back at home, Maureen received in the mail the minutes of a secret
meeting from February 1968 in which Secretary of Defense Robert S.
McNamara recommended against risking a helicopter crew by sending it
into Chinese airspace to look for Dunn.
When McNamara spoke at Harvard University 30 years later to promote a
book about his role in the war, Maureen held up the minutes and shakily
told him, ''I'm that guy's wife.'' She told McNamara his recommendation
that day had set the course of her life. She asked him to apologize to
her and to the little boy - now a man - who grew up without his father.
McNamara said he didn't remember saying that, but if he did, ''I'm not
only sorry, I'm horrified.''
Maureen still hopes the U.S. will one day raise the wreck of her
husband's plane. Her car still bears a ''Where is Lt. Joe Dunn?'' bumper
sticker.
Dunn says, ''They're never going to find my dad's body. But the
organization my mom put together is very important today. The government
tried to squash it, and a bunch of wives went to grocery stores and
refused to stay quiet.''
Near the end of his China trip, Dunn went to a strip of beach where he
felt his father's presence strongly. Telling his dad, ''I've done all I
can for you,'' he pulled off the MIA bracelet bearing his father's name
and threw it into the sea.
The black-and-white photograph of Lt. Joseph P. Dunn remains at The
Island Merchant.
''There's an unwritten Irish tradition,'' Dunn says, ''If your da is
dead, you put his picture on the bar. That hits home on so many
different levels.''
Gwenn Friss can be reached at
gfriss@capecodonline.com.
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Larry Scott
