Keeping the Promise: The Story of MIA Jerry Elliott, a Family Shattered by His Disappearance, and a Sister's 40-Year Search for the Truth

by Elliott Donna E.

  We were a ragtag bunch of folks the day after Dale’s accident. Everyone missed Dale, but felt obligated to return to the Old French Fort to check on the grave, and explore the eastern slope of the hill where Danny had located the old NVA bunker. Danny climbed the hill and started down into the ravine. He got as far as the bunker. I met him on his way back up, and he was so pale beneath his tan I asked, “Danny, are you alright?”

  “I smell death,” he blurted, “I can’t go back down there, I smell death. I need to get out of here, out of Khe Sanh...now!”

  “Okay, Danny,” I tried to ease his anxiety, “I can check it out later. I’ll take you back to Dong Ha if you like.”

  Away from the Fort, Danny elected to spend another night in Khe Sanh. We planned to take a short side trip the next morning before his return to Dong Ha. We all crammed into a taxi van and headed for Laos. Unable to cross the border at Lao Bao due to a backlog of heavily laden logging trucks, we ended up stuck in traffic for almost an hour. A throng of money-changers surrounded the taxi and tapped persistently on the closed windows until the driver managed to turn the vehicle around. We explored the modern new market in Lao Bao. With a metal roof shaped like a water buffalo’s head, the shops were well-stocked with everything from huge bottles of cobra wine to finely crafted gold jewelry. After strolling through the market, we browsed the fruit stands. Danny, Geof, and I enjoyed the sweetest grapefruit any of us had ever eaten.

  Impulsively, we decided to tour Lao Bao Prison. The French built Lao Bao Prison, also known as D’ Ai Lao, was used to house Vietnamese prisoners from 1896 until 1945. I’d read declassified U.S. military intelligence documents that stated the NVA 304th Division temporarily used the Lao Bao prison in 1968 to hold U.S. and ARVN POWs. Could Jerry have been temporarily held in Lao Bao as a prisoner during the Khe Sanh-Highway Nine campaign? I came to consider this possibility from comments made by returned POW Dennis Thompson after I sent him a topographical map, compiled in 1968, of northwest Quang Tri Province. Captured on February 7, at the Special Forces Lang Vei camp, just weeks after Jerry’s ambush, Thompson acknowledged, “...Lao Bao is designated as a prison. I’m sure we were held in that area but not in a permanent type structures. We were in bamboo and thatch huts bunkered back against a hillside. They were tactically spread out. The place was like a converted way station with logs as ankle stocks and rusty wrist gouging manacles. No latrine, no mosquito nets, and very little water. We ate fish jerky and sandy rice.”

  In recent years, what remained of the old prison buildings had become a tourist attraction easily reached by driving a few miles south of Lao Bao village. It began to rain as we walked through the prison gates. The huge raindrops splattering on the walkway like colossal teardrops seemed appropriate for such an oppressive place. Geof climbed inside the old prison cells and thoroughly checked any standing structures for initials, symbols, or marks that American POWs may have scratched into the walls, but found nothing.

  Returning from Lao Bao, we drove by the old Special Forces Camp at Lang Vei. This historic Army outpost had undergone many changes from the first time Mike and I had come here in 1999. Roadwork on the highway blocked access to the old Special Forces camp. The only thing we could see from the van was an old PT-76 Russian tank on display. The area was such a muddy mess even the highway road crew had called it quits for the day.

  Geof Stiner entertains the Bru children of Lang Cat with his video camera, 2003.

  We drove to a Bru village Geof fondly called “Miracle Village.” Once the children recognized Geof, they instinctively knew he’d have candy, and happily splashed through mud puddles to reach him. Within seconds, a circle of giggling children surrounded him.

  One of the village elders came out of his hut wearing camo pattern fatigues called a “tiger suit.” Kieu and the old soldier spoke briefly in Vietnamese, and Kieu explained to Geof this man had worn his old military uniform to honor his presence in the village. Geof and the Bru soldier shook hands, patted each other on the back, and greeted one another like old comrades.

  We moved under the overhang of the nearest hut. Curious, I stuck my head inside the door for a look around. The room consisted of four walls, a barren split-bamboo floor blackened with age, and absolutely nothing else. Not even one change of clothing hung on the wall. Attached to the hut was a cooking area stacked with a couple of rice baskets, a half-empty sack of rice, and a few utensils. This Bru hut was by far the most impoverished dwelling I’d ever seen anywhere.

  A woman handed the village Chief a baby girl. Through Kieu, he asked if I could help his grandchild. She was sick with a slight fever, a runny nose, and a hacking cough. Having young grandsons, I always carried orange-flavored baby aspirin in my bag. With Kieu’s help, I instructed the Chief on the correct dosage, and warned about keeping the pills in a safe place as children often mistook them for candy. No sooner had the little orange pills hit the Chief’s hand, than three more women appeared. Standing in the pouring rain, they held their sick babies out to me. It’s difficult to explain how their appeal for such meager help made me feel. Glad to do what I could, I felt inadequate and a little guilty I could do no more for these humble, generous people.

  Farewell’s over, we piled back into the taxi. The driver, now dealing with a river of thick red mud for a surface, spun the wheels, which fishtailed the van into a quagmire of red clay close to the edge of the hill. When the van finally came to a complete stop, I took the opportunity to claim my femininity, climbed out of the van, and stood off to one side. Sometimes it’s good to be a woman. The guys slipped around in the mud as they vainly tried to push the van out. Some of the local men came forward, showed mercy on us, and shoved our ride back onto the road.

  Back at the hotel, Danny and I loaded our gear into a taxi, along with Dale’s motorbike, for the return to Dong Ha. Dale had checked himself out of the hospital, and taken Hung with him back to the hotel. From my perspective, he was better off in the hotel—fewer rats and a softer bed. Dale looked like hell; he sat hunched over the edge of the bed, both eyes black and blue, one swollen completely shut, and a bandage on his forehead. He could hardly move and was in a lot of pain, but even worse, he felt he had let the group down by not being able to continue. I would miss him when his wife, Huong, arrived by train to take him home, but I was glad he was alive. After all, he wouldn’t have been in Khe Sanh on a motorbike at night, checking on a grave, if he hadn’t been trying to help me find Jerry.

  Danny and I excused ourselves so Dale could rest, and went in search of food. We asked the desk clerks if there was an open restaurant nearby, but it was too late, everything had closed for the night. “Well,” Danny said, “what do we do now?”

  “We’ve still got half a French loaf and some peanut butter. I’ll cook,” I told him. We laughed as I spread the last of the peanut butter on two pieces of bread with a finger. Hungry, we gobbled the meager meal down, chased it with water, and called it a night. I was almost ready for bed when I heard a light tap on the door. When I opened it, to my surprise one of the desk clerks stood there with a tray holding a big bowl of steaming chicken pho. I tried to pay him, but he shook his head no, and walked away smiling. I called Danny’s room to learn he was also a happy beneficiary. We decided the hot soup was the hotel staff’s way to let us know they understood and respected our return to check on our injured friend.

  Danny stayed in Dong Ha the next morning, while the hotel arranged for a car and a driver to take me back to Khe Sanh. I met up with Geof and Kieu in Khe Sanh at the hotel. We immediately agreed to go back to the Old French Fort to check on the grave. I wanted to explore the ravine where Danny found the old NVA bunker. Kieu explained it would be “a good thing” for me to buy flowers, joss sticks, and fruit to place on the grave to honor the dead. I gave Kieu some dong, and as he went off to the market, Geof and I went back to the Fort. When Kieu returned we carried everything up the hill, got on our knees, and lit the incense in respectful silence. “It would be a good thing if you ga
ve the soldiers some dong to buy joss sticks to burn here every week after you leave,” Kieu instructed. I complied, appreciating his intention to keep the grave secure even after we left the area.

  Geof cut through all the brush with his machete and then started to poke around in the bunker with a long stick. I headed down the steep slope below the bunker into the narrow ravine. At the bottom, ran a small, wet weather stream. I decided to follow it for a distance, and search for anything that might resemble a piece of a crashed helicopter. Hot and sticky, I stopped in the rocky streambed to catch my breath. Jungle growth thrived in this damp environment, created an impenetrable awning overhead. Under the canopy, with the air heavy and still, the smell of moist decay overwhelmed me. Without a horizon in view, I could easily become disoriented. Every few feet, I checked up in the trees and down on the ground for snakes before I moved. I was grateful Geof and Kieu weren’t far away, in case I needed their help.

  Jutting out the bank was something round, which resembled a plastic tube. After breaking every stick within reach, I dug into the mud with my fingers until I decided it was only a big bamboo root. Effort was energy in the steamy heat and I was tired, but I wanted to follow the streambed and see where it led. I picked up a small round, rusty, once green, metal object. It looked like a gearshift knob off something mechanical, maybe a chopper. I dropped it in my shirt pocket and continued to crawl over rocks and branches. The next two objects I found appeared to be grenades. I filmed them and moved on. There was a lot of unexploded ordnance in the streambed, probably washed down over the years from the plateau above. I wanted Geof to come down and look around; he would recognize something broken off a chopper. I called and called to him. I could overhear Geof and Kieu talking to each other, but they couldn’t hear me shout from forty feet below.

  When I climbed back up to the plateau, I noticed Steve and Huong had arrived. I told Steve I might have found a part from Black Cat #027, pulled the round knob out of my shirt pocket, and tried to hand it to him.

  “That’s no gear shift knob, Donna, that’s a cluster bomb! Get rid of that damn thing!” Steve shouted. As I tossed the cluster bomb over the hillside, I thought about the clanking sound the metal ball made each time it bounced against my video camera as I climbed over rocks and limbs. I scolded myself for picking it up, another narrow escape and another lesson learned. In the future, I would settle for photographs of all strange items. We spent a couple of hours digging around the area where the dozer bladed, and were able to identify bullet casing and other remnants of military presence.

  It was time to go. I hated to leave the Old French Fort. We hadn’t heard a word from Gary Flanagan, or the JTF. There was no way to be certain the grave would remain undisturbed, but I didn’t have much choice in the matter. We had waited three days for someone from JTF to call or show up, and Danny and I had a plane to catch in Saigon.

  Steve and Huong would stay one more night in Khe Sanh, but Geof and Kieu decided to ride in the taxi with me back to Dong Ha. When the car ran hot, the driver pulled off the road. Steam boiled off the radiator. He parked and walked to a nearby restaurant for water. Two police officers rode past on a motorbike and parked at the restaurant. While we waited for the radiator to cool, Geof and I decided to visit the nearby Bru village nestled in a valley at the bottom of the hill. Kieu climbed in the back seat and slumped down. “You want to stay in the car while Geof and I walk down to the village?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Kieu replied, “I stay with taxi.”

  We barely reached the bottom of the hill when a motorbike followed us. The same two police officers we’d noticed earlier looked us over as we smiled and waved. They recognized Geof, waved back, and drove up the hill without stopping. This was another return visit for Geof, and once again, when the kids saw him they came on the run. I teased Geof and told him his new nickname was the “Candyman.” The boys, a little bolder than the girls, clustered around Geof. He tied the candy up in his bandana, put it on the end of a stick, and exuberantly asked the children if they wanted to go fishing. He looked like the Pied Piper going down the road with a gaggle of laughing boys and girls following him.

  Clean and prosperous, the village boasted a community well, cows, pigs, and a portable sawmill. The homes here were much sturdier than huts in other Bru villages, many built with milled lumber instead of bamboo. The children in this village were healthy. I didn’t see any sick babies or hear the usual hacking coughs. The villagers called out warm greetings from their stilted homes as we casually walked around. Abruptly, a man ran out to us and asked loudly, “You Americans? You Americans?” He told us he had worked with Americans during the war. When Geof explained he served at Camp Carroll, our new friend started to reel off the names of some of his American friends. Surprisingly, I was acquainted with of some of the vets he mentioned, Bob Donoghue, Dave “Bulldog” Smith, and Robert Shippen, to mention a few. It was like old home week. Unexpectedly, a picture sent by a Khe Sanh vet only weeks before popped into my head. “Did the Americans call you ‘Ham’?” I asked.

  Bru woman with dogtag necklace

  “Yes, yes, my name ‘Ham,’” he quizzically answered. “Ham” explained he had heard about the American vets who returned to Khe Sanh to assist the Bru. He had come to Lang Cat to wait for their return. He had been there over a year because he wanted their help to see a doctor for a “pain in the bone” in his chest. I explained to him the Cedar Point Foundation, established by American veterans to provide medical, educational, and other humanitarian assistance to the Bru Montagnard tribesmen of Vietnam, had tried to return, but encountered visa problems. Ham didn’t seem discouraged. “I am not with my American brothers, but I see them in my heart,” he told us, “I miss them very much and I have much love for them.”

  Ham asked for my email address. When in Da Nang he would use a friend’s computer to write. My bag was in the car, I had neither paper nor pencil. Geof had an ink pen, so I wrote my name and address inside a glove and gave the pair to Ham. I thought as much rough work as the Bru life entailed, he would probably be happy to have some good gloves. Ham rolled the soft leather in the palm of his hand and asked, “What is this?” When I told him it was cowhide, he seemed shocked and a bit repulsed, but he tried to hide his feelings by carefully placing the gloves in his back pocket. Ham never contacted me, so I don’t know if he received the needed medical attention for his “pain in the bone.”

  As Geof and I started the long climb back up the hill, four or five Vietnamese women came out of the bush with heavy packs on their backs. It was obvious they were smugglers, an occupation punishable by death. They looked so trail weary I felt sorry for them. Sweat ran down their faces and soaked their clothing from walking many miles through the jungle with heavy loads. I could hear liquid splashing around in bottles so I figured they were hauling untaxed liquors, and probably black-market cigarettes. The children followed us to the top of the hill to say goodbye. Vietnamese music, a strangely stirring melody, echoed from a loudspeaker in the restaurant nearby as we got back in the taxi and drove away.

  The radiator overheated again several miles down the road. All the men got out of the taxi to confer with the local men about the steaming radiator. As I sat alone in the back seat, I watched a small Bru boy about two years old wander into the highway. He stood transfixed on the white smoke coming off the car engine, and the chattering group of men who weren’t even aware of his tiny presence. He reminded me of my grandsons, Sam and Max, and I smiled as I turned away. My smile quickly faded as I saw a big dump truck about a quarter-mile away careening at full speed directly toward the little boy. I slipped out of the backseat and slid down the side of the taxi unnoticed. The truck was bearing down, there was no time to think, only to react. I bolted into the highway, wrapped my arms around the kicking screaming child, and ran for our lives. Kieu took possession of the child and met his mother halfway to deliver her son safely into her arms. She had seen everything from the front door of her hut. She smiled and waved.
I smiled and waved. Everyone piled back in the taxi and we drove a few more miles before breaking down again. This time the driver called someone to come and pick us up in a utility vehicle with only four seats. Being the smallest, I had the honor of bouncing around on the floor of the cramped rear storage area.

  Downtown street in “Old Hue,” September 2003.

  By the time we arrived at the hotel in Dong Ha, I was beat. It had been a hard day, a rough ride, a long adventure of almost three weeks. I was glad that tomorrow we would start the journey home. I was thinking about being under the jungle canopy in Khe Sanh when I fell asleep that night, and remembered an overused, but very practical expression: Khe Sanh is an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

  Hue never looked as good coming in from the south as it did when returning from the northern province of Quang Tri; it was like reaching civilization again. We all went to the Hotel Morin and stuffed ourselves with Western food. Life was good again, except for the nagging concern we shared over the grave at the Old French Fort. Before leaving Dong Ha, we’d heard a rumor the JTF was in town, so Steve, Danny, and I rode motorbikes over to their hotel. The desk clerk told us Gary Flanagan had been there for a few days, but checked out that morning to return to Hanoi. We tried to call, but there was no answer and the phone didn’t go to voice mail so I could leave a message. I hoped we hadn’t missed one another on the road. With no other means to contact him, I emailed Gary that we were in Hue. I gave him the phone number of the hotel, told him we would leave for Da Nang the next day, and asked Gary if he would please get in touch with me.