BURD, DOUGLAS GLENN
Name: Douglas Glenn Burd
Rank/Branch: O2/US Air Force
Unit:
Date of Birth: 08 November 1945
Home City of Record: Hampton VA
Date of Loss: 01 August 1969
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 145936N 1082847E (BS281589)
Status (in 1973): Killed/Body Not Recovered
Category: 2
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: F4E
Refno: 1474
Other Personnel In Incident: Tommy L. Callies (missing)
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 15 June 1990 from one or more of
the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence
with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews. Updated by the P.O.W.
NEtWORK
REMARKS:
SYNOPSIS: On August 1, 1969, just four years after he graduated from the Air
Force Academy, Capt. Tommy Callies found himself in the Vietnam war as the
pilot of an F4E Phantom fighter/bomber jet. On this day, 1LT Douglas Burd
was his back-seater, having charge of navigation and bombing. It was
Callies' dream to become a career pilot, and he and Burd were flying one of
the most exciting aircraft of the time.
The Phantom, used by Air Force, Marine and Navy air wings, served a
multitude of functions including fighter-bomber and interceptor, photo and
electronic surveillance. The two man aircraft was extremely fast (Mach 2),
and had a long range (900 - 2300 miles, depending on stores and mission
type). The F4 was also extremely maneuverable and handled well at low and
high altitudes. The F4 was selected for a number of state-of-the-art
electronics conversions, which improved radar intercept and computer bombing
capabilities enormously. Most pilots considered it one of the "hottest"
planes around. It was equipped with Skyspot radar, which helped ground radar
track the plane.
When the Phantom flown by Callies was in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam,
just about 25 miles southwest of the city of Quang Ngai, the Skyspot was put
to test. The plane was shot down.
Observers feel that Tommy Callies and Doug Burd died in the crash of their
plane, and circumstances surrounding the area of crash indicate a very good
chance the enemy knew what happened to them. The two are on the rolls of the
missing because their bodies are in enemy hands.
For the nearly 2400 other Americans unaccounted for, simple explanations are
not so easy. Experts now believe that hundreds of Americans are still alive,
held captive by a long-ago enemy. While Callies and Burd are not, evidently,
among this number, one can imagine their willingness to fly one more mission
for their missing comrades. Why have 15 years gone by without our bringing
these men home?
The Los Angeles Times
Saturday, December 27, 1997
Issue of MIAs in Vietnam Losing Steam
By DAVID LAMB, Times Staff Writer
DA NANG, Vietnam--On the official records, it's Case No. 1474: two American
pilots--a captain and a lieutenant--shot down on a bombing run over the
jungles of Vietnam in 1969.
For 28 years, the unnamed hill where they crashed, 130 miles southwest of Da
Nang, lay as undisturbed as a ghost-town cemetery, even as the lost airmen
became part of what for the U.S. is the great unresolved issue of the
Vietnam War--the fate of 1,568 Americans still listed as missing.
Now, just as excavation crews have descended upon the site, some U.S.
officials and veterans groups are privately raising a question no politician
would dare ask publicly: At what point should the United States say it has
done everything possible to account for its missing and start winding down
a campaign that has cost hundreds of millions of dollars?
Congressional Mantra
Although the MIAs are a mantra for every member of Congress visiting
Vietnam--the issue, each is quick to point out in news conferences, is the
first topic raised with local officials--the fact is that MIA groups no
longer have the access they once did on Capitol Hill. And, U.S. diplomats
say, the issue is gradually being relegated to a less prominent position on
the agenda of foreign affairs.
"To a large extent, the whole MIA issue was manufactured," said Michael
Leaveck, associate director of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation in
Washington. "The Reagan administration used it for political purposes; the
Bush administration perpetuated it; a cottage industry profited from it;
some political forces used it as leverage for a broader agenda.
"I would never deny the importance of putting a family's pain to rest, and I
know there are still a lot of unresolved feelings, but at some point you
have to say there is nothing left we can do that will
produce--alive--returning Americans. You have to accept a certain number of
unresolved missing cases whenever you go to war."
Actually, it may be nature itself that determines the eventual end of the
MIA campaign, because before long there won't be anything left to find. In
Vietnam's acidic soil, bones disappear in 30 years or less. Of all the body
parts that can be used for identification, only teeth have an indefinite
life span--and, in the new-growth tangle of thick jungles, they can be
impossible to find. Perhaps mindful of nature's deadline, a dozen U.S.
military men and women arrived recently to set up a tented encampment on the
long-ignored battlefield near the Ho Chi Minh Trail where the two pilots'
F-4 Phantom crashed.
They were joined by a team of Vietnamese army men who a generation ago would
have been the Americans' mortal enemies. And for eight hours a day, six days
a week, they dug, sifted and marked the hillside with tape, searching for
clues that may have lain hidden and that with luck and perseverance might
bring closure to Case No. 1474.
The helicopter that circled over the sweating excavators one day was made
in Russia, was piloted by a Vietnamese and carried an American ambassador.
Normally, Douglas "Pete" Peterson is a gregarious man, but on the
50-minute flight from Da Nang the ambassador had sat silently, staring out
the small, round window, his chin resting in the palm of one hand. The
Vietnam veteran watched the jungle whisk by, and he knew that, had
history taken a different twist, it could have been his remains that the
joint task force was searching for.
"How can you put a value on an effort like this that is unprecedented in
history?" Peterson asked the GIs after his chopper landed in a blinding
whirl of dust. "You know, sometimes people ask how many dollars it costs to
look for our MIAs. Well, I think we should tell them proudly how much we're
spending."
The search for America's missing costs about $100 million a year. But that
is money well spent, the young soldiers on the mission said, and one of
them, born a year or two after the last Americans fled Saigon, in 1975,
asked Peterson, "Were you ever in Vietnam during the war, sir?" "Yes, for
quite a while," replied the ambassador, a former Air Force pilot who was
shot down in 1966 on his 67th mission over the country and spent more than
six years as a prisoner of war.
Linchpin of U.S. Policy
The question of the MIAs' fate has been kept alive by bereaved families,
concerned veterans, a few congressional leaders and a specialized business
that has profited by not letting the controversy fade.
It is the tit-for-tat linchpin on which U.S. policy toward postwar Vietnam
is based: Hanoi's cooperation on MIA accountability in return for
Washington's normalization of diplomatic and economic relations.
Those in the United States who could never accept a Vietnam lost to
communism seized on the MIAs as a wedge to keep Hanoi and Washington apart,
convinced that Vietnam would never be a partner in the search for
missing GIs. It was a way, they believed, of keeping Vietnam isolated
indefinitely, but they had it wrong.
Vietnam's cooperation, long in coming but now substantial, has made the MIA
issue the bridge to an increasingly fruitful relationship between two former
enemies.
"I'm enormously impressed with the cooperation that exists on the POW/MIA
issue," U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin said in April during a visit
to Vietnam. Lt. Col. John Kelly, commander of the U.S. detachment
for MIA accountability, concurs: "Cooperation is excellent. Otherwise we
couldn't be out here doing our job."
The Vietnamese secretly let U.S. searchers into Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum when
rumors surfaced that American prisoners were being held there in underground
caves. They have allowed U.S. teams into cemeteries under the cover
of darkness to reinter bodies that reports indicated might be those of
Americans.
They've opened archives, handed over 28,000 documents and let U.S. military
personnel fly off to remote villages on an hour's notice and check reports
that remains had been found or an American prisoner of war seen.
Unprecedented Access
Although questions remain about archival access, the Vietnamese military has
let us do things the American military would never allow a foreign country
to do," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). "We've gone into their
prisons, gone into their defense headquarters. Can you imagine us letting a
bunch of Vietnamese into the Pentagon to run around under similar
circumstances?"
McCain, shot down over Hanoi in 1967, spent six years as a POW,
volunteering nothing but his name, rank and serial number during months of
interrogation and torture. Once freed, he wrote a magazine article
titled "You Get to Hate Them So Bad That It Gives You Strength."
Later, after Vietnam began cooperating on MIAs, McCain became a leading
advocate of reconciliation and tried to move relations beyond the single
issue of accountability.
A flood of anonymous mail poured into his office, branding him the
"Manchurian candidate" and accusing him of collaborating with the enemy.
"Many people," he said, "don't want to see this issue go away."
More than 80,000 Americans remain listed as missing from World War II, but,
as a victor in that conflict, the United States had unrestricted access to
battlefields and archives in Europe and Asia.
An additional 8,000 Americans are still officially missing from the Korean
War, but, as part of the armistice, the U.S. was allowed to conduct thorough
searches for their remains. But in Vietnam--where 300,000 North Vietnamese
soldiers are listed as missing, in addition to the 1,500-plus Americans
(including 23 civilians and a Marine believed to have drowned while
surfing)--the United States initially encountered only stony silence, broken
by an occasional release of remains when Hanoi wanted to curry favor.
Hanoi Perplexed
The Bush and Clinton administrations both tied improved diplomatic relations
to increase cooperation on MIAs. Hanoi was perplexed. The government didn't
take linkage seriously at first, nor did it understand the emotional depth
of Americans' commitment to bringing their sons and husbands home.
"We've fought wars before, and, when they were over, we exchanged prisoners
and that was it," said Le Van Bang, Vietnam's ambassador to the United
States. "The unaccounted-for issue wasn't even raised. So this was an issue
many Vietnamese had a hard time understanding."
In 1992, a significant breakthrough came when the Vietnam Veterans of
America Foundation sponsored Nguyen Ngoc Hung's trip to the United States.
Hung, a former soldier who fought the Americans for six years and is now a
university professor of English in Hanoi, is believed to be the first North
Vietnamese whom Washington allowed to travel freely in the United States
after the war. Moderate, articulate and non-ideological, he spoke at
colleges, on talk-radio shows, in town forums, often encountering protests
and hostile questions.
"I was amazed how the MIA issue had galvanized the United States," he said.
"I'd pull into a gas station in Georgia, and every car seemed to have an
American flag and one of those POW/MIA stickers on it."
When he returned to Hanoi, he was debriefed at the foreign affairs and
interior ministries. Well, officials said, it looks like just a matter of a
short time before Washington normalizes relations, right?
Dead wrong, Hung replied: Relations are not going anywhere until the MIA
issue is resolved.
Improved Cooperation
Cooperation improved, and the Joint Task Force for Full Accountability was
set up that year to work in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Since then, it has
repatriated the remains of 293 service members killed in Vietnam and
identified 95 of them. An additional 568 case files have been stamped "no
further pursuit," meaning that investigations and inspections have failed to
turn up evidence or leads.
Although returns are diminishing with the passage of time and there has
never been any credible evidence of Americans being held prisoner in Vietnam
since McCain, Peterson and the other POWs were released in 1973, the task
force still solicits fresh information, advertising in Vietnam's yellow
pages and running TV ads. Its headquarters is marked on most tourist maps.
Much of the information the task force receives--none of which it pays
for--leads nowhere. Sometimes, the bones that villagers believe to be
American are those of a Vietnamese or an animal.
Other times, "American GIs" seen in a remote village turn out to be
Australian backpackers.
Investigators in the United States also have had to deal with phony dog
tags, doctored photographs and deliberately misleading information conveyed
by people who had hoped to profit by keeping alive the hopes of MIA
families.
Still, Dolores Alfond of the National Alliance of Families, based in
Bellevue, Wash., said: "I believe there are Americans left alive over
there." Her brother, a pilot, has been missing since 1967.
"The Vietnamese probably move them around and out of the way when Americans
come into a village. The Americans don't get to talk to anyone whose story
hasn't been rehearsed and checked out by the Vietnamese authorities. So
basically, the statements you hear in the media from the joint task force
are lies and misrepresentations."
At the isolated site southwest of Da Nang, the joint task force's excavation
around the crash crater had grown to half a square mile by the time of
Ambassador Peterson's visit. The F-4 Phantom was lugged away by villagers
years ago, part by part, and sold as scrap metal, and the acidic soil had
obliterated any trace of bone fragments.
Only the most meticulous efforts resulted in the discovery of a few clues: a
pocket knife, a boot sole, a life raft, a seat buckle, a portion of a
helmet. They were not enough to prove that two men had died in the
vicinity, not enough to establish anyone's identity--as just the discovery
of a tooth might have done.
"You're disappointed when you don't find more, when there aren't remains to
send back so a family can have closure," said Denny Danielson, a civilian
anthropologist with the task force who fought in this same jungle as a
Marine in 1966.
"But beyond that, what keeps crossing my mind out here is that I was one of
the lucky ones. I got home. These guys didn't."
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