WILLETT, ROBERT VINCENT JR.
Name: Robert Vincent Willett, Jr.
Rank/Branch: O2/US Air Force
Unit:
Date of Birth: 05 August 1944
Home City of Record: Great Falls MT
Date of Loss: 17 April 1969
Country of Loss: Laos
Loss Coordinates: 161700N 1064500E (XC860999)
Status (in 1973): Missing In Action
Category: 2
Acft/Vehicle/Ground: F100D
Refno: 1427
Source: Compiled 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 in 1998.
Other Personnel In Incident: (none missing)
REMARKS:
SYNOPSIS: Robert Willett was married only six weeks before he went to
Vietnam. His job there was piloting the Super Saber jet, the F100 (also
sometimes called the "Hun" or "Lead Sled"). The F100 was a fighter bomber,
and good at top cover and low attack, primarily used in Vietnam for close
air support.
On April 17, 1969, Willett's plane was shot down over Laos in Saravane
Province, just inside Laos, and south of the city of Khe Sanh, South
Vietnam. Circumstances surrounding Willett's loss indicate that there is a
strong probability that enemy forces know his fate.
When 591 American prisoners of war that were released in 1973 by the
Vietnamese, Willett was not among them. He was among nearly 600 Americans
lost in Laos who did not return. Laos was not included in the agreements
ending American involvement in Southeast Asia, and the U.S. has never
negotiated with the Lao for American prisoners they held. Eventhough the
Pathet Lao stated on several occasions that they held American prisoners,
not one man held in Laos was released.
Alarmingly, evidence continues to mount that Americans were left as
prisoners in Southeast Asia and continue to be held today. Unlike "MIAs"
from other wars, most of the nearly 2500 men and women who remain missing in
Southeast Asia can be accounted for. If even one was left alive (and many
authorities estimate the numbers to be in the hundreds), we have failed as a
nation until and unless we do everything possible to secure his freedom and
bring him home.
May 1998
AN ENDURING MEMORIAL?
by JD Wetterling
Last Memorial Day weekend my grown son and I made a pilgrimage to the
Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC--my first--to pay our respects to a
few old friends of mine. I had been moved by the half-scale-model traveling
version when it came to our town two years earlier, but it was inadequate
preparation for this.
We dodged the rolling thunder of Viet Vet bikers on Constitution Avenue to
pass in respectful procession by that mystically overwhelming wall. The sky
was a dirty galvanized tub inverted over an otherwise enthralling city. It
matched the mood of the hushed cortege while anointing bowed heads with
drizzle. Cool drops diluted hot salty ones on ruddy cheeks of middle-aged
vets, mine included, for whom that war was the watershed event of our
lives-some would say our post-modern culture.
Stephen and I shuffled along in single-file before the sad face of that
black granite slab, silently staring at all those names as I compared panel
and line numbers with my rain-soaked crib sheet. At panel 27W, I knelt,
counted down to line 103 and found my best friend, Robert Vince Willett,
fighter pilot, shot down April, 1969, while flying as my wingman in the most
horrific midnight gunfight of our lives. Now he's part of the dust of a
jungle mountain overlooking an unpaved highway called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
I ran my fingers over those electrifying engraved letters as videotape of a
massive, mushroom-shaped fireball on the darkest night played in my head.
Old regrets for snap decisions made in the heat of battle, ones I'd give the
world to take back, tormented my soul. My son's hand rested on my shoulder,
communicating as only flesh of flesh can. I fought to be a manly, composed
father he could be proud of.
I arose, speechless, and we walked toward a sheltering tree and a riveting
broadside view of that awesome wall. After several attempts, words were
forthcoming and I told my son how proud I was of my friends who gave their
all for their country. I confessed how difficult it was for a vet to honor
the guy in the big house down the street who had worked so hard to be a
non-vet. Early on he dishonored his duty to his country and now he faces
several accusations of dishonor in the highest office in our land. I
wondered aloud what those 58,200 dead soldiers would think if they were to
rise again and see the new America, its Commander-in-Chief serving at the
people's pleasure with 14 of his associates convicted of crimes and 90
others having pled the fifth or fled the country.
I told my son that as long as depraved humanity has breath, old men will
send young men off to war. It's an awful thing, but bondage is worse.
Vietnam was not a popular war, but neither was the Civil War, and the
mothers of mighty Rome were no less distraught when big Julius marched their
sons off to Gaul. Yet if all young men were allowed to pick their wars
there would be no freedom. I explained that a small minority of men in my
generation had done that very thing, violating or evading the laws of the
land, and today the nation reaps the reward. Some of them are now in
positions of authority, rewriting history to justify their acts while
ignoring the genocide and bondage following our desertion of a nation of
peasant farmers.
With no understanding of war or 4000 years of human history, they actually
believe that unilateral disarmament is not suicidal while 19 unfriendly
nations are rabidly building nuclear arsenals. America now faces a threat
we can't run away from, more dangerous than during the Cold War days, yet we
remain utterly defenseless against Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.
While 500 Russian nuclear warheads are unaccounted for, our government
permits the private sale of missile guidance technology to an enemy with 13
nuclear ICBM's aimed at our country. The cost of permission was 30 pieces
of silver in a campaign coffer.
Then I admitted to my son that his dad had one great dread, a scenario well
within the envelope of possibility: that the dearth of moral authority and
the alarming lack of concern for national defense would result in the
destruction of the Vietnam War Memorial and everything those soldiers died
for. That stately granite wall would be radioactive lava just a few blocks
from ground zero and some old soldier somewhere will repeat St. Jerome's
shocked cry for Rome 1600 years ago: "My voice falters, sobs stifle the
words I dictate; for she is captive, that city that enthralled the world."
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