"The search for Spooky 21"

Via Knuckledraggin' My Life Away

 

TA-OY, Laos — Maj. Derrell Jeffords bounced his roaring Spooky 21 down and off the runway at Da Nang Air Base in Vietnam. It was just before 7:30 a.m., on Christmas Eve 1965. The big camouflaged belly of his twin-prop AC-47 was easily visible against a blue sky as he banked west.
The cargo plane-turned-gunship was on its way to Laos; its mission was top secret.

Jeffords put the South China Sea at his back and the plane lumbered over a landscape mimicking the twists and folds of an unmade bed. The flight plan showed that he and his five-member crew would be returning to base in under six hours. Back in time for a late lunch.

But that was without complications, and this was the Vietnam War.

Just over halfway through what had been up to that point an uneventful flight, at 10:56 a.m., two U.S. planes in the area picked up a UHF radio broadcast:

“Mayday, Spooky 21. Mayday.”

Then the plane disappeared, swallowed up in the dense green foliage of the Southeast Asian jungle.

This is a story of that flight, and the nearly half-century it took to find and bring home its six crew members. Guiding that effort through all those years was the pledge that those who go into battle make to each other: No matter what, we will come back for you. You will not be forgotten.

You will not be left behind.

It is also the story of how a six-hour combat mission at a time when America was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam would test the limits of forensic science, and the faith and patience of the grieving sons, daughters, wives and parents of the six lost airmen.

The rest of the story
Part 1 of 3