A LIVING MEMORIAL FOR

Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class MALCOLM T. MILLER

UNITED STATES NAVY

Information from the Wall

HM3 - E4 - Navy - Regular
20 year old Single, Caucasian, Male
Born on Nov 21, 1946
From TAMPA, FLORIDA
Length of service 3 years.
Casualty was on May 10, 1967
in QUANG TRI, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY
OTHER EXPLOSIVE DEVICE
Body was not recovered
Religion
PROTESTANT

Panel 19E - - Line 84

 
 

The above photos courtesy of Dana Fisher, his niece. The 2 bottom pictures were
taken just months before he went missing. His remains will be laid to rest at Arlington
on May 10. 2005, the 38th anniversary of the incident. He is laid to rest below.

 
MILLER, MALCOLM THOMAS
Name: Malcolm Thomas Miller
Rank/Branch: E4/US Navy
Unit: H & S Co., 3rd Recon BN, 3rd Marine Division, Khe Sanh, South Vietnam

 

 

Date of Birth: 21 November 1946 (Clewiston FL)
Home City of Record: Tampa FL
Date of Loss: 10 May 1967
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 163706N 1064404E (XD845485)

Status (in 1973): Killed in Action, Body Not Recovered
Category: 2
Acft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground
Refno: 0676
 

 

MARCH 23, 2005
Uncle Mac comes home
He was KIA in Vietnam, but Mac Miller still has a story to tell

BY BROOKE HATFIELD

Dana Fisher was raised on "The Dukes of Hazzard," "Looney Tunes" and stories about her uncle Mac. Her mother, Sandra Miller Keheley, told young Dana about her uncle Mac. He used to light up rooms and hearts, she told Dana. He joined the Navy as a corpsman at 16. He was brave.

Three men came to Dana’s door on Feb. 19. Two of them represented the U.S. Navy Office of Mortuary Affairs, The U.S. Navy Casualty Office, and the third was a petty officer who was her uncle’s equivalent rank. They came to tell Dana that, after 38 years of being listed as MIA in Vietnam, HM3 Malcolm Thomas Miller was coming home.

Dana’s uncle Mac was a ladies man.

‘He had a girlfriend for every hour of the day," said Sandra. "He’d have one for breakfast and one for break and one for afternoon break."

He used to keep a bottle of Brut in the dashboard of his family’s green 1963 Plymouth Valiant, just in case he needed to splash on more during the course of the evening. If he had two dates scheduled for one night, he’d rush home to change between them. But of the many women in his life, it was his sister Sandra who arguably felt most loved by the dashing Mac Miller. Fellow redheads, they were only two years apart in age.

"He was another half of me," Sandra said. "He’s the one that made everybody laugh. He’s the one that eased everything. The middle child is the one that’s the comedian and tries to make things right."

The summer after Sandra’s first year in nursing school, she returned home to a sheet with "Welcome Back, Sandy" emblazoned across the front and three bottles of champagne. When Sandra told Mac that she didn’t want to tell their father that she had actually failed two classes, he had a solution— "Tell Dad after he drinks some champagne."

When Mac was 16, he went joy-riding in a car that he didn’t know was stolen. Since he was the oldest person in the car, he took the bulk of the punishment, and the judge presiding over his hearing gave him two options— serve his country or go to jail. Mac chose the former, entering Navy corpsman school in August of 1964.

Sandy was still in nursing school at the time, and she remembered how her brother’s new military career didn’t change her relationship with him.

"He was writing letters to me bragging about the things he could do,," Sandra said. "He was damn proud of what he was doing, and he was damn proud to lord it over me." Mac seemed to enjoy training to be a medic, and mentioned to Sandra that he wanted to be a doctor once he left the service.

He went on to serve on the U.S.S. Repose for a year, giving vaccinations to soldiers about to depart for Danang. In 1966, he was reassigned to the Marines as a medic to the 3rd Recon Alpha Company. In order to get out of service earlier, Mac elected to go on reconnaissance missions. He was a "Kiddy Cruiser": he went into the Navy at 16 and would have been out by the time he was 20. At the time of Mac’s death, "he had something like three weeks left," Sandra said.

The JPAC report delivered to Dana’s door tells her the story of HM3 Miller’s last hours on earth. How he and six other men were on a reconnaissance patrol code-named Team Breaker near a U.S. Marine base in Khe Sanh on May 9, 1967. How they set up camp that night on a hill near the border of South Vietnam. How the North Vietnamese Army attacked them, killing 2nd Lt. Heinz Ahlmeyer, Sgt. James N. Tycz and Lance Cpl. Samuel A. Sharp within two hours of the battle’s initiation. How Dana’s uncle Mac died from fragmentation grenade wounds while the Vietnamese continued to fire on his comrades through the night and into the morning.

"I’ve always wondered if he was still really out there," Dana said. "Mom’s pretty much kept him alive with us all these years."

Although he was classified MIA/KIA, and although the three survivors of Team Breaker saw Mac die in the early morning hours of May 10, his family still harbored hopes of his eventual, if unlikely, return.

"My sister said it right," Sandra said. "She had always dreamed of him finding a Vietnamese women and having 25 Vietnamese children running around."

After two attempts to evacuate the members of Team Breaker by helicopter, the remaining men, riflemen Clarence Carlson and Carl Friery and Pfc. Steve Lopez, were rescued. But because of the intense firefight at the time of their extraction, recovering the remains of the four slain men wasn’t possible for nearly 38 years.

"There was never any closure there without the actual remains," she said. "We had this mystic uncle out there somewhere and we knew all about him as a kid."

In 2003, a joint United States/Socialist Republic of Vietnam team excavated an alleged burial site, a hill that locals claimed was haunted. Hill 665, as the JPAC report refers to it, yielded 31 disarticulated teeth fragments and minute bone fragments. Dental records showed that eight of those teeth belonged to HM3 Malcolm Thomas Miller.

Although the remains are currently at a military facility in Hawaii, the four men will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on May 10, the 38th anniversary of their death. Sandra and Dana said that they are looking forward to meeting the families of the men who died that day with Mac, who was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and Vietnamese Military Merit Medal and Gallantry Cross with Palm.

Dana has become a standard-bearer of sorts, using the Internet to track down Mac’s military colleagues and others who might be able to tell her more about the uncle who captivated her as a child.

Her life is full of piles of paper— stacks of photographs of her uncle, hundreds of photocopies of government documents and newspaper clippings, page after page of correspondence with people connected to her uncle Mac and his days in Vietnam. One of the pieces of paper in one of the piles, a letter written by Sandra, has the following remembrance: "When I think of my brother, I see him against the rail on the U.S.S. Repose. He has on a stark white T-shirt and his flaming red hair is carefully combed. He will never grow old like the rest of us."

The Last Goodbye

After 38 Years, Families of Four Soldiers Lay Their Hopes and a War to Rest

By Lynne Duke

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, May 10, 2005; C01

They lie in a pile on the red clay of Vietnam.

Four dead men. One already is smoldering. The elephant grass is on fire.

Three other Marines are still alive for now, but if the North Vietnamese Army doesn't get them, the fires surely will.

It is late morning, May 10, 1967, on Hill 665 northwest of Khe Sanh. A Marine reconnaissance patrol named Breaker is in trouble, picked off or blasted apart for 12 hours by NVA snipers and grenades.

U.S. forces throw hellfire onto that hill. Jets crater the area. Gunships rocket enemy bunkers; Gatling guns fire 6,000 rounds per minute, pulverizing flesh and bone. And the napalm fires burn.

But the NVA is relentless. It turns chopper after chopper into Swiss cheese.

One takes 182 hits, wounding the whole crew; in another, a pilot dies.

Suddenly a Huey flies in fast and low, just drops from the sky, slips in under a blanket of ferocious cover fire. The chopper slides onto the hilltop, within feet of the Marines. Ron Zaczek, a Marine crew chief, jumps out with a crewmate to haul the survivors aboard. It takes only seconds.

The young Marines are sprawled on the deck. Clarence R. Carlson and Steven D. Lopez are bloodied and dazed. Carl Friery is clinging to life. Zaczek tries in vain to stuff Friery's intestines back into his gaping abdomen.

Then he just rocks him gently, whispering helplessly, "There, there. There, there."

The chopper struggles for lift. It skids and bounces, nearly crushing the four dead men on the ground. Zaczek remembers one face. Oddly clean, calm, facing the sky. Its blond eyelashes flutter as the Huey's rotor whips the air and finally lifts the bird.

The dead remain where they lie. It is the last time any Marine will see the bodies of Heinz Ahlmeyer Jr., James N. Tycz, Samuel A. Sharp Jr. and Malcolm T. Miller.

They recede into the distance, into the past, already a haunting memory.

Vietnam's red earth has claimed them.

Finding the Fallen

If they have had no proper burial, the spirits of the dead wander. That is what Buddhists believe. To bring them home, to put them to rest, the spirits must be guided -- with prayer, with incense.

So a villager from Huong Hoa district in South Vietnam placed burning incense around the mesa of Hill 665 on an April day in 2003 when the red earth would start disgorging its buried secrets.

Ahlmeyer. Tycz. Sharp. Miller. Today their families will finally mark their return.

For 38 years, their families have waited. They have waited for some physical

remnant: a bone, a tooth perhaps, even just a dog tag. Something to bring them closure. Today they will have their wish, with full military honors for the fallen soldiers, at an Arlington National Cemetery ceremony that will end their uncertainty and close a bitter chapter of the Vietnam War.

Lost in the infamous hill battles of Khe Sanh, the missing men of Breaker patrol were among the many abiding mysteries of a war from which there are still more than 1,800 listed as missing in action.

The job of finding them was left to anthropologist Sam Connell, who specializes in the ancient civilizations of the Maya and Inca. He'd signed on with the Pentagon's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) in 2002 to lead excavation teams. The work is a blending of archaeology and forensics, not unlike a criminal investigation. The search for remains is never simple, especially with the passage of time. Remains of almost 750 U.S. MIAs have been found since the Vietnam War's end. The cases that linger are the most challenging.

"So now," says Connell, "it's the cases like this, where you're on a cliff face or you're piecing together a more complex history."

Hill 665 was indeed complex -- a troubled place, its terrain disturbed.

Near the old demilitarized zone and the Laotian border, 665 had been bombed and cratered repeatedly. It had been picked over by scavengers searching for scrap metal or by bone traders looking for human remains to sell or barter.

The secrets of Hill 665 had eluded investigators for years. There had been but a few random clues and no dots to connect them.

U.S. officials in the capital, Hanoi, met with a steady flow of local people trying to sell information or human remains, though U.S. policy prohibits investigators from buying. Often, the clues offered little beyond the

obvious: Someone died. But who? Where? In which battle?

And those questions weren't easy to answer, because the location of the Breaker incident was in dispute for several years. In 1993, a search was mounted, but it turned out that the coordinates were wrong and investigators found nothing.

The case was shelved until 1998 when a villager scavenging for metal found boots atop Hill 665.

But a backlog of hundreds of other Vietnam cases delayed the Breaker investigation. (Not to mention the 78,000 MIA cases from World War II or the 8,000 from the Korean War that JPAC is also investigating.) Delays were as simple, sometimes, as the weather: Investigative trips are limited to those few months each year that aren't in monsoon season.

Finally, in 2002, a test excavation was conducted atop Hill 665. It turned up a few boots.

"So I come in the next year thinking, 'Oh, they already have [their] boots,'

" says Connell.

Launching a more extensive dig, "immediately I find three or four other boots. Then we began excavating, and I find 11 boots, which is more than the four men had."

The team also found C-ration containers, combs, toothbrushes, toothpaste tubes, bits of socks, artillery casings, sandbags.

The discoveries, at first, made no sense. Obviously, other battles had been fought there. Other U.S. troops had occupied that hill. (Later Connell would learn that the 101st Airborne Division had set up a firebase on Hill 665, unknowingly atop the Breaker patrol's remains.)

"In warfare," says Connell, "things are messy like that."

Connell's team hired about 50 villagers to sift the dirt through mesh screens that would tease out even the smallest fragment. They found snaps, a

1964 penny, cartridge casings, wing nuts, a battery, a ballpoint pen case, belt buckles, fragments of a plastic insect-repellent container.

And by the end of the two-week mission, the searchers also had found 31 individual teeth or tooth fragments, plus fragments of bone.

Connell could tell right away that the incisors did not have the shovel shape of Asian incisors. And dental fillings, which some of these teeth had, are not commonly found in the less developed world.

In Hanoi, a review panel of U.S. and Vietnamese experts agreed the teeth were American. The teeth fragments were stored inside evidence bags, placed in a flag-draped casket and flown to JPAC headquarters at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. There, the JPAC laboratory would try to identify them.

Last Letters Home

Dear Mom, Dad and Sis: Well, I'm just fine. They took Hill 861 and 881 and things are beginning to quiet down. We can sit on our chairs out in the back of the tent and watch the jets and B-52s make the runs on 811.

Lance Cpl. Samuel A. Sharp Jr.'s last letter home to San Jose, Calif., sounds like a Vietnam picnic -- watching the bombing runs. It was dated May 7, 1967, as the infamous hill battles of Khe Sanh were ending.

He was 20 and tall, son of a Navy man, and a worshiper of John Wayne. He joined the Marines to be with Ed, his best friend. From Vietnam, he sent his little sister a fiver for her 18th birthday. Janet Caldera, 56, of Spokane, has kept it all these years. Love, frozen in time.

Dear Mom and Pop . . . Our company has been hit pretty hard, too, with casualties; 100 percent casualties in one of our eight-man patrols hit by mortars while waiting for helicopters to pick them up. . . . Mom and Dad, I have had opportunities to write sooner than tonight, but I hope you will understand that writing about an unpopular war like this one is not easy. .

. . I had an interruption just now. Our lieutenant passed me the word that we go in at 7:30 a.m. tomorrow. None of us want to go, but that's our job and I pray I will never fail to do it. Your Marine Son, Neil.

Sgt. James Neil Tycz was a soldier's soldier. The men trusted him. He knew the jungle, had been on several patrols. Back home in Milwaukee, he ran cross-country, played some tennis. He'd thought of becoming a priest. In Vietnam, he sometimes led the men in prayer before they departed on patrols.

Tycz's last letter arrived home in Milwaukee on May 9, 1967. He died the next day, at age 22.

They all have their stories, these families. They are wonderful in their ordinariness, precious with each recollection.

How Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Malcolm T. Miller, the hospital corpsman, didn't have to be there in Vietnam, could have avoided it by taking advantage of the sibling rule, since he had an older brother already stationed at Tan Son Nhut, says their sister, Sandra Miller Keheley, of Madison, Ga. (His brother, Air Force Sgt. Wes Miller, returned home alive.)

Second Lt. Heinz Ahlmeyer Jr., a graduate of the State University of New York at New Paltz, had completed Officer Candidate School when he was shipped to Vietnam. Hill 665 was his first patrol.

Guts and devotion were his defining traits, says his big sister, Irene Healea, of Watertown, Tenn. Since his death, SUNY New Paltz has given out an award each year in his name, for a student with just those attributes.

The families received their telegrams long ago, confirming the deaths and the Marines' inability to recover their remains. The families held their memorial services. They gathered up their memories and assembled them in photo albums, on walls, in keepsake chests. They carried their heartache.

The years did not erode their longing, their unspoken wish that it was a mistake.

"In the early days, after the war ended, anytime prisoners of war were brought home you'd always hope," says Tycz's older brother, Phillip D. Tycz, 62, of Plano, Tex. "You're told it's a definite killed in action, but until you have remains, you never know."

The Vietnam War mushroomed into a broad social and political force. But for these families, it remained deeply personal. They received briefings over the years from JPAC or its predecessor agencies. They knew the contours of the search, its ups and downs.

Life went on. And yet they remained emotionally tethered to Hill 665, Khe Sanh, 1967.

For Keheley, when the phone call came earlier this year with word that the remains had been positively identified, it was as if her brother had died all over again.

"I had to leave work. I couldn't deal with it," says Keheley. "I thought after all these years it would be easy. But it's like knowing that someone you love is dying and even when the time comes it's still hard to take.

That's how it was. I just started crying, and I had to go home."

Under Attack

They roll themselves in their ponchos and sleep in a circle in the tall grass. One man keeps watch.

Technically, they accomplished their mission: Put down on Hill 665 by chopper at 5 p.m. on May 9 to check enemy movement into the area. Breaker patrol had radioed back to the Khe Sanh base that it had found a series of empty but recently used NVA bunkers and spider holes, perhaps for a company-size contingent.

That's well over 100 men. And they are only seven.

They could have left the area and hunkered down elsewhere. But they didn't.

And around 10 p.m., the NVA return. They walk right up to Breaker patrol's position. Pfc. Lopez sees them.

"They walked up to the side of the circle that I was facing, and the first one or two people that came in, I shot them," recalls Lopez, now 56, seated in his kitchen in La Plata, uncomfortably recalling events he's rarely spoken about in 38 years.

Hill 665 lights up and stays that way for 12 hours.

Ahlmeyer and Tycz get hit in the first volleys. Tycz was the patrol leader, showing the higher-ranking Ahlmeyer the ropes on his first patrol.

"Ahlmeyer was hit harder than Tycz and started moaning, and they threw grenades at the sounds," says Friery, now 59, on the phone from Longmont, Colo., where he lives on military disability after a long struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The recollections of Friery and Lopez complement the account of the battle written by Lawrence C. Vetter Jr. in his 1996 book, "Never Without Heroes,"

about Marine recon units in Vietnam.

"Grenades were flying around and rolling right around the position," says Lopez, a radio man on the patrol, who today is a public school behavioral specialist.

Tycz, like them all, is throwing back grenades. One explodes near his head.

Soon he is dead. Lance Cpl. Clarence R. Carlson takes shrapnel from the blast.

Both radios are hit. Carlson mixes and matches parts and rigs up a working unit. He starts calling for artillery support. He hands the radio off to Lopez, who is shot in the chest but stays on the air.

Sharp takes a round to the chest, too. Pfc. Friery crawls over to him. His best friend in Vietnam is beyond help. A grenade lands next to Friery. He throws it back and is hit with gunfire in the gut.

Then Miller, the corpsman, takes a round, gushing blood from a femoral artery. Carlson tries to stanch the flow from Miller's leg and another grenade blast wounds them both. Miller asks to be propped up with a gun, which Carlson does. And Miller slumps over. Dead.

All ears in the region are on the Hill 665 radio traffic. Marines back at the Khe Sanh base are virtually begging to be sent in to help the men of Breaker.

So many U.S. rockets and gunships are shooting at NVA positions on 665 that huge globs of damp jungle soil rain down on the patrol, recalls Friery, the other radio man. He passes out when he is hit again by another grenade.

Carlson and Lopez scrounge among the fallen for more ammunition. They pile the dead -- their own and the enemy's -- as a barricade around their position. They kill many NVA, says Lopez, but they are outmanned.

Carlson tries to throw a grenade, is shot in the arm, then drops the grenade and takes shrapnel in the back when he tries to dive away from it. He injects himself with morphine. Then he is shot in the leg.

The NVA troops are so close that Lopez can hear them talking, hear them dragging their dead through the tall grass. He is calling in air support all the while.

"Drop it closer! Drop it closer," he was quoted as saying in a wire dispatch in The Washington Post on May 11, 1967.

Though he doesn't remember all the details now, Lopez says, "I know that I asked for napalm. I was asking for anything I could get. And then I asked for more and more."

By daybreak, the fires are menacing.

"Scarface, this is Breaker," Lopez radios at one point, according to Ron Zaczek's 1994 book, "Farewell, Darkness." Lopez's pleading transmission would haunt Zaczek for decades: "We're burning. You gotta get us out.

Scarface, you gotta get us out. We're burning up."

Lopez explains: "We were all pretty much engulfed in flame, but it wasn't a roaring inferno. It was spots of fire and you could negotiate it, if you were on your toes." A very big "if."

By the time Zaczek's Huey flies in, Lopez has chest, leg, head and abdomen wounds. Carlson is equally shot up and blasted. Friery is effectively disemboweled and will be hospitalized for nine months.

After the rescue, the Khe Sanh Marine command orders the all-out bombing of Hill 665.

The men received Purple Hearts, including the dead. Carlson was awarded the Silver Star; Lopez and Tycz won the Navy Cross.

Coming Home

The four flag-draped caskets arrived Sunday at Dulles International Airport on a United Airlines flight from Hawaii. Four hearses awaited them. Military escorts saluted.

The caskets of Ahlmeyer, Tycz and Miller each contained a folded green blanket. Wrapped inside were a few teeth, positively linked to each man by the JPAC. Atop the blanket lay a dress-blue uniform, pressed and laid out with all their ribbons and decorations. Sharp's remains were put to rest beside his father last month in San Jose. The fourth casket at Dulles represented the group, and held teeth and bone fragments found on Hill 665 that were circumstantially linked to the four men.

The hearses left Dulles in a convoy, carrying the dead from a long-ago war.

The caskets will be interred today at Arlington National Cemetery.

Friery planned to be there today. Lopez said he, too, would go. Other men of Alpha Company, 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, have looked forward to this event for weeks, and so have Zaczek and those who manned the gunships for the Breaker rescue. Mission accomplished, they want to say: Breaker patrol is home. They want to put to rest their private demons from Hill 665, too.

From each family, scores of relatives and friends have come. They will receive the folded flags and hear the volleys of rifle fire, the sounding of taps.

They have waited so long. So long to say goodbye. Again.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BTW, Vetter's book, "Never Without Heroes," (which I highly recommend) contains numerous similar accounts of incredible courage and, at the end, the names of all who served 3rd recon battalion in VN including Curt Corsi who'd previously been with Alpha's 1st plt...

_________________

Al Mays

1st Plt Bravo 1/9 (1968)

A soldier buried, a soldier remembered

By Liesel Nowak / Daily Progress staff writer May 10, 2005

Whenever I see the black and white POW-MIA flag wave, I think of Malcolm T. Miller. When I hear stories of families still waiting for information from the Vietnamese government, I think of Malcolm T. Miller. His name and his story have resonated with me for 17 years, from adolescence into adulthood.

Tuesday morning, like most mornings, my struggle to wake up began with the clock radio and NPR. As I lay in bed, I drifted back to sleep during news from Iraq and President Bush's visit to Europe, but a story on the remains of soldiers returning home from Vietnam after 38 years stirred me.

A woman described a photograph of her brother sitting on horseback just months before he was sent to Vietnam. He was killed 38 years ago today after coming under enemy attack in the Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam. I thought to myself, how sad for that family. All these years have passed, and still no burial, no closure.

Another sister talked about the loss of her brother, a Navy medic from Florida named Malcolm T. Miller.

At the sound of the name, I was fully awake.

Malcolm T. Miller.

As his sister described to an NPR correspondent Malcolm's tenacity as a young man in Tampa, reaching down from a tree toward a presidential motorcade to shake hands with President Kennedy, I hopped out of bed across the room and reached into my jewelry box.

There it was. The bracelet I've had since I was 10 years old.

The silver bracelet inscribed with Malcolm T. Miller's name, rank and date he went missing.

On a trip to Washington as a fifth-grader, I'd bought the bracelet at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I found Malcolm's name on the wall and etched his name onto a piece of paper.

The etching and accompanying literature on those who went missing in action are somewhere with my other childhood keepsakes at my parents' house, but the bracelet has stayed with me, through middle school, high school, college and a dozen or so moves in between. The bracelet gave meaning to an impressionable girl about the loss of young lives a decade before I was born.

Malcolm T. Miller and the three other young men who died with him that day - Heinz Ahlmeyer Jr., James N. Tycz and Samuel A. Sharp Jr. - received full military honors Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery. I can only imagine what his family, and the families, must have been feeling these past 38 years.

I grabbed the bracelet from my jewelry box and slipped the silver bracelet on my right wrist, grateful to still have it, grateful that Malcolm T. Miller's family now has a place to visit him and grateful that he is back home.

Contact Liesel Nowak at 978-7274 or email her at lnowak@dailyprogress.com.

http://www.tracypress.com/2005-05-11-Vietnam.html

Families receive closure at burial services

Haraz Ghanbari/AP

An honor guard from the U.S. Marine Corps carries the flag-draped coffin of Lance Cpl. Samuel Sharp on Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington , Va.

Frederic J. Frommer

Associated Press

Published in the May 11, 2005 , in the Tracy Press.

ARLINGTON , Va. - As a U.S. Marine Corps band played taps and a hawk circled overhead, Phillip Dale Tycz said he felt his brother had finally come home.

"This is where I thought he belonged - not Vietnam ," Tycz said.

For nearly four decades, the remains of Tycz's younger brother, Marine Sgt. James Neil Tycz, 22, of Milwaukee , had been missing on a hill in Vietnam , along with those of three other servicemen killed in a firefight May 10, 1967 .

On Tuesday, there were burial services for three of the men at Arlington National Cemetery ; the fourth had his service in his hometown of San Jose last month. A painstaking recovery effort by the military led to the identification of the remains earlier this year, using dental records.

"What came home physically was one tooth," said Irene Healea, whose younger brother, Marine 2nd Lt. Heinz Ahlmeyer Jr., 23, of Pearl River , N.Y. , was killed in the fight on Hill 665, near the Laotian border. "But what really came home was his embodiment and his spirit."

More than 100 family members and friends came to pay their respects Tuesday, the 38th anniversary of the four young men's deaths. Just before the service began, a Pentagon helicopter buzzed nearby, its whir-whir-whir a reminder of the fateful day in which a chopper retrieved the three survivors of the seven-man reconnaissance team, leaving the four dead behind. It was too dangerous to go back for them.

The silver-colored coffins reflected the sunlight of a perfect spring day, as a Marine marching band led a procession on the way to the grave site. Members of the POW-MIA group Rolling Thunder placed beads on the coffins. Each family was presented with a folded U.S. flag.

"The flag-folding was like watching a ballet," said Sandy Keheley, the older sister of 20-year-old U.S. Navy corpsman Malcolm Miller, of Tampa , Fla. "Seeing my brother as a hero today and not a statistic meant a lot to me. I feel his spirit is here. He's on American soil."

Marine Lance Cpl. Samuel Sharp Jr., 20, of San Jose , Calif. , was buried last month alongside his family members, but he was honored along with the other three at Arlington National Cemetery .

Sharp's mother, Irene Sharp, said Tuesday was not a sad day.

"It's been a relief to me," she said. "No tears shed. Finally, he's home."

Sharp decided to sign up for the Marines after his best friend, Ed Charette, did. On Tuesday, Charette recalled telling his buddy: "What if you get killed, Sam? I'll feel really bad."

"I wish Sam and I had been here together to watch somebody else's funeral," Charette said. "I loved that guy."

http://www.monroenews.com/articles/2005/05/11/news/news04.txt

Final salute to a veteran - 05/10/2005

Remains of county man missing in Korean War laid to rest in Kentucky.

By EVENING NEWS STAFF

It was a day of closure for the Mathus family.

Fifty-five years after he was killed in combat in North Korea, Henry Mathus was laid to rest in a family plot at Fairview Cemetery in Bowling Green, Ky., with full military honors.

His brother, Robert, of Monroe, accepted the folded flag that draped the casket containing the few remains investigators recovered from a makeshift grave where peasants remembered that a GI had been buried.

Pfc. Mathus was last accounted for near Usan, a North Korean village, on the night of Nov. 1, 1950, as an Army battalion was being overrun by attacking Chinese. The 19-year-old was listed as missing in action.

When the war ended, Mr. Mathus wasn't among prisoners released and family members were left waiting and wondering about his fate.

Pfc. Mathus later was included on a list of Monroe County's Korean War dead, but it wasn't known for sure what happened to him.

About two years ago, Robert, his remaining kin, received notification from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command notifying him that they might have found his brother's remains. The JPAC has 18 search and recovery teams traveling the globe to investigate reports of military remains, trying to trim a list of nearly 100,000 MIAs from America's wars. In 1997, they recovered the Pfc. Mathus' remains from where the peasants said they were buried.

More than a year ago, the agency located Robert and a cousin, took blood samples, compared DNA and concluded that the soldier was, indeed, Henry.

The remains were flown to Hawaii and shipped to Bowling Green, where the Mathus family first lived before moving to Michigan in 1943.

Today, Henry finally rests beside his mother, father and another brother beneath a headstone bearing his name that was erected years ago to serve only as a memorial to a soldier lost in battle long ago.

Other Personnel in Incident: Heinz Ahlmeyer Jr.; James N. Tycz; Samuel A.
Sharp (all missing)
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 01 April 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 1998.
 
REMARKS: KIA WHN PTRL ATKD, WNDD RCV-J
 
SYNOPSIS: Third Class Petty Officer Malcolm T. Miller was a hospital
corpsman assigned to H & S Company at Khe Sanh, South Vietnam. He was
working with A Company, 3rd Marine Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Marine
Division at Khe Sanh on May 9, 1967.
 
On that day, Miller joined a reconnaissance patrol from A Company that had
the mission of gathering intelligence information on suspected enemy
infiltration routes near their base. The patrol was helicopter lifted into
an area just south of the DMZ, where they found signs of recent enemy
activity, and moved to high ground to establish a night defensive position.
 
Shortly after 12 p.m. the patrol came under heavy small arms fire, and
several of the team were wounded. Twelve hours later, after numerous
unsuccessful attempts, a helicopter was finally able to land and retrieve
the wounded. It was not possible to retrieve the bodies of those who had
died, including Miller, LCpl. Samuel A. Sharp, Jr., Sgt. James N. Tycz, and
2Lt. Heinz Ahlmeyer, Jr. All were said to have died during the action from
wounds received from enemy small arms fire and and grenades.
 
The four men left behind near the DMZ were never found. The government of
Vietnam has been consistently uncooperative in releasing remains they hold
or in allowing access to known loss sites.
 
Even more tragically, evidence mounts that many Americans are still alive in
Southeast Asia, still prisoners from a war many have long forgotten. It is a
matter of pride in the armed forces, and especially in the Marines Corps,
that one's comrades are never left behind. Many men have been killed trying
to bring in a wounded or killed buddy. One can imagine the men missing from
A Company, as well as Malcolm Miller, had they survived, being willing to go
on one more patrol for those heroes we left behind.