The Magical Stranger (24 page)

Beth, you are the reason I am here today. You
made me a better man. And I would never want to be here if you were not by my
side. You've sacrificed your career and a lot of other dreams. And you did it
for me. I can't thank you enough.

Tupper had written more, but he didn't trust
himself to speak again without bawling. He moved on and thanked Vinnie and his
men. Soon he was done and sat down. Then he noticed something on a shelf of the
lectern. It was one of the creepy figurines he had given out the night before.
One of the guys had stashed it there before the ceremony. Tupper's face broke
into a wide grin. Maybe his men did love him, just a little.

Chapter Thirty-One

S
herm was always coming up with Navy guys for me to meet when I visited Whidbey. He was particularly insistent about one aviator. His name was Lieutenant Commander Brian “Steamer” Danielson, a flight instructor with VAQ-129, the Prowler training squadron. Sherm didn't know him well, but what he did know filled my heart with dread.

“His dad was shot down over Vietnam when he was a baby. They never found him. You should call him.”

Actually, I didn't want anything to do with him. Steamer sounded too much like a fellow traveler. I was barely comfortable with my own grief; commiserating with another lost soul was out of the question. I could drink beers with Sherm and Tupper and shoot the shit with the guys in the ready room. These men were still alive and flying. I could make a separate peace with the present, but the past was always going to be my enemy. I managed to lose Steamer's email multiple times. But Sherm kept prodding and I finally wrote Steamer on a dead gray March morning in Anacortes. He emailed me back immediately.

“I'm actually giving a presentation about my dad to the Navy League at the officers' club today. I can get you in. Not too big of a deal if you can't make it.”

His speech started in forty-five minutes. I showered and sped over Deception Pass Bridge, passing cars in the breakdown lane the closer I got to NAS Whidbey, cursing myself for not getting my shit together. It was the same old song.

I stumbled Chevy Chase–style into a banquet room half-filled with civilians eating sandwiches and exchanging business cards. My shaggy hair and dishevelment set me apart as usual. A man in khakis with strawberry blond hair and a slight, sad smile walked up to me. His chest was covered with ribbons.

“Hey, I'm Steamer. You must be Steve.”

He spoke slowly and reluctantly, as if he were used to apologizing for things he had not done wrong. He told me he hoped I wouldn't find it too boring. He looked down at his watch and exhaled.

“I guess it's showtime.”

He walked to the podium and thanked everyone for coming. He lifted his water glass in a mock toast and patted his stomach.

“Thanks for lunch, but we'll have to call it a rain check,” said Steamer. He offered another half-smile. “For those of you who have worn these khaki uniforms, you know they tend to shrink over time.”

I chuckled and recognized myself in his preamble. Self-deprecation is an essential tool when trafficking in the tragedy trade. It helps to instruct the audience that your sense of humor remains intact even as you're about to monologue about death.

Danielson flipped on a PowerPoint display and began telling his story. Benjamin Franklin Danielson was born on March 31, 1943—eighty-four days after my father—in Kenyon, Minnesota, a tiny farming community sixty miles south of Minneapolis. He lived in town with his parents and his brother Dennis but longed to be on his uncle Jim's farm a few miles outside of town, milking cows and helping with the corn and soybean harvests.

Benjamin was a star football player who fell in love with Mary Gates, a full-of-beans cheerleader. After graduating, he headed to nearby St. Olaf College on an Air Force ROTC scholarship, and she went to Winona State, a hundred miles away. There were the periodic breakups, but everyone knew they were meant for each other.

They both graduated in 1965 and were married that summer on a blue-sky day at Kenyon's First Evangelical Lutheran Church. Ben wanted to fly jets in the Air Force but he failed the eye test after college. He stayed in the Air Force anyway, training to be a meteorologist in Colorado Springs. He earned his civilian pilot license and began giving lessons to cadets from the nearby Air Force Academy. The cadets put a good word in for him, and he passed the eye exam on the second try.

A few months later, the Danielsons moved to Craig Air Force Base in Selma, Alabama, for flight school. They watched civil rights marches pass not far from the main gate.

Ben earned his wings in March 1968, just a few weeks after Mary gave birth to their son, Brian. Ben then spent the next year learning to fly the F-4 Phantom, a fighter-bomber. The following March, just after Brian's first birthday, Lieutenant Benjamin Danielson shipped over to Cam Ranh Bay Air Base in Vietnam to join the 558th Tactical Fighter Squadron. His wife and baby son moved back to Kenyon and waited out his one-year tour of duty.

It was the year after Tet, and Walter Cronkite had just proclaimed, “We are mired in a stalemate that can only be ended by negotiation, not victory.” In Washington, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara convinced President Lyndon Johnson that the key to victory wasn't destroying the North Vietnamese in the field, but shutting down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a supply route that wound from North Vietnam through the jungles and ravines of neighboring Laos. Strangle the trail, McNamara argued, and the Vietcong in South Vietnam would starve. A desperate LBJ wanted to believe him, and so did his successor, Richard Nixon.

From 1965 to 1973, the United States dropped more bombs on Laos than it had dropped on all the cities of Europe during World War II. Comparatively, the cost to American aviators was profoundly minor, but the 558th had already lost a handful of pilots to enemy fire during Benjamin Danielson's year in-country. The Phantom was the world's most advanced fighter, renowned for its Mach 2 airspeed—engineers called it the triumph of thrust over aerodynamics—and a nine-ton assortment of bombs, machine guns, and air-to-air missiles. But what the Phantom gained in strength, it lost in finesse. The F-4 could move a mile in six seconds, but it wasn't particularly nimble. When a Phantom entered its bombing run, the jet had to slow down and its trajectory became distressingly predictable, making it easy pickings for surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft fire. Over 380 Phantoms were lost in Vietnam. Pilots called their plane the Flying Footlocker.

I
t's unlikely that Benjamin Danielson was thinking of saturation bombing, power politics, or aircraft mishap rates on the morning of December 5, 1969. Most likely, he thought of getting home. Just twenty-six, he was already a battle-hardened veteran with sixty-seven combat missions under his belt. Like Dad, he was close, just weeks from coming home.

That morning, Danielson and another Phantom—known on the radio as Boxer 21 and Boxer 22—took off from Cam Ranh Bay at around 9:00 a.m. It was the dry season in Laos, and southbound traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail had picked up. Every day, Phantoms would hit choke points on the trail, dropping 500-pound MK-36 antipersonnel mines along the road. The MK-36s would hit the endless mud, sink into the ground, and then detonate when a truck or motorcycle crossed over them.

Boxer 21 and Boxer 22 were directed to the Laotian village of Ban Phanop, ten miles below the Mu Gia Pass, a major entry point for the North Vietnamese. The planes descended to about seven thousand feet and let go of their ordnance. Boxer 21 completed its run unscathed, but Boxer 22 was hit by 37-mm antiaircraft fire as it pulled up to 6,000 feet. According to another pilot in the area, Danielson tried to save the plane but it bucked out of control. Danielson and his navigator-bombardier, Woody Bergeron, bailed out at 3,000 feet.

Both men were fired upon during their descent with the wind blowing them to different sides of a small tributary called the Nan Ngo River. Danielson was the unlucky one; he landed in a construction area near a main road, while Bergeron fell to earth in a grove of trees on the less developed side of the river.

The two cleared their chutes and immediately activated their rescue beepers. They both burrowed into the reeds alongside the river and made radio contact with rescue aircraft already gathering above them. Within thirty minutes, a dozen American warplanes were in the area dropping bombs and “hosing down” the area with machine-gun fire in the hopes of setting up a safe zone for helicopters to pluck the airmen to safety.

Danielson was in the more precarious position, so his comrades went after him first. At 12:40 p.m., an Air Force Jolly Green Giant helicopter got within two minutes of picking up Benjamin before ground fire drove the helo away. Another rescue was attempted at sunset. This time, a helicopter got close enough that a pararescuer started firing his machine gun, laying down ground fire so a rope could be dropped to Danielson. But a burst of Laotian machine-gun fire hit the pararescuer and the helicopter skittered away. Airman David M. Davison was dead before the helicopter landed back at base. The sun disappeared around 6:00 p.m., and Danielson and Bergeron were told to sit tight: the Air Force would be back at first light.

Back in Kenyon, it was already morning of the next day. An Air Force officer knocked on the door of Mary Danielson's small apartment. She answered it holding her son, Brian. The officer told her that Benjamin had been shot down, but that he was alive and a rescue mission was under way. She was told to wait by the phone.

The call never came. Through the night, Danielson and Bergeron talked briefly on their radios, never staying on long for fear of being overheard by Laotian soldiers. The Americans were true to their word. At dawn, a dozen helicopters and planes laid more fire on the Laotian strongholds. Around 7:00 a.m., Danielson whispered to Bergeron on the radio that the enemy was drawing closer. Then he went silent. The Air Force tried to raise the two downed airmen on the radio, but only Bergeron responded. Midmorning, Bergeron reported that he'd heard gunfire on the other side of the river followed by the scream of what sounded like an American.

That was the last anyone heard from Benjamin Danielson. Thirty-six hours later, a delirious Bergeron was finally plucked from the shores of the Nan Ngo in the most extensive air rescue operation of the war. Almost five hundred missions were flown in an effort to rescue two men. In Kenyon, Mary Danielson's phone finally rang. She was notified that her husband was officially listed as missing in action. The Air Force only had Bergeron's account of hearing her husband's screams, and he'd become dehydrated and disoriented from the trauma of being hunted for two days. Maybe, just maybe, Bergeron was mistaken.

M
ary and her son Brian lived the next four years in twilight. Information was scarce. When American military involvement ended in 1973, the North Vietnamese repatriated 598 American POWs. The Air Force told Mary to watch her television. It was not impossible, they said, that her husband might just walk off one of the Freedom Birds, flying Americans to Baguio Air Force Base in Subic Bay, Philippines, the place where Mom would last see Dad six years later. Mary watched for days, with her only son playing on the floor in front of her. She didn't see her husband.

By 1976, the Air Force had moved Benjamin Danielson from “missing in action” to “presumed deceased, body not recovered.” Mary eventually married a Navy Reserve chaplain and moved to New Hampshire with her eight-year-old son, but it didn't work out. They returned home to Kenyon three years later. Brian spent weekends and summers working the family dairy farm. He went to the same high school as his dad. Everyone told him his father was a great man.

B
rian Danielson didn't share all of this with the audience. He didn't mention the Laotian bombing casualties, and he definitely didn't mention the two Laotian soldiers whom Woody Bergeron saw “disappeared” by an American plane's .50 caliber machine guns. He didn't mention how the failure of his mother's second marriage caused another man to fade out of his life. And he skipped past his teenage years where every Chuck Norris MIA rescue movie pushed his rationality aside and filled his fatherless adolescence with hope that his dad might walk through the front door one day.

Don't get me wrong. I'd have left them out too. When I talk of my father's accident, there's usually no mention that the
Kitty Hawk
was steaming toward the Persian Gulf to rescue fifty-two hostages taken largely because of America's slavish support for the shah of Iran, a cruel despot. You keep the pointlessness of your loss locked away from your friends and yourself.

A
bout halfway through, a cranky old man complained that the pictures being displayed on the overhead projector were not synching up perfectly with Steamer's narration. The old man stepped toward the machine and tried to correct the malfunction. Instead, he crashed the equipment. It took five minutes to reboot and the lunch crowd got impatient and impolitic in the way old people sometimes do.

“So what happened to your dad?” shouted one man. “What did you find out?”

“Well, we're getting to that,” said Danielson quietly. “Give me just a minute.”

The projector fired back up and Danielson continued. He skimmed over his personal history, skipping over how he attended St. Olaf's and played football for the same coach as his dad. He didn't tell them that he had his heart set on the Air Force after graduating in 1990 but was turned down. He reluctantly accepted a billet as a Prowler ECMO and not a pilot. He knew the crowd was here for his father's story, not his own.

Brian mentioned that in 1991 his father's pistol was found in a North Vietnamese military museum. It was a tantalizing detail that led nowhere. The government reclassified Benjamin Danielson as “last seen alive,” a designation that made him a top priority for MIA cases.
Parade
magazine ran Benjamin's handsome face on its cover in 1993, but nothing changed.

But in 2003, Benjamin Danielson's dog tags were found in Laos along with a human shoulder bone not far from his crash site. Ben Danielson's grandmother gave a sample and a DNA analysis began. But it was just a sliver of a bone, less than an ounce. It would take years to figure out whether it was a match.

By now, Steamer was married with three kids of his own. He began personally investigating his father's crash. He contacted his father's squadron mates and spent an afternoon with Woody Bergeron. He learned the details of the massive rescue mission launched to find his father. He understood how close his dad had come to being saved. In 2005, a joint Laotian-American task force found an eyewitness who had seen exactly where Benjamin Danielson had landed on the banks of the Nan Ngo. An American military task force—known as a Joint POW Accounting Command—mobilized and made plans to sift through the dirt near the river. Danielson petitioned JPAC to be included on the trip.