Dick Yarbrough

Syndicated columnist

You have read my accounts of my fraternity brother at UGA, Pat Boggs, a Marine Corps pilot who went missing in action during the Vietnam War. One of my columns wondering what had happened to him made it to Monterey, California, where his brotherin-law, Ron Breuch, filled me in on the details. Maj. Boggs had been killed on a bombing mission in North Vietnam when his plane hit a karst, a limestone formation prominent on the coast.

Total devastation. Nothing found but harnesses and a pistol.

Pat’s niece, Aileen Wetzel, who never got to meet her uncle, recently went to Vietnam and visited the site where his plane had crashed. She shared her mystical and spiritual experience with me. I feel compelled to share it with you. It is about being lost and found. Here is her story: “In my early 20s, a business trip took me to Washington, D.C.

My mother asked me to visit the Vietnam Wall and bring home a pencil rubbing of her brother’s name.

“As I started to walk the length of the black granite wall, my gaze lifted from the flowers and mementos left on the ground and the first name I read was Major Paschal G. Boggs, my Uncle Pat. I still can’t explain it. It felt like a tap on the shoulder. A reminder: I’m here.

“When I decided to go to Vietnam in August, I carried that experience with me. I believed that if I had felt him at the Wall, then surely I would feel him here.

“Eventually, I found myself on Ha Long Bay, a two-hour drive from Hanoi and a mere 8 kilometers from the crash site. “As I stood on the boat, the water was calm beneath us, interrupted by those extraordinary limestone karsts rising almost impossibly from the sea — immense, ancient shapes. Some stood alone. Others appeared one behind another through the haze, fading into shades of gray until it was difficult to tell where the stone ended and the sky began.

“It was breathtaking.

Somewhere above this water, Pat had flown. On his last mission, he would have looked down upon this same landscape. The thought stopped me.

“Nearly sixty years separated us, and yet for a moment we occupied the same geography — the same sea, the same impossible limestone formations, perhaps even the same horizon.

“I tried to imagine what he had seen from the cockpit. Had he noticed the beauty beneath him? Had the karsts looked small from the air, scattered across the water like stones? Was the bay clear that night, or hidden beneath clouds?

Did he know these would be among the last mountains, the last water, the last pieces of earth he would ever see?

“I watched the limestone cliffs pass slowly beside me. And I waited.

I waited for what had happened befo re. For the coincidence. For the sudden certainty that something had shifted. For that familiar tap on my shoulder. I’m here.

“But nothing came.

There was only the water, the mountains, the sky.

And silence. What overwhelmed me on Ha Long Bay was not Pat’s presence. It was his absence.

He wasn’t there.“And there it was. An epiphany that nearly knocked me to my knees. Maybe the dead do not stay where they die. Maybe they stay where they are loved.

“I thought about the Wall. I thought about Pat’s name carved into the black granite. I thought about the hands that have touched those names. The flowers left beneath them.

The photographs. The letters. The people who stand silently before more than fifty-eight thousand names searching for a loved one.

“And perhaps that is why I could feel Pat at the Wall but could not feel him in Ha Long Bay.

Vietnam could show me the water he flew over. It could show me the mountains he saw. But it could not tell me where he went. Perhaps there was nothing of Pat left for me to find in Vietnam because he had not been left behind.

“As our boat moved quietly through Ha Long Bay, another limestone karst emerged through the haze. I looked up and a hawk, a Black Kite to be specific, was gliding effortlessly through the air.

Mom passed away years ago, but she frequently comes to me in the form of a hawk. She was there.

And maybe that was the tap on the shoulder I had traveled so far to find.”

Maj. Pat Boggs is not in Vietnam. Once lost. He has been found. His spirit is here. He is at home, where he belongs. Well done, good and faithful servant.

You can reach Dick Yarbrough at dick@dickyarbrough. com or at P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.