50 Years After This Airman Disappeared In Vietnam, Investigators Made An Astonishing Discovery

50 years after this airman disappeared in Vietnam, investigators made an astonishing discovery. It's 1968 and three A-6 intruder planes take off from the USS Enterprise for a mission over Vietnam. For the two-man crew of one of those crafts, this mission will not turn out well. But it will be more than 50 years before the full story about one of the airmen navigator and bombardier Lieutenant Richard C. Lanham emerges. The pilot flying the A-6 with Lanham aboard was Lieutenant Commander Thomas Shurich. It was 6 o'clock p.m. on March 1st when the trio of planes took off from the USS Enterprise on a foggy evening with heavy cloud. All three A-6 crews reported that both radio reception and their weapons were in good order Once clear of the Enterprise, the three planes went their separate ways, two to attack the North Vietnamese army barracks at the port of Kham Pha and the other to attack a bridge. It was 30 minutes after takeoff that Lanham and Shurich radioed what was to be their last message, execute. That meant that they were just minutes away from their target, the Kham Pha barracks. Now close to the target and as ordered, Lanham's plane turned its identification transmitter off. This was presumably to avoid detection by North Vietnamese anti-aircraft batteries. The plane also disappeared from radar as it was flying at the low altitude of 2,500 feet. To all intents and purposes, the A-6 was now undetectable except by the human eyes. The three planes had a pre-arranged rendezvous point where they were to meet after completing their missions. That location was intended for a situation when one or more of the planes had lost radio contact or sustained damage. Two of the planes arrived on schedule but there was no sign of Lanham and Shurich's aircraft. The two crews that made it to the rendezvous searched the area for the missing craft but found nothing. They then tried to reach their buddies on radio. When there was no response, they alerted search and rescue. They too drew a blink and no emergency signals from the intruder were detected. Nor did they spot any wreckage. The mystery was complete. It seemed that Lanham and Shurich had disappeared into thin air. When Lanham and Shurich disappeared in March 1968, the U.S. was well and truly embroiled in the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese Communists, with the support of their Chinese allies, however called the conflict the Resistance War against America. In fact, the fighting in Vietnam is seen by many as part of the Cold War, the decades-long dispute that pitched America and her allies against communist countries led by the Soviet Union. At first, the American forces stationed in the country were classed as military advisors. In 1964, 23,000 of them had amassed there. Then, in March 1965, the first U.S. combat troops arrived in South Vietnam. A marine force of 3,500 men landed on the Vietnamese coast, and by the end of that year, there were 200,000 American soldiers in the state. A turning point in the war came in January 1968 when the North Vietnamese launched a massive assault, the Tet Offensive. This involved over 85,000 North Vietnamese fighters attacking more than 100 South Vietnamese cities. Fighters even attacked the American embassy in the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. Many towns fell to the communists, and two more large-scale attacks quickly followed. The two-month-long Tet Offensive left 4,000 U.S. military personnel dead and 45,820 wounded. Indeed, the situation was so serious, it's said that even nuclear weapons were considered for use by U.S. Commander General Westmoreland. This idea was swiftly abandoned, however, once President Johnson's White House got wind of it, leading to Westmoreland's replacement in March 1968. So when Lanham and Shurich took off from the USS Enterprise on March 1st, 1968, the Vietnam War was at its most intense. We'll take a closer look at the details of their mission in a little while. In the meantime, let's learn more about the two men's backgrounds and how they ended up serving in Vietnam. Thomas Edwin Shurich was born in 1933 and brought up on his parents' farm near Norfolk, Nebraska, along with his brother and two sisters. He was a student at Norfolk Junior College and graduated from there in 1953. After that, he attended pre-flight training at the Pensacola, Florida Naval Air School. Shurich went on to become a qualified pilot of the Grumman A-6 Intruder. This was an assault plane specifically designed as an all-weather craft and was one of the main planes used by the U.S. Navy at the time of the Vietnam War, and it could carry up to 18,000 pounds of bombs, making it a highly effective attack plane. The A-6 often flew at low altitudes to deliver its deadly payload, and that is just what Shurich and Lanham were doing on their mission to bomb Kam Tha barracks. Unfortunately, this low flying meant that the A-6 was a target for anti-aircraft weapons, and in fact the military lost 84 of the planes during the course of the conflict. When the Vietnam War got underway, Shurich actually volunteered for active service despite being 35 at the time. Towards the end of 1967, he deployed to the USS Enterprise, and that, of course, was the ship from which he and his navigator, Lieutenant Lanham, took off on their March 1st mission in 1968. Shurich's flying partner, Richard Clive Lanham, who inherited the nickname Tito from his father, was born in Union City, Tennessee in 1941. A keen athlete at school, he went on to attend the University of Tennessee, where he studied business administration, and it was while at college that he met his future wife, Charlotte. Lanham graduated from college in 1965, and from there signed up for the Officer Candidate School, also in Pensacola. The young airman started out flying in C-130 Hercules planes, but then transferred to the intruders. He then received training for them at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington State, and like Shurich, he joined USS Enterprise at the end of 1967. With both Lanham and Shurich aboard, Enterprise sailed from Sasebo, Japan in January of 1968, bound for the Gulf of Tonkin. En route, the ship was diverted by an incident in the Sea of Japan. The North Koreans had captured a U.S. spy vessel, and the Enterprise took part in a show of force during this crisis. However, as we saw earlier, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam on January 30th, so the Enterprise resumed its journey to the Tonkin Gulf on February 16th. Her specific destination was Yankee Station, a mustering point at sea for U.S. naval forces some 90 miles off the North Vietnamese coast. Enterprise arrived at Yankee Station on February 21st, and airborne combat missions commenced the very next day. On the 23rd, despite bad monsoon weather, Attack Squadron 35's A-6 intruders headed out on their first mission of deployment. They attacked the North Vietnamese port at Hanoi, the country's capital city. Attack Squadron 35 was Lanham and Shurich's unit, and this first mission to Hanoi was judged a success. Concerning these types of A-6 missions, it's worth noting the words of Admiral William F. Bringle, the Vice Commander of the 7th Fleet, quoted on the POW Network website. They give a flavor of what men like Shurich and Lanham were up against. Admiral Bringle said, The low-level night missions flown by the A-6 over Hanoi and Haiphong were amongst the most demanding we have ever asked our aircrews to fly. Fortunately, there is an abundance of talent, courage, and aggressive leadership in these A-6 squadrons. The missions Lanham and Shurich undertook, then, were no cakewalk. And the A-6 crews continued to fly in the heavy rains and stormy weather that characterized the Northeast Asian monsoon season. Indeed, it's been said that the airmen actively welcomed these bad conditions which persisted through February and into March. Their aircraft were specifically designed to cope with the But let's return to March 1, 1968. Three A-6s took off from the Enterprise at 6 o'clock pm that day. The lead aircraft, No. 1, was crewed by pilot and squadron commander Glenn Coleman. Navigating was Johnny Griffin. Lieutenant Commander Greg Young was flying the second plane, with Lieutenant Bill Siegel as navigator. And Lanham and Shurich were in plane No. 3. Coleman's plane was to attack the strategical import Tan Hau Bridge. Planes 2 and 3, however, were heading for the Kam Pha barracks, about 90 miles from Hanoi. After the three planes had taken off from the Enterprise, they met up at the preordinated point just off of the North Vietnamese shores. After final weapons and communication checks, it was time to fly to their targets. Coleman headed west for the seemingly indestructible bridge, while the other two planes, led by Young, set a course northwards for Kam Pha. The approach to this target was fraught with difficulty. The sea was dotted with small islands by the hundred, many with jagged rock formations reaching to the sky. This made low-altitude flying particularly perilous. And the mission was made no easier by the fact that there was a heavy concentration of North Vietnamese anti-aircraft defenses in the very area the crews were flying into at low altitude. Young sped in for his attack at 1,500 feet. Shurich came on the radio to say that he was about to attack as well. Young's plane then dropped its bombs. After the airmen completed their bombing missions, the three planes were to meet up again at the same rendezvous point Aircraft 1, with Coleman and Griffin, plus Aircraft 2, crewed by Young and Siegel, were present and correct. But there was no sign of Lanham and Shurich. The two A6s waited for as long as they could in hope that Lanham and Shurich would show up, but eventually, with fuel running low, they had no choice but to return to the Enterprise. As they made their way back to the carrier, they radioed the ship to report their comrades missing. The next group of planes, due to make an attack from the aircraft carrier, then jettisoned their bombs and instead went searching for the missing A6. Lanham and Shurich's Navy comrades now made a thorough search for the pair. The Intruder Association website later carried an interview with Bob Benjamin, who had been a member of the Attack Squadron 35 at the same time as the two missing men, and he'd been flying in one of the planes that ditched their bombs to help with the search. As I remember, it was a clear but dark night, Benjamin explained. If there was a fire on the ground, from the wreckage, we should have been able to see it, but we didn't. We found neither fire nor a survival radio signal. We searched the area near Kampha, the islands south, west, and east of Kampha, and even went north as far as the Chinese border, looking for any sign of the wreckage. Nothing. Ominously, Benjamin also added, Kampha, on a dark night, was almost impossible to find on radar. It was a place that was tailor-made to get disoriented. The limestone formations and the mountains behind Kampha made low-level flying deadly. And as a result of the fruitless search, Lanham and Shurich were declared missing in action. The naval authorities then announced that Shurich and Lanham's plane must have gone down about 29 miles from Kampha in the Bay of Tonkin, but the truth was that nobody really knew where the plane had ditched, or even crashed. Perhaps the men had ejected near their target before being captured by the communists, but it was all speculation. Nobody knew for sure whether Lanham and Shurich were dead or alive, but there was still the possibility that the pair had survived and were being held in the North Vietnamese POW camp somewhere. This, after all, had been the fate of many other U.S. airmen. But this, too, turned out to be a blind alley. After the U.S. forces withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, just under 600 American prisoners of war were released. Sadly, neither Lanham nor Shurich were among them. And even now, there are still men that haven't been accounted for. According to the Defense POW, MIA accounting agency, in fact, 1,592 Americans remain missing as of December 2018. The years passed and the families of Lanham and Shurich were left in limbo, not knowing what had happened to their loved ones. In 1978, however, the Navy declared that Shurich was no longer missing in action. Instead, he was now presumed dead. But for both families, there was still no grave to grieve over. But that wasn't the end of the story for Lanham's family. Indeed, employees of the Office for Seeking Missing Persons, a Vietnamese state organization, tracked down some local witnesses to the 1968 incident. They'd seen a U.S. plane crash on the densely forested island of Tra Ban, just off the coast of the mainland. One witness gave a convincing account of visiting the site where the American plane had crashed. The location was a mountaintop on Tra Ban, near the village called Nha San. The man also said he'd found a helmet belonging to a pilot. Another local witness described hearing an explosion one night. These testimonies were compelling enough to prompt the Vietnamese authorities to take further action. In 2017, a team from the Office for Missing Persons visited Tra Ban. There, they found plane wreckage and human remains. The following year, the remnants underwent DNA analysis and a positive identification was made. It was Lanham. At last, after a 50-year wait, his family finally knew what happened to him. On March 2, 2019, Lanham was buried, 51 years and a day after his death. His final resting place is in his hometown of Union City, Tennessee. The airman's wife, Charlotte, spoke to CBS News. I just want him to know how proud I have been all of these years, to have been his wife. I would just like to be able to tell him," she said. Sadly for Thomas Shurich's family, however, his remains are yet to be discovered.