Search for missing pilot continues
Search team in Vietnam fails to find grave of Navy Cmdr. Roderick L. Mayer

Lewiston Morning Tribune - Sandra L. Lee - Saturday, January 19, 2002

U.S. Navy Cmdr. Roderick L. Mayer remains among the missing.

A recovery team excavated a site in Lang Son District of Vietnam in October looking for the Navy pilot from the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley who disappeared almost 36 years ago. He was 26.

The report sent to his mother, Elizabeth Mayer of Clarkston, this week recommends the site be closed.

Thirteen trenches were dug, the report says. The ground was raked and sieved through quarter-inch screen. No human remains were found, but the team did locate a pocket from a Vietnamese-made shirt and a coffin nail, both believed to be related to the burial of a Vietnamese person whose grave was relocated by his family almost three decades ago.

At first, Elizabeth Mayer was devastated.

Then she rallied, as she has so many times since 1965.

"Just because they're closing the site doesn't mean they're closing the case," she says.

She called the man in Tennessee assigned to work with some of the almost 2,000 families who still have missing loved ones in Southeast Asia. He walked her through the six-page report filed by the excavation team following an investigation team that visited the area almost two years ago, in February 2000.

He told her, Mayer said Friday, this doesn't mean they're closing the case. Sometimes they have to go back two or three times to an area, he said, so don't think this is the final blow, because it isn't.

The search teams from Joint Task Force -- Full Accounting in Hawaii have brought back 323 missing Americans since its creation 10 years ago. Its members will go back over the drawings, interview the same people and perhaps some different witnesses. When they think they might have another chance, they'll go back and look again.

She's grateful for all the searching that has been done, Mayer says. Her son's chart has little check marks all over it, each one indicating where something has been done or looked at.

Each year in June, she and her daughter go to a meeting of the families of other MIAs, and some of their charts have only one or two checks, usually because little is known about where they disappeared, or because it was at sea.

People ask her, she says, why she can't let go after so long.

It's because she has never felt in her heart that he is dead. She could deal with that -- It's the not knowing, and the thoughts of what could be happening to him if he's still alive somewhere.

Rod Mayer was a young man with a bright future. He graduated in 1957 from Lewiston High School and in 1961 from the University of Idaho.

His mother treasurers a photograph taken of him at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane in July 1964. He had recently qualified for carrier landings, and his helmet sports the large symbols of the Black Aces squadron of the USS Independence.

He was on a cross-country training flight when he looped that F-4B Phantom jet fighter over the valley twice, pointed the nose at the sky and lit it up, his mother recalls, still smiling at the memory.

Then he landed at Spokane, and they brought him home for an overnight stay before he went back to work.

The next May he and the Independence headed for Vietnam. By October, he had close to 80 missions completed; 100 meant he could come home.

He planned to be married at Christmas, and his parents, Elizabeth and the late Joseph Mayer, had been back East to meet his fiancee.

The young woman waited four years for him to come home before she went on with her life, Mayer says, nodding, understanding.

Rod Mayer was shot down by anti-aircraft fire Oct. 17, 1965, over North Vietnam.

Both he and his radio intercept officer, David R. Wheat, now of Duluth, Minn., were able to eject from the plane. Another pilot said he saw Mayer lying on the ground, not moving.

Wheat's knee was broken when he hit the ground, and he was captured a few hours later. He spent seven years as a prisoner of war, never once getting a hint that his partner might be alive somewhere.

The first search teams went into Vietnam 10 years ago next week as part of a negotiated agreement to recover more than 2,000 MIAs.

Eventually, witnesses were found who told of a very tall American pilot being captured by Vietnamese militia, who took him to a hospital in Lang Son Province that was run by the Chinese.

Mayer was 6 feet 4 inches tall.

There's no proof the man the Vietnamese remember was Mayer, but it was about the right time and the right place.

The man was seriously injured, an elderly women told the investigators, and he died three days later. The Vietnamese buried him in an unmarked grave in a small prison cemetery with two or three others, all Vietnamese.

The site once was on the edge of jungle. A few years later, a farmer bought it, leveled the ground and planted his crops. Now the area is ringed with houses, the nearest about 36 feet away. Cultivated tea bushes, pineapple plants, lemon trees and manioc border all sides of the cemetery plot, which still contains two graves, both with stone markers and less than 20 feet from a house, the report says.

Four investigative teams, each 95 people strong, make the trip to Vietnam each year, staying 30 to 35 days at a time, says Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara of the Joint Task Force headquarters at Honolulu.

"We have another team going out 14 March, and they're going to look at this case again, probably in the same area," O'Hara said Friday. "We have witnesses that say they buried him. They're just unable to locate the burial site."

Part of his training is not to promise families that teams will look for their son, or brother, or father, at a certain time because too many things may interfere.

Plans have to be reviewed by Vietnamese officials, who have been cooperative, but the meeting to go over the March itinerary won't take place until the end of February.

Weather is perhaps the biggest factor in where teams go. Helicopters may not be available or may not be able to fly. A host nation may say no for a reason they don't have to explain.

"So many things can affect a game plan before we can get to do what we want to do," O'Hara says.

However, Mayer's case is one that is scheduled for continued work on this trip, the 69th Joint Field Activity, as it's called.

"Our witnesses keep taking us to the same area, and we keep investigating the same area with the same results: We have not found the burial site."

What can be done differently is limited, O'Hara says. "It's sad to say, but not too much. We're going to go revisit the same witness to see if his memory can get us in the right direction ... It's been a long time since this incident occurred."

This will be an investigation team, not one geared up to do full excavations. It will try to pinpoint a new site, dig test pits and confirm the possible existence, or not, of a grave.

If it finds anything, an anthropologist is sent back later, perhaps as soon as May, perhaps not. Many are missing, and the likelihood of success has to be taken into consideration.

"We have to point our recovery teams at those sites we're sure we're at the right place. Otherwise, we're wasting an awful lot of resources and effort."

Mayer's is one of those sites where they know there is a grave; it's just a matter of finding it.

"Everything we've done has been given to the families," O'Hara says. "There's no secrets. There's nothing held back. Everything is above board."

O'Hara is going along on this trip that will include three retired Special Forces soldiers who are going to try to find a helicopter crash site they saw during the war.

They were attempting to recover bodies when they were fired on and had to leave.

There have been 13 unsuccessful visits to the hilltops in the area where the helicopter went down. It's jungle, where if you're six feet away, nothing may be visible, he says.

"We're going over there with positive minds."

They do that with every case, he says.

"We want all the families to know, and this isn't BS, if you ask in the Joint Task Force ... who they're working for, they will say -- without exception -- for the families, and if you've ever seen a repatriation scene, yes, they're crying, and yes, they're upset, but you also see the healing process taking hold of themselves.

"I've seen that, and it's a special event."

There's an urgency to the work because the families of the missing are growing older.

And on the other side of the world, where the life expectancy is only 55 to 60 years, potential witnesses also are growing older, coupled with memories that may waiver after 35 years.

Tell the families, O'Hara says, "If we get a lead, we run it down. Some leads are great leads; some aren't so great. But if we get one, we run it down."