Skip Butler can recall clearly the day 39 years ago when he heard that Don Wann’s attack helicopter had been shot down near Khe Sanh in South Vietnam.

“I was flying my helicopter back to base for the night,” Butler said. “On my radio I heard, ‘Give me the tail number of the aircraft that went down.’ When it came back ‘002,’ somebody said, ‘Was that Don?’ The company radio operator said, ‘It was Wann and Magers.’”

But in 2008, Wann and Magers were found.

On Aug. 21, the remains of Chief Warrant Officer Donald L. Wann of the United States Army — missing in action no longer — will be laid to rest with full military honors at Fort Gibson National Cemetery.

The Cobra helicopter flown by Oklahoma native Chief Warrant Officer Don Wann and Nebraskan Lt. Paul Magers came under enemy fire above a dense jungle on the side of a mountain in Quang Tri Province, according to an official military account.

“The (helicopter) crashed, burned, exploded, and slid down a steep hill, before the ammunition on board started tearing apart what was left of the aircraft.

“All witnesses stated that the crash was non-survivable. The hill was under heavy fire and no recovery attempts could have been made.”

Unexploded ordnance surrounded the crash site, and fighting raged on in the jungle nearby, so it was impossible to search for Wann’s and Magers’ remains. The two soldiers were declared missing in action. The war came to an end, Vietnam was closed to the West, and the jungle swallowed up the crash site.

Wann and Magers were shot down June 1, 1971, the day after Wann’s 34th birthday. A few days later, soldiers in dress uniforms arrived at the Midwest City home of the Wann family to deliver a telegram with the news that Wann was missing in action.

Shannon Wann Plaster, his elder daughter, who was 10 at the time, remembers the day.

“I was sitting on the couch watching TV,” said Plaster. “Someone knocked on the door. When Mom answered the door and saw them in their dress blues, she just started bawling. They didn’t have to say anything. When military people come to your house in dress blues, you know something has happened.”

On March 20 of this year, Plaster was at a hotel in San Antonio, Texas, for an Army update for family members of soldiers missing in action. When Plaster got to the banquet room where the briefing was to be held, she was hoping to see Carolyn Floyd, the civilian casualty officer assigned to Wann’s case. Plaster had known Floyd for more than 10 years.

“Carolyn walked over to my table,” said Plaster. “She said, ‘Shannon, we’ve got your dad. We’ve found him.’ She hugged me, and she told me they’d found Paul Magers, too.”



Off that mountain

Plaster’s road to that meeting in San Antonio and to Fort Gibson National Cemetery has been long and painful.

“Not knowing the truth left a blank void,” she said. “It drove me to the point where I had to find out. It’s something I had to do. I had to get him off that mountain.”

Plaster’s search began with a 1990 letter addressed simply to “The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.”

“I said in my letter that I wanted to know if my dad is alive or dead,” said Plaster. “A lieutenant colonel called me from the Pentagon and said, ‘I can’t answer the question, Shannon. But your dad’s case is open.’”

In 1993, a crash site that correlated to her father’s was found by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), the military agency charged with accounting for servicemen missing in action.

The same year, Plaster traveled to Washington, D.C., for one of the annual government briefings with the National League of POW/MIA Families.

“I had felt alone my whole childhood,” Plaster said. “I met all those people in the same boat. I thought, ‘My God, I’m not alone.”

In about 2000, a brigadier general told her that JPAC would not continue the search for her father’s remains, saying the crash site was too dangerous. During one search for another site, an aircraft carrying JPAC personnel crashed, killing all seven people on board.

“When he told me, I was crying, but I said I understood,” Plaster said.

Then five years later, Plaster received a letter saying that JPAC had decided to start looking again.

The effort was aided by a lead from an unexpected source: a North Vietnamese soldier whose unit had shot down Wann and Magers’ helicopter.

The former soldier, Pham Thiet Hung, told searchers that he had approached the wreckage the day after the crash in 1971. About 20 meters from the crash, he found the burned body of an aviator, and placed it in a nearby shallow mortar crater.

With Hung’s help, Vietnamese and American search teams located the remains of Wann and Magers in July of 2008.

Using DNA and dental records, Wann and Magers were identified at JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.

Last March in San Antonio, Plaster finally received the answer to the question she had asked in her letter to the Pentagon 20 years before.



A special place in my heart

Don Wann was born in Kosoma, grew up in Fairfax, and after high school considered Shawnee his home. He never lived in Muskogee. But his daughter has formed strong ties with the community.

Pat Davis, historian for the James F. Smith American Legion Post 15, invited Plaster to Muskogee last year during a controversy over placing flags at the Muskogee Civic Center. Davis arranged for Plaster to explain the significance of the POW/MIA flag to local officials.

That association turned into a love affair.

“Muskogee has become a very special place in my heart,” Plaster said. “These people opened their arms to me.”

Plaster has given the museum at the USS Batfish and War Memorial Park her father’s uniforms and much else associated with his life and the attempt to bring him home.

“People can go to the museum to see my dad’s things,” Plaster said. “He’ll be just down the road at the National Cemetery.”

Some time next month, Plaster will fly to Hawaii, then accompany her father’s remains back to Oklahoma.

Wann’s funeral will be held at Southeast Baptist Church at 10 a.m. Aug. 21. Plaster, a divorced mother of two and Yukon resident, will be joined at the ceremony by her mother, who remarried several years after Wann’s death, and by her sister Michelle Wann. Butler plans to travel to Oklahoma from his home in Virginia for the occasion. Many other friends and old comrades-in-arms from all over the country are also expected.

The funeral is open to the public.

Reach Kirk Kramer on 684-2901 or kkramer@muskogeephoenix.com.