CUNNINGHAM, CAREY ALLEN
Remains returned 1989 Identified 04/01/98
Name: Carey Allen Cunningham
Rank/Branch: O3/US Air Force
Unit: 10th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron
Date of Birth: 18 March 1938
Home City of Record: Collinsville AL
Date of Loss: 02 August 1967
Country of Loss: North Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 183115N 1052451E (WF405462)
Status (in 1973): Killed/Body Not Recovered
Category: 3
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: RF4C
Other Personnel in Incident: Wallace G. Hynds Jr. (missing)
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project from one or more of the following:
raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews. Updated by the P.O.W. NETWORK.
REMARKS:
SYNOPSIS: Col. Wallace G. Hynds was the pilot and Capt. Carey A. Cunningham
the radar navigator of an RF4C reconnaissance version of the Phantom
fighter/bomber. The two were assigned to the 10th Tactical Reconnaissance
Squadron.
On August 2, 1967, Hynds and Cunningham were flying the lead plane in a
flight of two aircraft on a reconnaissance mission near the city of Vinh in
North Vietnam. The number two aircraft observed Hynds' aircraft to crash to
the ground and explode. No parachutes were heard, and no emergency beeper
signals were heard. Based on their visual observation, the two men were
declared killed.
The U.S. Government believes the Vietnamese could account for Hynds and
Cunningham, primarily because the area was relatively heavily populated and
there were enemy forces present. However, the Vietnamese have denied any
knowledge of either Hynds or Cunningham.
Hynds and Cunningham are listed among the missing because their bodies were
never recovered. Others who are missing do not have such clear-cut cases.
Some were known captives; some were photographed as they were led by their
guards. Some were in radio contact with search teams, while others simply
disappeared.
Since the war ended, over 250,000 interviews have been conducted with those
who claim to know about Americans still alive in Southeast Asia, and several
million documents have been studied. U.S. Government experts cannot seem to
agree whether Americans are there alive or not. Detractors say it would be
far too politically difficult to bring the men they believe to be alive
home, and the U.S. is content to negotiate for remains.
Well over 1000 first-hand, eye-witness reports of American prisoners still
alive in Southeast Asia have been received by 1990. Most of them are still
classified. If, as the U.S. seems to believe, the men are all dead, why the
secrecy after so many years? If the men are alive, why are they not home?
Defense POW/MIA Weekly Update
April 1, 1998
REMAINS OF U.S. SERVICEMEN FROM SOUTHEAST ASIA IDENTIFIED
The remains of three Americans previously unaccounted-for from Southeast
Asia have been identified and will be returned to their families for burial
in the United States. One is identified as U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander
Donald V. Davis, of Salisbury, N.C. The other is Captain Carey A.
Cunningham, U.S. Air Force, of Collinsville, Ala. The name of a U.S.
civilian lost in Laos will not be released at the request of his family.
On July 25, 1967, LCDR Davis left the USS Oriskany, flying an A4-E aircraft,
on an armed reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam. His wingman observed
LCDR Davis' aircraft crash as it was attacking a truck convoy. The wingman
reported there was no chance for survival. No search and rescue was
initiated.
In 1988 and 1996, a joint U. S./Socialist Republic of Vietnam team visited
the probable location of LCDR Davis' crashsite and interviewed local
villagers for information on this loss incident. Witnesses reported finding
a crashsite and burying the remains of a pilot found within the wreckage.
Analysis of aircraft wreckage determined it to be from an A-4 aircraft.
In 1997, a joint U.S./Vietnamese team excavated a possible burial site
identified by the villagers. The team recovered human remains, life support
equipment, and aircraft wreckage. The remains were repatriated to the U.S.
Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii for analysis and
subsequently identified as those of LCDR Davis.
On August 2, 1967, Capt. Cunningham and his crewmember were flying a
daylight photographic reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam. Their
wingman stated that Capt. Cunningham's RF-4C Phantom banked into a hard
right turn and crashed. No parachutes were seen exiting the aircraft before
it crashed.
In 1989, the Vietnamese government repatriated two boxes of remains, one of
which they claimed belonged to Capt. Cunningham's crewmate. In 1992 and 1994,
a joint U.S./Vietnamese team interviewed villagers about a 1967 crash of an
American aircraft in which both pilots died. The villagers reported that the
remains of the pilots were turned over to central authorities.
Personal effects belonging to the Americans were examined in two Vietnamese
military museums. The remains repatriated in 1989 were subsequently identified
as those of Capt. Cunningham. His crewmember is still unaccounted- for.
With this identification, 2,093 Americans remain unaccounted-for from the
Vietnam War.
May 25 1998
Airman's Remains Finally Come Home
The Associated Press
By MALCOLM RITTER
COLLINSVILLE, Ala. (AP) - The day he died on the other side of the world,
Capt. Carey Allen Cunningham began a journey that lasted longer than his
life. Last month, beneath two oak trees on a hill overlooking his hometown,
the journey came to an end.
Dozens of family members gathered under a blue canvas canopy that flapped
in the breeze. A minister offered thanks for Carey's life, "for what he
did for us, individually and as a country." In the distance, a bugler in a
crisp blue uniform and white gloves played taps.
Thus were Carey's only known remains - 16 scraps of bone in a small wooden
box -- laid to rest.
The headstone said, HOME AT LAST.
It had been nearly 31 years since Carey, an Air Force pilot and navigator,
died at 29 in a plane crash in North Vietnam. His remains were identified
only this year.
Carey's case is striking but hardly unique. Last year, the military
identified the remains of 35 Americans who had been missing in the Vietnam
War. And while the national spotlight is on the Vietnam casualty in the Tomb
of the Unknowns, if you want to know what these investigations really mean,
listen to some of the mourners who gathered last month at the Cunningham
family plot.
Listen to Carey's daughter, Anna Munoz, 33. She finally had to bury her
childhood hope that the Dad she'd last seen when she was 3 would return.
Listen to his son Carl, 32, and brothers Wayne and Herbert, who could finally
shed doubts about what they'd been told of Carey's fate.
And listen to his sister Joanne Gunnin, 67, who helped make this day happen
by getting her doctor to draw some of her blood and by driving the sample to
Atlanta herself. She is just glad the family could finally give her younger
brother a funeral.
Joanne now lives in the home where Carey grew up, as a music-loving bookworm
who was absolutely nuts about airplanes.
When Carey was in college, he and Wayne would buzz Collinsville in Wayne's
Piper J-3 Cub, whizzing by their parents' farm house only 50 feet off the
ground.
`It was quite a talk in the town," Joanne recalls. "When a plane would fly
over low, they would always say, `That's the Cunningham boys.
Carey joined the Air Force in 1959 and married in 1963. He and his wife
Christina had two children. Carey went to Vietnam in June 1967.
One August day in 1967, Wayne was coming home from work in Marietta, Ga.,
when he heard on the radio that an American plane had been lost over North
Vietnam. "It just shook me," Wayne says. "It was my brother. I just knew
it."
Joanne, who was living in Birmingham, Ala., had heard the same news and had
the same reaction. Before long, two men in uniform came to meet her parents.
Carey had been the navigator of a two-man reconnaissance plane, they said.
Other airmen in nearby planes had seen it go down, but they didn't see any
parachutes. Carey almost certainly died in the explosion. No remains had
been recovered.
His mother later said he died doing what he loved best.
The Air Force had a memorial service for him at his base in Idaho. Later,
his name was included in the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC
But for some members of the Cunningham family, the story wasn't quite over.
Wayne, his old flying buddy, suspected Carey might still be alive. After a
few years, though, he began hoping Carey was dead, afraid of what the North
Vietnamese would to do to him if he were captured.
Carl was also nagged by the possibility his father might have survived the
crash and become a prisoner. Anna, with only the dimmest memories of her
father, never quite gave up hope he'd come back.
That's where it stood, for decades, until Joanne opened a letter from the
military one day in 1996. Bones had been recovered from Vietnam that might be
her brother's, it said. Could she give some blood to see if the DNA matches?
The pathway to that startling request had begun in 1989, when the Vietnam
government turned over 28 boxes of remains to the United States. Two boxes
had come from the village of Son Giang, near where Carey and his pilot had
crashed.
Over the next few years, joint American-Vietnamese inspection teams gathered
threads of evidence. They found military identification cards for Carey and
his pilot at a Vietnamese museum, and documents in Hanoi that said both men
had died in the crash. Villagers near the crash scene told them that partial
remains had been buried in a common grave, dug up, separated and reburied.
Then they were exhumed again, probably in 1977 or 1978.
A sample of foot bone from one box had failed to yield any mitochondrial DNA
for analysis in 1991. It was one of the first attempts by the military's lab
in Rockville, Md., to use "mtDNA" for identification. In 1995, another
piece of the same bone did show mtDNA.
It was time to ask for Joanne's blood. If details of her mtDNA matched the
genetic material in the foot bone, it would be strong evidence for identifying
the remains as Carey's.
For Wayne, the letter asking for blood was enough. His brother was dead.
For Anna, it began a long period of waiting and calling the military
repeatedly for news. Finally, last February, an Air Force representative
visited her home in Phoenix. The mtDNA from Joanne's blood matched not only
the genetic material from the foot bone, but also material from leg and head
bones in the other box. Both boxes held remains of her father.
That was proof enough for Anna. And for Carl, who was relieved his father
hadn't been captured. And for Herbert. While Herbert had given his younger
brother up for dead in 1967, "you still say, maybe a miracle will happen ...
. But once the bones are identified, you say it's all over with for sure."
Anna was happy the wait was over. But she was also saddened.
"I'd never allowed myself to mourn the loss of having a father," she says.
"I realize that if he'd been around I would be different."
She also had something else to grieve. "Since I was very little, I had a
hope he would come back. In a way, I'm mourning my hope. I don't know
whether to call it a good feeling, but it feels right to know now what
happened."
On April 25, Carey's bones completed their journey. They would no longer be
buried and dug up again in the Vietnamese countryside, or stored in
laboratories in the hope of finding a better place.
Now they're in that better place. From Carey's grave, you can see the high
school where he pounded out Chopin's "Military" polonaise at graduation, the
swatch of sky he and Wayne sliced as they buzzed the swimming hole and their
parents' chicken house, the road into town he took with his brothers and
sisters to catch the Saturday afternoon Superman serials.
Home at last.
For his children, this final resting place is a touchstone to a father they
never really knew. Carl, who lives in Sweden, says if he has children he will
bring them here and tell them about their grandfather.
Anna will be back, too.
"I'll just talk to him there," she says. "He probably won't even hear me,
but that's what graves are for ... for the people left behind.
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