PAGE, GORDON LEE
Remains identified 04/30/98
Name: Gordon Lee Page
Rank/Branch: O4/US Air Force
Unit:
Date of Birth: 15 August 1932
Home City of Record: Palo Alto CA
Date of Loss: 07 March 1966
Country of Loss: North Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 190500N 1044600E (VG754099)
Status (in 1973): Missing in Action
Category: 4
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: RF101C
Other Personnel in Incident: Jerdy A. Wright (remains returned)
REMARKS:
Source: Compiled 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.
SYNOPSIS: Maj. Jerdy A. Wright and Maj. Gordon L. Page were the two pilots
of an RF101C assigned a reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam on March
7, 1966. When their aircraft was about 10 miles northwest of the city of Con
Cuong in Nghe An Province, North Vietnam, it went down. Both Wright and Page
were declared Missing in Action.
The Defense Intelligence Agency further expanded the classification of
Missing in Action by adding an enemy knowledge factor indicator of 4.
Category 4 was generally applied to cases in which the time or location of
loss was unknown, or cases in which no solid evidence existed that indicated
that the enemy had knowledge of the fate of the lost personnel.
Wright and Page's families waited for the war to end. They understood that
the possibility existed that their men might have been captured. Even though
they did not hear from them, they knew that many were known to be prisoner
who had never been allowed to write home.
In 1973, 591 American prisoners were released from communist prison camps in
Southeast Asia, but Page and Wright were not among them. The Vietnamese
denied any knowledge of the two.
On June 21, 1988, the Vietnamese returned the remains of Maj. Jerdy A.
Wright, Jr. to U.S. control. For over 22 years - dead or alive - Maj. Wright
had been a captive in enemy hands.
Since American involvement in Indochina ended in 1975, over 10,000 reports
have been received related to Americans missing in Southeast Asia. Many
authorities are convinced beyond doubt that hundreds remain alive in
captivity. With absence of proof that he died, Maj. Page could have survived
to be captured. He may be among those who are said to be still alive. If so,
what must he think of the country he proudly served?
April 1998
The NETWORK received word on April 15, 1998 from Gordon Page, Jr. that his
father's remains had been returned and identified in March. Burial was
scheduled for May 8th in Paradise, CA. The official government announcement
was April 30, 1998.
The long goodbye
Vet's remains buried in U.S. 32 years after his death
May 10, 1998
By Larry D. Hatfield
San Francisco Examiner
PARADISE, Butte County, Calif. -- Ten thousand miles and a spiritual
generation later, Col. Gordon Lee Page has finally come home.
Under slate skies and with a chill wind sweeping his hillside grave site,
Col. Page, forever 33, was buried here Friday, 32 years after he perished in
the steamy jungles of North Vietnam.
His grave is among veterans of other wars, in a former olive grove next to
camellia bush, under a stately deodar cedar - Vietnam, finally, only a
distant echo.
"He is home now," said his widow, Lou Page, 64, who remained faithful to
him for those missing years. "He's home."
Although Page has been listed as presumed killed in action since 1974, and
as missing for eight years before that, it was still a jolt to learn of
the official determination last month that remains in a box returned by
Vietnam were his.
Col. Page's remains, cased in a silver military casket, escorted from Hawaii
by Air Force Col. George Bowen and attended by a solemn-faced 22-member
honor guard from Beale Air Force Base, were laid to rest at Paradise
Cemetery Friday Aafternoon.
About 100 people, many of them veterans in caps and medals, some active duty
military and others civilians, attended the funeral and graveside services
with full military honors.
"Many unknown people made a promise to you," Air Force Reserve Maj. Newton
Kerney, pastor of Paradise Lutheran Church, said of the continuing efforts to
find and identify the remains of American soldiers still missing in Vietnam.
"This (funeral service) represents the culmination of a promise by many to
bring your husband home," he said. "This is the promise fulfilled."
In search of closure
It was ironic, Kerney said before the simple service in the elegantly plain
mountain church, that the funeral happened the day after it was decided to
disinter the remains of another Vietnam soldier from the Tomb of the Unknowns
at Arlington National Cemetery.
Officials will attempt to identify him, using the same kind of DNA and other
tests used to identify Col. Page.
"Both are an affirmation that no other country in the world has such a
deliberateness in its intent to bring home its warriors from combat," said
Kerney, a chaplain at Travis AFB.
"Right now, after so many years of wondering, it's sort of basically just
dealing with the reality," said Lou Page. "Everyone mentions the word
closure.... I know that will happen, but it hasn't yet.
"I've had a bunch of conflicting emotions.
"As far as closure, one of the most comforting things in a sense is final
ly to know where he is. That's one reason I chose the cemetery here. Years
ago, he would've gone to Arlington, but it's just too far.
"I can visit him now. And the children . . . now he can be part of their
lives. They've lived with the fact that there was a person who existed
and now he doesn't. This gives them something."
Ready to move on
As she accepted the flag from his casket, with the cartridges from the three-
volley final salute wrapped inside and his medals pinned to the presentation
box, Lou Page was prepared to move on.
For years, the Page family lived in the limbo of not knowing - the same limbo
still suffered by the loved ones of 1,568 Americans listed as missing as a
result of the war that has been over nearly a quarter of a century.
Lou Page, who moved from San Jose to Paradise 3-1/4 years ago, asked the
Pentagon to change the status of her missing husband from MIA to presumed
killed in action in 1974, the year before the war formally ended and a year
after American POWs were returned by Vietnam.
"A number of us did that," she said in an Examiner interview. "We felt this
was what our husbands would have wanted us to do.
"All of us had lived in a state of limbo for so many years. We just couldn't
live that way. You weren't either a wife or a widow."
But life goes on. Now, she said, "He's still 33, and I'm not. The past just
gets dimmer, and you just sort of have to go on. . . . It's just a comfort to
know he's not in a box in Hawaii or someone's back yard in North Vietnam."
Gordon Page, born in Palo Alto, was a graduate of Sequoia High School and
the College of San Mateo. He went into the Air Force's aviation cadet
program in 1952 and was commissioned in December 1953.
He got his wife, high school sweetheart Lou, and wings on the same day in
December 1953 when he was graduated from flight training at Vance AFB,
Okla.
He was stationed for a time at Hamilton AFB in Marin County, where he flew
such people as then-Vice President Richard Nixon and Bob Hope for Special Air
Missions.
When the war in Vietnam heated up, he was sent to the Udorn Royal Thai AFB
on the Mekong River and assigned to Rolling Thunder, finding targets for
bombers and making post-raid photo assessments.
On March 7, 1966, he and wingman Capt. Jerdy A. Wright Jr. took off in their
unarmed RF-101C Voodoo photo-reconnaissance jets. Their last radio contact
was 25 minutes later over Nghe Tinh province. Moments later, several
radar stations reported receiving a distress call from an unidentified
pilot who said his aircraft had been struck by a missile. There was no
further contact, and a search yielded nothing, the thick jungle canopy
hiding any signs of wreckage.
On June 1, 1989, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam turned over 28 boxes of
remains to the United States. Wright, who like Page had been promoted to
colonel in the interim, was identified through dental charts, but none of
the bones could be matched to Page.
In July 1993, a joint American-Vietnamese team traveled to Nghe An province
and interviewed several informants about crashes. They supplied information
that could correlate to Wright's and Page's crash sites, but a search proved
fruitless.
Several months later, in early 1994, a team working in the Vietnamese
National Library in Hanoi located a newspaper article in the March 9, 1996,
issue of Nhan Dan (The People) chronicling the downing by SAMs of two U.S.
warplanes.
A similar story in the March 9 issue of Guan Doi Nhan Dan (People's Army)
convinced searchers the stories were about the downing of Page and Wright.
In June of that year, a joint team went to Nghia Khan village in Hghe An
province and interviewed witnesses.
"The informants indicated that the headless body of the pilot had been
buried near the crash site but then later exhumed and reburied nearer to
the village," according to a U.S. military report.
"Sometime in the mid-1970s the body apparently was exhumed a second time
by representatives of the District Military Command."
Although MIA teams believed the body to be that of Col. Page, they couldn't
determine where the remains had gone. A search of the site yielded
small pieces of wreckage but no sign of a grave.
After the Vietnamese returned the remains in 1989, the U.S. Army Central
Identification Laboratory in Hawaii started exhaustive forensic tests
to determine whether the remains were Page's.
Finally, using DNA samples from his sister and a niece, pathologists
determined a probable match. Analysis of an engine turbine blade from the
crash site reinforced the identification.
Memories intact
Jeff Page, now 42, remembers the predawn hour 32 years ago when there was
knock on the door in the Okinawa military housing where he and his mother
and sister, Julie, now 40, lived. His mother was two months pregn ant with
GordonScott "Chip" Page Jr.
"I was 10 then. I remember the guys coming to the door at 4 in the
morning,"Jeff Page, a San Francisco electronic engineer, said in an
interview. "I knew what was happening. I was very conscious of what he did,
and I knew what theywere going to say."
The years of uncertainty were unnerving. Before Friday's ceremonies, Jeff
Page said, "I'm looking forward to it. It sort of closes it."
Julie lives in Aptos and is working on her teacher's credential. Chip, a
freelance photographer, lives in Paradise with his mother. Lou Page works as
proof reader at the Paradise Post.
Besides his wife and children, Col. Page is survived by five grandchildren,
sister Anita Bell of Los Gatos, and brother Willard Page of Tahoe City.
Page's military awards included the Air Force Commendation Medal, National
Defense Service Medal, Air Force Outstanding Unit Award, Air Force Longevity
Award with two oak leaf clusters, Air Force Expeditionary Medal and the
Good Conduct Medal.
He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star, Air Medal and Purple Heart.
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