VVMF

IN REMEMBRANCE OF THIS MOST HEROIC UNITED STATES COAST GUARD PILOT, A POSTHUMOUS RECIPIENT OF THE SILVER STAR, WHOSE NAME SHALL LIVE FOREVER MORE
Posted for: JACK COLUMBUS RITTICHIER:
	UNITED STATES COAST GUARD LIEUTENANT JACK COLUMBUS RITTICHIER served as a PILOT with the 37th AEROSPACE RESCUE and RECOVERY SQUADRON ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== 14 November 1998 UNITED STATES AIR FORCE SEEKING MISSING HELICOPTER The Associated Press HURLBURT FIELD, Florida (AP) -- The Air Force is hoping flight simulations can help solve the disappearance 30 years ago of a rescue helicopter in Vietnam. The project may lead to similar efforts to find other aircraft that vanished during the Vietnam War, former flight engineer Bob Baldwin said Wednesday as the nation marked Veterans Day. Baldwin is part of a team of veterans teaming up with the Air Force to find an HH-3E Jolly Green helicopter and its four-man crew. The helicopter named Jolly Green 23 vanished on 9 June 1968, while searching for a downed attack pilot, who also remains unaccounted for. Baldwin was part of the wartime effort to find the helicopter. Thirty years later, he's helping with a new search despite being thousands of miles away from the scene. Black and white aerial photos taken in the late 1960s were converted into digital photos and matched with current maps to recreate the wartime landscape near the Vietnam-Laos border. Baldwin then used a computer joy stick to fly through the scene displayed on a console. " I just closed my eyes and when I opened them up, it was like stepping back 30 years," Baldwin said. " The only thing missing is that the tracers aren't coming at you " from antiaircraft guns. The simulations at the Hurlburt base in the Florida Panhandle allowed Baldwin and another former pilot to pick out three spots where the helicopter may have crashed. A military team in Vietnam searched for four days before the monsoon season forced them to stop. They plan to resume when the rains end next year, said Major Mike Vaughn, who helps supervise computer mapping and flight simulator work at Hurlburt. The team found no sign of Jolly Green 23, but did find wreckage of a Marine Corps helicopter that had been forced down. All but one of the crew members had escaped. ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== REMAINS OF COAST GUARD PILOT RECOVERED IN LAOS by Molly Kavanaugh, Reporter CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER In the months following the June 9 1968 helicopter crash in the jungles of Laos, Carol Rittichier held onto hope her husband was still alive. The two met at Kent State University and within two months became engaged. After 11 years of marriage, they told people they were still on their honeymoon. Lieutenant Jack Rittichier, a pilot with the Coast Guard, had arrived in Vietnam just two months before the crash. " I just want to save lives as much as I can," the 34-year-old Barberton native wrote his wife. And that is what he was trying to do that summer morning. As he swung the " Jolly Green " helicopter near the downed attack pilot, enemy fire came at him until finally his HH-3E chopper tumbled to the ground and exploded. Rittichier's body and those of his three crew members were never found. His wife, now remarried and living in California, said she had assumed that people had quit looking for him and that he would never be found. Yesterday she was overjoyed to find out she was wrong. " I can't believe he was not forgotten," the 65-year-old woman said. On Friday remains recovered from the crash site will be brought to Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, Hawaii. Positive identification cannot be made for several months, but forensic testing is expected to confirm the remain belong to Rittichier and the three Air Force men, said Petty Officer Lauren Smith, a Coast Guard spokeswoman. The crew were, Captain Richard Carolinus Yeend, 29, of Mobile, Alabama Sergeant James Douglas Locker, 21, of Sidney, Ohio and Staff Sergeant Elmer Larry Holden, 24, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma " They are almost 100 percent sure this is indeed the site," said Smith, who visited the remote area last month to photograph the excavation for the Coast Guard. The crash site, a six-hour drive plus a 90-minute helicopter ride from Vientiane, the capital of Lao People's Democratic Republic, was discovered in November. In addition to remains and helicopter pieces, search and recovery teams have found some personal effects. They include a pocketknife, part of a watch, a boot sole and a bar ensign which probably belonged to either Captain Yeend or Lieutenant Rittichier. The 23-year-old Smith said people working at the site, some of them locals, know this mission was important. " These are remains that have been waiting for a long time to come home," Smith said. Rittichier's widow, now Carol Wypick, said his death was hard to accept. " When it happened, I just wanted to die," she said. " I couldn't believe someone so cool, so wonderful, was taken away." The oldest of three boys, Rittichier had many talents, she said. He majored in art, loved to write, was captain of the football team and was a great dancer. The two did not plan to have children because their lives felt so complete together, she said. After graduating from Kent, Rittichier joined the Air Force but eventually decided that being a bomber pilot was not for him. He wanted to be a helicopter traffic reporter, but those jobs were scarce. So he joined the Coast Guard to fly search and rescue missions. The couple moved near the Coast Guard station at Selfridge Air Force Base in Mount Clemens, Michigan where a hangar now bears his name. When he got the chance to go to Vietnam for a year as an exchange pilot, Rittichier signed up, then told his wife. He wanted to write a book about the war and figured he'd better see action firsthand . His letters and the tapes he sent home spoke of uncertainty over the war and concern for the Vietnamese. He was the first Coast Guard combat casualty and the only Coast Guard member to be Missing In Action from the Vietnam War. " His mother and I used to say, he's not dead, he's running around in the jungle," Wypick said. Rittichier's parents are now deceased. But over time, as the years multiplied, all of them knew in their heart he was gone, Wypick said. And so they prayed for this day, the day his remains would be found. ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== VIETNAM WAR MISSING IN ACTION CAPTAIN COMING HOME Thirty-five years later, the remains of an Air Force pilot shot down over Laos are identified and will be returned to relatives in the Mobile area 09 SEPTEMBER 2003 By RON COLQUITT Staff Reporter The remains of Air Force Captain Richard Carolinus Yeend Jr., who was listed as missing in action after his helicopter was shot down over Laos 35 years ago, have been identified and will be returned to relatives in the Mobile area, federal authorities said Monday. Yeend and his three crewmates were trying to rescue a downed A-4E Skyhawk Marine pilot on 9 June 1968 when they were shot down, said Larry Greer of the U.S. Defense Department's PIO / MIA office in Washington, D.C. Yeend was 29 at the time and the copilot of an HH-3E "Jolly Green" rescue helicopter, Greer said. Mike Yeend, one of the dead copilot's brothers, said Monday the news that his brother's remains had finally been found and identified was " joy mixed with 35 years of sorrow." " We always knew he had died because it was witnessed," he said. " But even so, he was never found and that haunted us." Identification of the remains follows repeated and focused search efforts of a type that have increased in intensity in recent years as families, veterans and government officials strive for a full accounting of the more than 1,800 American military personnel that remain unaccounted for after the Vietnam War. Yeend's family is planning a private memorial service, Mike Yeend said. Yeend, who owns a Mobile jewelry store with his brother Tom Yeend, said a representative from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, notified the family on Thursday that his brother's remains had been found and identified. Greer, a retired Air Force colonel, said, that bone fragments and teeth found in February have been identified as coming from Yeend and the other three men who went down with the helicopter. Yeend's remains were identified on 15 August by comparing teeth found at the site with his dental X-rays, Greer said. The remains were shipped to the Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base in Oahua, Hawaii he said. " Family members are very, very appreciative that we have kept this mission going ... and have spent time and money to bring this warrior back," Greer said. " It allows them to finally close a chapter in their lives." Mike Yeend said a list of the items found at the crash site included buckles from uniforms, part of a boot sole and an Air Force issue .38-caliber pistol. Greer said there are still 1,882 Americans listed as missing in action in Vietnam and nearby countries. He said the remains of 701 former MIAs have been found and identified. In 1998, some Vietnam veterans began an intensive effort to find the helicopter that Yeend was on when he disappeared. In November 1998 a pilot and a flight engineer who had flown numerous helicopter missions during the war over Vietnam and Laos gathered at Hurlburt Field in Fort Walton Beach, Florida to try to determine where the helicopter had gone down. According to an Associated Press report at the time, the veterans used a joystick connected to a computer that allowed them to fly over a digitally generated landscape showing the border of Laos and Vietnam where the helicopter was believed to have crashed. They were able to pick out three likely spots where Jolly Green 23 could have gone down in the dense jungle, the AP reported. Four days of searching the areas by a Defense Department team, however, failed to turn up any sign of Jolly Green 23. Greer said Monday that the remains of Yeend and the three men who went down with him eventually were found through hard, meticulous detective work. The crash site was on the Laotian side of the border, about 10 miles from where the searchers' best guess had placed it, Greer said. In May 2002, Laotian villagers reported what they believed was the wreckage of a helicopter in their area, Greer said. A team of U.S. investigators converged on the site in November of the same year and " found a number of human remains and lots of teeth from the four crew members," Greer said. The bones were badly damaged by the acidic soil of the jungle, so experts relied instead on the teeth found at the site to identify Yeend and the others, Greer said. Greer said the remains soon will be returned to family members in the Mobile area. It will be left up to the family to decide whether the remains will be buried in Alabama, in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere. A full, military funeral will be provided if the family requests it, authorities said. Richard Carolinus Yeend graduated from McGill Institute in Mobile and from Auburn University. He entered the United States Air Force in March 1963 and was assigned to duty in Vietnam in February 1968. In March 1969, he was posthumously awarded the Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak leaf clusters, the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters and the Purple Heart.
Posted by: CLAY MARSTON Email: CMARSTON@INTERLOG.COM Relationship: BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCHER - USCG Thursday, December 15, 2005
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