The Misty Pilots
There was endless speculation about what might have happened to Howie. Since there was no sign of a parachute, maybe he had never gotten out of the airplane. But why not? Rutan, furious and heartbroken, doubted that scenario. He recalled that Howie had been forced to eject from a malfunctioning plane back during F-100 training, and he figured that since Howie had already been blown out of an airplane once—and survived with his sunglasses still on his face–he would have known exactly what to do this time. Maybe the ejection seat malfunctioned, Rutan guessed. There were other theories. Perhaps something had come loose in the cockpit when the canopy blew off, knocking Howie unconscious. Or maybe Howie did make it down but got knocked out when he landed. Or he could have come down in nearby Laos, which was notorious for the murderous treatment of prisoners. He could have been killed on the spot.
Rutan flew with Jones the next day. Like all the other Mistys who flew immediately after the shootdown, they headed straight toward the area of the crash. They saw a clean gash in the jungle where the plane had gone in. That suggested the F-100 was still flying level when it sliced into the trees, not spinning out of control in a way that would have prevented Howie from getting out. For 48 hours the Misty pilots kept a vigil over the area, listening desperately for some miraculous sound over the radio. But there was only silence from below.
Rutan decided he had to do something besides drill hopeless circles in the sky over Howie's wrecked plane. As many people in Vietnam's classified world knew, there were special operations teams, Green Berets and others, that routinely operated along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They'd spy on trail traffic and North Vietnamese encampments and other points of interest and often provide startlingly good intelligence—if they got out alive, which many didn't. Rutan knew a couple of the helicopter pilots who ferried the commandos in and out, from Nakon Phanom Air Base over in Thailand. He called one of his buddies at NKP and asked if they'd drop him off near the crash site during one of their missions, then come back and pick him up a few hours later. He figured that should be enough time for him to hike up to the wreckage, see if Howie's body was inside, remove his dog tags and other personal items, and perhaps bury his friend. It sounded crazy to Rutan's special ops buddy, but then again they dealt with crazy stuff all the time. Sure, one of the pilots told Rutan. Get yourself over here and we'll see about dropping you off in Laos.
While flying over the ground where his buddy had disappeared, Rutan intently studied the terrain, memorizing various landmarks. The crash site was in deep jungle, right on the border between Laos and North Vietnam. Rutan had been around combat enough to know that a serviceman's "missing" status, when there was a high likelihood he had been killed, was a peculiar kind of torment for the families back home. It encouraged false hope and added profound uncertainty to the pain of losing a husband or father. On one Misty mission, Rutan had been tasked to go investigate an area where an F-4 pilot and his back-seater had become disoriented on a night mission and flown straight down into the ground. The plane had exploded. Rutan's job was to monitor the rescue channel for any word from the two pilots, even though there was virtually no way they could have survived. Rutan heard no radio traffic whatsoever, but he couldn't find any evidence that proved they were dead, either. Still, when the mission was over, he reported to the F-4 commander that the crew had died, hoping the commander would pass that news on to the family members so they could begin to deal with the loss.
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