Although it has been nearly 50 years, Nadine Dugan Venzke vividly remembers the day her family learned her brother was missing in action.
Col. Thomas Dugan of the U.S. Air Force was 35 years old when he went missing in Vietnam on Dec. 13, 1968.
“I go back in time to that day, 12 days before Christmas,” Venzke said Friday during a candlelight vigil honoring prisoners of war and missing in action.
More than 100 attended the National POW/MIA Recognition Day vigil in City Park that also honored those from Berks County who were killed during the Vietnam War and those who died later of war-related injuries or illnesses.
The event also commemorated the 30th anniversary of the city’s Vietnam War Memorial.
Venzke of Exeter Township remembers officials coming to her family’s home with albums filled with photographs of POWs, and asking if her brother, Tom, was among them.
“Every picture resembled my brother to me,” she said. “We wanted to see him alive. We wanted him in those pictures.”
Dugan and Air Force Col. Francis J. McGouldrick Jr. of New Haven, Conn., were flying a B-57E bomber on a night strike mission when their plane collided with another aircraft over Savannakhet Province, Laos.
Neither man was ever seen again.
On April 8, 2007, a joint team from the U.S. and Lao People’s Democratic Republic found pieces of Dugan’s plane near the village of Keng Keuk.
They also found 13 fragments of bone in the soil. Five tested positive as containing McGouldrick’s DNA; two others were found to be non-human, and six did not reveal DNA.
The Defense Department’s POW/Missing Personnel Office changed Dugan’s status from “killed in action/unaccounted for” to “killed in action/accounted for.”
“The government has closure,” Venzke said. “My family doesn’t have closure.”
The vigil also honored two other veterans from Berks County who also are listed as missing in action: Air Force Capt. David Pannabecker, 33, of Womelsdorf, whose plane was lost over Cambodia in March 1972, and Air Force Lt. Col. Ralph Angstadt, 34, of Oley, whose plane was lost over the Tonkin Gulf, North Vietnam, in October 1966.
Members of the Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps of Muhlenberg High School joined the Berks chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America, the Berks POW/MIA Forget-Me-Nots and family members in reading the names of the 62 Berks Countians killed in Vietnam and in laying a rose for each at the base of the memorial.
Tommy Dunston, 75, of Spring Township recalled how a core group of 16 to 20 Vietnam Veterans worked to prepare the memorial’s site, digging the foundation and helping to lay the base. When their work for the day was done, the veterans of all four branches of the military would gather in the shade of a maple tree to swap war stories.
Many of those men have died now, Dunston said, adding “I am really proud to be able to stand here after 30 years.
Contact Michelle N. Lynch: 610-371-5084 or mlynch@readingeagle.com.
