When does a war truly end? What becomes of those left standing and, the ghosts that remain? In 2001, Vietnam vet, David Moragne returned to Vietnam with his comrades with those questions. His film, Flashback: Summer Sail One Revisited documents what they discovered.

Bio

David Moragne, was born in Manhattan, raised in the Bronx, nurtured in Greenwood, S.C. and grew up in Dong Ha, RVN.

He is a retired visual facilitator and storyteller, who has lived an adventurous life before settling down with his family in California’s Eastbay community for the past forty years.

He is blessed wife an amazing wife, talented and loving family, and friends who make a difference.

David takes nothing for granted, and appreciates all his gifts and blessings.  For him, “Life Is Good!!!”

Notable Mentions

Flashback: Summer Sail One Revisited: On June 11th, 1967, a CH 46 Transport Helicopter call sign Bonnie Sue, with a four man crew from the HMM, 265th Marine Air Group went down while inserting a seven man recon team, call sign Summer Sail One from Third Force Reconnaissance Company in to their zone of operation, south of the DMZ and west of Con Thien, Vietnam. All aboard were killed, and there are bodies never recovered.

The accounts, recollections, and memories of this incident have crisscrossed thousands of miles, a lot of years, and affected many people. This is an American story, told in a common language of how some of those affected have tried to find understanding, acceptance, and closure.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in South Africa in 1996, to help heal the country by uncovering the truth about human rights violations during Apartheid.

Vietnam War: The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians.  

DMZ (Vietnam): was a demilitarized zone established as a dividing line between North and South Vietnam from July 1954 to 1976 as a result of the First Indochina War. During the Vietnam War (1955-1975) it became important as the battleground demarcation separating North from South Vietnamese territories. The zone ceased to exist with the reunification of Vietnam on July 2, 1976, though the area remains dangerous due to the numerous undetonated explosives it contains.

“grunts”: For the soldiers who served in the Vietnam War, the word grunt was not just a nickname but also a commentary on their status in the hierarchy of war. To be a grunt was to be in the infantry. It meant leaping out of helicopters into landing zones that were sometimes under enemy fire. 

MIA: Missing in action (MIA) is a casualty classification assigned to combatants, military chaplains, combat medics, and prisoners of war who are reported missing during wartime or ceasefire.  

KIA: Killed in action (KIA) is a casualty classification generally used by militaries to describe the deaths of their own personnel at the hands of enemy or hostile forces.[1] 

Balmy Alley: The street is located in the Mission District in San Francisco, California. The block long alley is the best place to see the most concentrated collection of murals in San Francisco. The murals began in the mid-80's as an expression of artists' outrage over human rights and political abuses in Central America. Today the alley contains murals on a myriad of styles and subjects from human rights to local gentrification.

Ka-Bar knives:  KA-BAR) is the contemporary popular name for the combat knife first adopted by the United States Marine Corps in November 1942 as the 1219C2 combat knife (later designated the USMC Mark 2 combat knife or Knife, Fighting Utility), and subsequently adopted by the United States Navy as the U.S. Navy utility knife, Mark 2.[

The accounts, recollections, and memories of this incident have crisscrossed thousands of miles, a lot of years, and affected many people. This is an American story, told in a common language of how some of those affected have tried to find understanding, acceptance, and closure.

However you define it, given the human predilection for disruption and conflict, reconciling has always played an important role in the story of humans making peace and moving on.

Twenty six years ago the word became a headline, when the newly reconstituted state of South Africa established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help heal the country by uncovering the truth about human rights violations during Apartheid.

During my time in South Africa researching the book Art and Upheaval, I spoke to many South Africans about the TRC. The only consensus that I could discern was that it was an awful necessity. One friend likened it to trying to close a horrible, infected wound with an office stapler. She said, in the end, the lesion was closed, but the scar was then, and for many still is impossible to look at.

Given our genocidal white supremacist creation story America has struggled in its efforts to reconcile its history with its stated ideals. Our fractious civic landscape is a continuous reminder that these kinds of stories just can’t be buried.

Another of America’s great reconciliation challenges came in the wake of the Vietnam War. Unlike South Africa, there was no national attempt to come to terms with that 20-year conflict. The fact that a war that laid waste to a small Asian country and killed 3.4 million people was never declared, made it a particularly hard wound to close. For returning soldiers this lack of recognition and the outright derision they often suffered compounded the devastating impact their war experience

It’s not surprising then that since the war’s end, some of these men and women have made it back to Southeast Asia, to try to make their own peace with history. Many with questions about what took place on the battle field, and in some cases what became of their fellow soldiers.  

We apologize for the uneven quality of some audio.This is Change the Story, Change the World, my name is Bill Cleveland.

Part One: Summer Sail One

Luckily, as young teen he also discovered a talent for dribbling, passing, and putting the ball in the net. He also learned that if he paid attention and pushed himself, he could up his game. It’s a lesson that served him well on the unconventional path his life took, after he decided that school was a waste of time.

That impulsiveness and a recognition that street life was no life, led him to leave the city to live with relatives in South Carolina, prior spending ten weeks at a well known military bootcamp at Parris Island, South Carolina, courtesy of the United States Marines.

In war, time is slow, and, if you manage to survive, learning is fast.

In Vietnam, David learned that staying alive had everything do with being alert, aggressive, mission focused, and staying lucky.

[00:07:01] BC: Hank Trimble and Dave Baccitch, who were piloting the 2 Huey gunships escorting the CH-46 Transport Helicopters into landing zone described what they saw.

Dave Baccitch: I saw that the aft rotor separate from the aircraft and go down into the right of the aircraft, and then the aircraft pitched up with the front rotor, pulling it straight up.

Hank Trimble: As much as anything, more than anything in my life, as he got to this position, he keyed his mic, which is right on his stick and he squeezed it, And he started to cry for about four seconds I guess, and he said, “mama, mama”, and then he was gone.

[00:08:39] DM: So we monitored the situation while we're still doing what we needed to do, and I just, I had this…I knew he was dead. There were all kinds of scenarios of being floated because nobody could get to the choppers, that possibly people jumped when they got closer to the ground, and the canopy kept them from being killed, or the chopper hits something and guides were thrown out of it, you know, very unlikely.

We sent in a reactionary force, the grunts sent in a reactionary force, but where they were going in, that zone was in the middle of the D (DMZ), and everybody who tried to get in there got blown up trying to get to the site, and it was never accessed. So the closest they got where they could look at the area, which is, brush jungle and all of that shit through binoculars. Nothing, nada. So these bodies were never recovered.

[00:10:04] Craig Christie: My mother was home alone when she got the initial news, and my dad was out of state on a hunting trip. It was their 25th wedding anniversary. And, uh, when my dad called to, uh…to wish her happy anniversary, that’s what he found out. They were told initially that the aircraft had gone down, and they were listed initially as a missing inaction, MIA.

[00:11:21] Don Havranek: Me and my brother Bill, we were down in Moody's cafe in Lynch Raska, our cousins playing pinball or some darn thing. One of our cousins come in and said, get yourself up to your grandma's house just block up or something. ‘Cause my uncle Delbert and my father they told me Mike has been shot down and he’s MIA. He said, “I don't know what happened yet”

We didn't really know. We re like “Oh, he's all right.” My mother was writing letters to everyone, “where’s my son?”

[00:12:40] Don Havranek: Oh, and then all of a sudden we got a deal. Well, he's KIA. Well where's his body? And we've got no response, we were just lost. […] I really feel that family has been lost.

[00:13:06] DM: So by the end of the day, I'm feeling really shitty. I'm just morose, angry, a lot of different emotions. So I promised myself that I wasn't going to get killed there. I was gonna make it home. And when I got home, I was going to find his family and tell them what a wonderful cat this dude was. And that was my promise. So that was June 11th. I came home. June ‘68 and the world is different. King is dead. Kennedy is dead. Everything is ablaze, right? Just, it was horrific in its own way, but not surprising. I'm angry at everything and everybody, and I wanted to get out of the Marine Corps, but I still had almost two years left to do.

[00:14:20] DM: When I finally got out, I knew where his family lived and I thought about finding a way to get down there and talk about it, but there was too many other things going on in my life, and I just wasn't certain about how I was going to approach this. So a couple of years go forward to 1972 or ‘3. I'm in San Diego. His family lives in Imperial each, just down the street from San Diego. And I'm crafting all these things in my mind, pick up the phone, do this blah, blah, blah, and just never could get it done.

It was painful, very painful. I didn't want to have anything to do with the military. I was glad to be at school. I was a single parent, and I was doing all of that. And it came up intermittently, and each time it came up, I found a way to discourage myself from doing it.

Part 2: Moving Pictures

So the trick was to learn quickly, but I didn't have a lot of money, and in the old days you shot everything and then you send it to Photomat, and I met a guy who said, you could buy a video camera and you could shoot something and see it that same day. And I said, “nah, you're kidding me”, and he says, “no.”

So I checked out the video programs at my school, and that's how I really got into it. So I'm an anthropologist, that was my field of study. So I thought about being a film ethnographer, because that would be the perfect job traveling around the world, documenting how people lived, and that's what I was going to do.

[00:16:50] DM: So things are coming together. I was in the intern program and I was almost about to graduate, and I was going to be placed at the University of California. And my mother informed me that my father is dying. In fact, he was in the hospital, in the coma in New York, and he and I had not had a great relationship for a long time. He and my mother separated when I was 12. The last year in the house was rough on everybody. It was abusive, and just some other things that contradicted wildly with the way that I was brought up, my expectation, it made me very angry.

But, I had a decision to make, and my decision was I was going to New York, and I was going to spend as much time with my father as I could. He was in the coma, and it was no guarantee that he was actually going to come out of it or live. But I had to go. So if he could spiritually feel I was coming, that was great. If he couldn’t, that's okay.

So I got there, uh, he was in the hospital. I went through some things with the nursing staff and I became like the nurses aid. So it went on for a while, and after a couple of weeks he came out of the coma and he was really surprised that I was there. Yeah. And the rest is history. So I spent several months in New York, and I was doing for him what he did for me. So I'm walking him around, taking care of cooking, the whole thing. So it was a great experience.

Prior to coming back east to be with his dad, UCSD, David had completed a few student film projects at the University of California at San Diego, where he would eventually graduate. The experience convinced him that this was the direction he wanted to go. Film was both a way to tell his stories, and a viable career. Unfortunately it also had a catch-22. You couldn't get a job without a track record, which in film was called a "reel." And you couldn't build a reel without a job. Fortunately, he caught a break.

And I met a woman who was actually doing a documentary, and somehow I talked her into letting me shoot it for her. She was doing the Balmy Alley Documentary in San Francisco. Balmy Alley is a place where the Mexican American community had early on, young people creating a mural project that had to do with their heritage in this place called Balmy Alley. And the woman that I met was telling the story. So I was shooting it for her doing some editing. So one thing led to another, other people saw my work and sought to hire me, and I got into a situation where I felt very confident about myself. And then I read that NBC had the inside pool of the 1984 democratic convention that was going to be in San Francisco. So now I got a reel, and I’m feeling legit, and one thing led to another, they came out to do the site survey early on, and I had the interview and I got hired.

[00:21:30] DM: So fast forward, many years later, I'm in my career. I'm working, doing commercial things, I'm doing corporate things, and I made another promise. I said every two years, I'm going to do something for myself. I'm going to tell a different kind of story. I'm going to produce something that has to do with my sensibility, and my community. And basically that was how it happened. I went to my first military reunion. I started to get back into contact because, I was finding some of the people that were out by that time that I knew, and I'd gone to reunion, I'd broken the ice. I was still tight with some of my partners. You know I’d go to Washington State, up to Camino Island. That’s where my point was, when I became a team leader. I went to Hawaii, thats where my first primary communicator lived. We’d hang out.

And then I started, in ’97 we got the internet in my office. It was the embryonic nectar, and one day I just happened to find this entry that was addressed to one of my other friends, who had been in a different team. His name was Eddie Delezen, and in the subject it was “Summer Sail” the name of the team that Dennis was in. Dennis Christie is my friend who was killed. And it was from a D. Havranek and Mike Havranek was one of the other kids on that chopper who were killed. So I knew what it was.

I opened it up and read it, and Eddie Delezen had been going back to Vietnam for over 10 years. He learned to speak Vietnamese and he was actually, not officially, adopted by a Vietnamese family, looking out for him and helping him. He had gone to Vietnam the last time, found the crash site…So they were initially… everyone was KIA, bodies not recovered. So, by the time that I'm talking about this discovery on the internet, their status had been changed. So they were now missing in action bodies never recovered, as opposed to killed inaction bodies, not recovered.

So Eddie had found the crash site, did a Buddhist ceremony himself, took some pictures, came back to the states, wrote an article. The article was published in one of the Battalion Reconnaissance Newsletters.

Don Havranek was living in Helena Montana, and he had become best friends on a mission with Craig Christie, Dennis's younger brother. Both of these were younger brothers of the Marines who were killed. Both of them joined the service after listening to all of the anguish that their parents had gone through for years, while they were younger. They both intended to go to Vietnam to find their brothers. Now that they were missing in action there was some hope.

[00:25:00] Don Havranek: My dream has always been to find my brother. I could never get it to my mind that he was just vanished off the face… I knew he had to be somewhere physically. He has to be somewhere. I could never have that realization until I was for this opportunity to go visiting my brother. Me and Craig Christy have always been very close together. Both of our brothers are together.

Part 3: Dong Ha

From the emails that had been forwarded to him David gathered that the younger brothers, Don Havranek and Craig Christie, had asked Eddie Delezen to join them in Vietnam, and guide them to the area of the crash site. Learning this, he wondered if his on the ground war experience and his film making skills could contribute in some way- possibly to document the journey for the family members who couldn't be there, he decided to call Eddie Delezen get a better sense of the plans.

Eddie made clear to David that their destination might be off limits, particularly for visiting Americans. He said they needed to keep a very low profile if they had any chance of getting in and out unmolested. Bottomline, he did not think it would be prudent for David to join the group. David understood the delicacy of the situation and decided not to press his case.

His point was that they wanted to be as low profile as possible, not to be discouraged or turned away. So I didn't argue, I spoke a little more. Then he said, “I'm gonna let you speak to the brothers.” So I called, told him who I was, and what I wanted to do, and they said welcome aboard. Here's Craig Christie reflecting on how the trip came together.

[00:28:30] BC: David too was surprised. He understood how extraordinary it was that Don and Craig had invited him on their very personal pilgrimage. A quest that was in many ways a leap of faith for everyone involved He resolved to keep a low profile.

So my story actually changed then, because I realized that I'm just helping getting it told. I thought I lost a friend, and I was hurt by that for many years. But there's no pain like [what] these families [felt].

So what I decided I was going to do is just listen. I was the fly on the wall, and when I was spoken to I would speak. So the story, is the story. So my job is to help by facilitating whatever it is that they needed to do to get this story out. So the biggest challenge was them getting their heads wrapped around that, you know, that their brothers are gone.

[00:30:00] DM: When we finally departed and went up to the DMZ, you know, it was a little more challenging. You had to stay in a single place that everyone has to check in, all of the Americans and you stay there. You sort of looked over and watched and they assigned an escort for us. It was always with us. If we want it to go into the DMZ in any place that wasn't authorized, except the town of Dong Ha. But it all worked out.

We found the crash that Eddie knew where it was, we accessed it the first day reacts, we went out and that was a bit of a surprise. We thought we were going to have a lot more resistance, but we got there, and we decided we were going to go back the next day and go down into the crash site. So I had a camera with me all of the time. So, you know, it was just a matter of going down, letting the brothers understand that this was the final resting place,

Part 4: Coming to Terms

Don Havranek: Craters are all around in the Hills, around me, the fighting holes in front of me. It felt like, almost that I was at peace, almost. Strange, but. It's like I can understand why my brother didn't get out of this place, cause’ of what the scars that are still visible today. But yet there are different types of scars and he's just a part of that scar and cycle was all of our scar. To me, it felt just… them craters, the explosion was all the explosions of my life, and all the stupid stuff I've done in the worlds stuff. And the kind of like it's, it made it all make sense to me. That makes any sense.

[00:35:46] BC: Craig Christie’s imagined scene of of his brother's reemergence speaks volumes about the invisible wounds of war. Sadly, when the Defense Department briefly reclassified the fate of these soldiers from KIA to MIA, it both reignited the families pain, and increased their need for closure which they ultimately recognized was not going to come in an official communique. Craig and Don had gone to Vietnam to pull the curtains on a thirty year nightmare. Despite the sense of peace they had felt in Vietnam, they knew the healing would be slow going particularly for the families back home. David felt the families reflections would be important for the Summer Sail Story but he also knew it would take time --he would have to be patient. ,

[00:37:24] Arlene Havranek: Now you think your children are yours, but they're really not, because anything could happen to anyone, but I just thought they were my babies, and I loved them so much. This war and Iraq just upsets me so bad.When I saw on the oh, 48 Hours the other night there's 2100 wounded have come back from Iraq already. Why not his legs cut off here, and then some of them were burnt so bad, it was just so cruel. And I thought, oh. And yet I thought I would, if Michael were here, I would rather have him that way than not at all, but we don't have a choice.

What they know is that the story of each assault, each bombing raid, each recon mission, each burning village, each wounded soldier, each returning veteran, each death of a son, a daughter, a brother, a mother, a child, ripples forward inexorably. What they know is that the 20 year history of America's war in Vietnam did not end with the lowering of the American Flag, and an inglorious escape from the US embassy in Saigon on April 30th, 1975. What they know is that these events were just the beginning of a much longer story that has never been adequately told. Hopefully David's film about these young men fighting a war, and their families trying to make sense of what happened in that war is one small step in the direction of changing that narrative

[00:40:41] BC: Sadly, as David Moragne has observed, the story we have just heard seems to be fixture of the human condition. An enduring narrative whose ripples never cease— ripples evidenced by these two post scripts.

In September of 2005, the remains of Jim Mosier and Jim Widner, two other Summers Sail One team members were repatriated by the Vietnamese government, and subsequently returned to their families. Both were laid to rest with honors.

We would like to express our deep thanks to David Moragne for his help on this episode, and by extension thanks to the Summer Sail One families who generously shared their stories for David’s documentary. Links to the documentary can be found in our show notes.

Change the Story, Change the World is a production of The Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our work through this podcast and our publications is to provide a chronicle of art and community transformation for others to be inspired and learn from. To do this we need your help.

So to all you listeners, thanks for your eager ears, and shout out and a special thanks to Judy Munsen for her genius musical contributions, and Andre Nnebe for his text editing prowess.

For this episode, of Change the Story, Change the World, our 50th by the way, this is Bill Cleveland, saying stay well, do good, and spread the good word.