Other Personnel In Incident: (none missing) Category: 2
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 01 April 1990 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 1998.
SYNOPSIS: Air Force Capt. James W. Grace was the pilot of an F4D Phantom fighter/bomber. The aircraft was one of the most advanced of its kind for the time. Its computers controlled navigation and enabled precise television and laser-guided bombing. Its speed topped Mach 2. Many pilots envied Grace's job.
Jim Grace once told a friend that if he were ever shot down, captured and held for several years, he would start a new life rather than disrupt his family if he learned his wife had remarried.
Shortly afterward, on June 14, 1969, Grace was flying a mission over Laos when his plane went down about 10 miles west of Muang Xepone (Sepone), Laos. His backseater, who would have been the first to eject, is not missing, so it is assumed he was rescued safely.
Government documents show Grace's "last known location" in Laos 40 miles away from the spot where he was shot down and where colleagues tried to rescue him, an attempt the government says killed Capt. Grace when he fell from the helicopter hoist lifting him out of the jungle. When pressed, the Pentagon reinterpreted its geographical data to bring Capt. Grace back to a latitude and longitude closer to the crash site.
Throughout the early years Jim was missing, his wife, Lillian, sifted through government statements about her husband, attempting to sort out what happened and what the chances were that he survived. One document says "the possibility definitely exists that he could be alive," an assessment made after witnesses claimed to have seen Capt. Grace fall 300 feet to 500 feet from the helicopter hoist.
Someone must have agreed with that assessment, because Capt. Grace, who had been classified Missing in Action (rather than Killed/Body Not Recovered), wasn't declared dead for seven years.
Three years after he was shot down, Mrs. Bickel discovered "Photograph No. 77" in a government "mug book" of unidentified Americans held captive in North Vietnam or Laos. She thought the man in the photograph was her husband. The photo had been taken in North Vietnam by a Soviet film crew. The US government gently replied that three other families claimed the man in the photograph was their relative and that no positive identification could be made. Mrs. Bickel didn't agree and found two witnesses who also said the man in the photo was James Grace. She believed the photographs proved that her husband had been taken prsoner. The Pentagon denied her claim.
But the paper trail doesn't end there. An Air Force form dated November 1, 1972, shows that Capt. Grace's medical and personnel records were ordered transmitted to Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi in anticipation of his eventual return. This document lists him as a "repatriated MIA." Air Force officials claim to have prepared more than 1,000 such documents for returning MIAs and POWs. If so, the preparation of those forms may indicate, as Mrs. Bickel says, that the government fully expected those men, including Capt. Grace, to return. Jim Grace did not return in the general prisoner release in 1973. In fact, even though the Pathet Lao stated publicly that they held "tens of tens" of American prisoners, not one of these men were released -- or negotiated for.
Lillian Grace, after many years of hard work and disappointment in trying to solve the mystery of her husband's disappearance, remarried and started a new life.
Then on June 14, 1982, Lillian Grace Bickel received a postcard from Hawaii. It was blank except for the postmark, the typewritten address and the inscription referring to the photograph on the front: "After years of dormancy, the volcano Mauna Loa comes to life."
When Mrs. Bickel turned the card over, she "started shaking and went into shock. In the blue sky over the volcano, someone had printed the tiny initials "JMJ." Lillian and Jim, who were childhood sweethearts, used to write the letters "JMJ" on test papers for good luck. JMJ stood for Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Lillian stopped the practice after the eighth grade, but not Jim. The three letters "were of such a personalized nature that only I would have recognized the significance," Lillian said. She believes Grace, either himself or through an intermediary, was telling her he was alive. The card postmarked on the 13th anniversary of Jim Grace's shootdown.
Lillian Bickel, although remarried, never gave up the search for her first husband. She says, "If he's alive, I want to make contact with him. He has two very fine children" and "it would make their lives complete" if they could meet their father.
In early 1990, Lillian Bickel sought action through a new congressional inquiry initiated by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms. The old photos she believed were Jim Grace were given to a noted Colorado forensic anthropologist, Dr. Michael Charney, for comparison with other photographs of Grace.
Dr. Charney not only said the man in photo No. 77 is James Grace, but also states that the man could not have been any of the men the other three families claimed he was. Charney pointed to Capt. Grace's receding hairline, a characteristic of male-pattern baldness. Other witnesses recognized Capt. Grace's hairline, posture, the shape of his nose and his flight-suit sleeves -- pushed up on his forearms, a Jim Grace trademark.
Confronted with these witnesses, the Defense Intelligence Agency changed the date on which the photograph was said to have been taken. DIA's story is that the man in the photograph couldn't be Capt. Grace because the photo was lifted from a communist propagenda film made before he was shot down, then given to the Defense Intelligence Agency six weeks later, after Capt. Grace went down. If so, why didn't the government officials know this when they obtained the film nearly 20 years ago? Why was the film dated incorrectly in the DIA's "mug book"?
Today, contrary to witness reports that state Grace could have survived, Government officials insist that Capt. Grace was killed in the rescue attempt. "I can get you up in a helicopter to 300 feet and let you step out," one Defense Department official confidently says. Mrs. Bickel concludes that the man on the hoist may not have been her husband.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Bickel's frustrating case is not isolated or unusual. Many other POW/MIA cases have much in common: documents and eyewitness accounts that reveal information about missing servicemen the government has been keeping from family members. Although a government commission chaired by former DIA chief Lt.Gen. Eugene Tighe reported in 1986 that a large volume of evidence points to the likelihood that Americans are being held against their will in Vietnam, the Pentagon so far seems to have been mightily unimpressed by such people as Mrs. Bickel.
The fate of Capt. James Grace may never be known, but the nagging question remains: What happened? And if Lillian Bickel's questions are hopelessly naive or out of line, why can't she get straight answers to them? And if men are alive, why are we not bringing them home?
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