Vietnam pilot’s remains coming home after 41 years

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Vietnam pilot’s remains coming home after 41 years
Cartersville man’s jet was shot down in 1967; his mother held out hope for almost two decades
By MARK DAVIS

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

On his last day alive, Lorenza Conner had a locket around his neck, a gun on his hip and his eyes on the sky. The prayers of folks back home followed him as surely as contrails stretched behind his fighter jet.

Those prayers are finally answered. The remains of the Cartersville quarterback are returning home, 41 years after he vanished in North Vietnam.

Conner, an Air Force captain shot down in 1967, will be buried with song and tears Oct. 25. He will be laid to rest at Oak Hill Cemetery beside his mother, Pauline Conner. She prayed until her last day for her only child.
“This is our closure,” said Conner’s cousin, Terri Durrah. “We know now that he’s coming home.”

Everyone called Conner “Ren.” A graduate of Tuskegee University in Alabama, he was an unusual sight in the early years of the Vietnam War: a black pilot. He flew the F-4D Phantom II fighter jet, a two-seater warbird.

The jet was in a group of four that ran into anti-aircraft fire on Oct. 27, 1967, over the hills of Tuyen Quang Province in northeast Vietnam. Three jets got away; Conner’s did not.

His co-pilot, Capt. Jon Black of Johnson City, Tenn., ejected before the crippled jet crashed and vanished in the jungle’s green folds. Those folds would hold what was left of the plane, and its 24-year-old pilot, for four decades.

Viet Cong soldiers took Black captive and held him for a year before releasing him to the United States. Black told his superiors what they already suspected: Conner was not coming back alive.

“It was devastating for us,” said Durrah, 53. “It was sad, but you know, we had to be strong.”

Years passed with no word on the downed flyer. Then, in 1992, Vietnamese officials contacted U.S. military representatives with information about a crashed jet. They also produced an item villagers removed decades earlier from the warplane: Conner’s identification tag.

Between 1992 and 2003, searchers from the United States and Vietnam visited the province where Conner crashed, interviewing witnesses and probing the leafy tangle where the broken remains of a Phantom jet came to light. In 2007, searchers with the Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office returned, excavated the site and recovered scattered remains.

Family DNA made it official: Ren Conner was missing no more.

In August, the family received his ID tag, the locket, and a few other items. Their retrieval brought back old memories that time hadn’t dimmed.

Durrah recalled a serious boy with a penchant for the printed word. Ren struck a deal with the school librarian to set aside weekly issues of Time and Saturday Evening Post magazines so he could read them first.

He played quarterback for Summerhill High School’s football team. The school, now a community center, was the home of the Blue Devils.

“He had a good arm,” said his former coach, Matthew D. Hill. An ordained minister, Hill will deliver the message at Conner’s funeral service. “He was real energetic, a real go-getter.”

Such a go-getter that his relatives were reluctant to say he might not be alive, even after the Department of Defense declared him dead. On Oct. 27, 1973, the six-year anniversary of the crash, the family gathered for a memorial service. Even then, “We always held out hope that he might come home alive,” Durrah said.

No one hoped more than his mother. A presser at a dry cleaners and an employee of Union Carbide Corp., Pauline Conner died in 1986. Mourners buried her at Oak Hill Cemetery, under a polished piece of granite.

The headstone also bears the name of a boy who turned his eyes to the sky, wore a locket along with his ID tag, and traveled the clouds with prayers in his slipstream.

In late October, he’ll be home for good.