|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
Susan Rothrock and Curtis Miller met at Texas Tech and were soon married. Susan was a 19-year-old sophomore who promised her dad she would finish her degree if he would give his blessing. Curtis was a 21-year-old junior who played a “cut-throat” game of bridge, was in the ROTC and wanted to be a pilot.
They were young, very much in love and planning a future together.
He got a degree in business. She got her’s in teaching. But this was 1967. The war was building up in Southeast Asia and pulling in young Americans. He went to “spy school” in San Angelo. She set up housekeeping. He went to flight training in Lubbock. She gave birth to their baby daughter Christy. He went to Ubon, Thailand. She moved in with her parents in Corpus Christi to await his return.
That day has finally come. Major Curtis Daniel Miller is coming home. He will be buried at DFW National Cemetery with full military honors on March 29, 1972 exactly 38 years from the day his AC-130A Spectre went down in Laos with a crew of 14. Miller’s wife Susan has spent 20 of her waiting years in Azle. After the death of her parents she moved to Azle to be near her college roommate, Gloria Harrison who was teaching fourth grade at Walnut Creek. Harrison introduced Susan to Curtis when they were at Tech and said they’re, “Like sisters. I’m an only child and she’s an only child.” Susan joined the teaching staff at Azle Elementary in the early 90’s and now teaches eighth grade history at Forte Junior High. She lives with her granddaughter Madison and daughter Christy, whose only memory of her dad, the pilot, is that his Donald Duck talk made her giggle. According to Susan, Christy wasn’t the only one amused by Curtis’ duck impression. “Neighbor kids would knock on the door and ask if Donald Duck could come out and play,” she said. Susan spent those early years after Curtis’s plane went down traveling and lecturing with the National League of POW/MIA Families. But the Vietnam war was so unpopular and the protests so pervasive that she eventually resigned. “I could only hear him called a ‘baby killer’ so many times,” she said. Over the years she dated some and said she even fell in love but marriage meant separation from Curtis, “And that was something I couldn’t do.” “I couldn’t make him deceased,” she said. “The Air Force needed to do that for me.” In order to classify Major Miller as Killed in Action, the Air Force needed to prove he was dead. That would require a search of the crash site and admission by the United States government that they were conducting battle over neutral territory. Laos, bordered on the northwest by China, the east by Vietnam, south by Cambodia and west by Thailand, was declared neutral territory on July 23, 1962 in a reactivation of the 1954 Geneva Agreement dividing Vietnam in two – a northern zone governed by the Vietminh and a southern zone governed by the State of Vietnam. North Vietnam continued to defy the agreement by using the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos to infiltrate soldiers and material into South Vietnam. In response, the United States was conducting a “battle of containment” over Laos to contain the communist influence in Southeast Asia. Miller’s AC-130A Spectre gunship had been downed by a Russian SAM (Surface to Air Missile) while on an armed reconnaissance mission. Susan and the families of other crew members were told there would be no rescue because the area was too “hostile.” Their cases were to remain in limbo for years. Susan describes those years as being like “a roller coaster ride.” “There were some highs and some terrible lows as the military kept giving us hope and taking it away again,” she said. The roller coaster took off in a low place when they were told the plane had gone down in a fiery explosion and there were no survivors. Hope was ignited when they heard that F4 support units traveling with the AC-130A could hear emergency beepers after the crash. “Those beepers could only have been triggered by survivors,” Susan said. In December 1972, Paul Miller, Curtis’ father along with 52 family members of other servicemen missing in Southeast Asia took an unsanctioned trip to Thailand. They got within 20 miles of the crash site before being turned back by men with guns. “So close but so far,” Susan said. “He returned a broken man and died three years later.” As refugees continued to pour out of Laos, Susan’s roller coaster picked up speed. MIA status changed to Prisoner of War (POW) when she heard that nine crew members had been marched into Hanoi. “POW’s in Vietnam were better off than in Laos where they were put into deep pits in the ground or caves,” Susan said. Hope waned when the military returned the medical tags Curtis wore to alert medical staff of his allergy to penicillin. And hope faded when she received a letter from Jim Coyne with Soldier of Fortune Magazine stating that he and Dave Hatcher of CBS in Bangkok had paid $400 to a Laotian man for Curtis’ wedding ring. The letter dated July 9, 1984 said the man told them he found the ring inside “an old airplane crash during his escape” from a reeducation camp near Muong Phine, Laos. Although wearing jewelry was against regulations, “Curtis had taped it to his finger and wore it anyway,” Susan said. The ring inscribed, “Forever Love Sue” was delivered to her door without preamble – as bright and as shiny as the day it was given. Circumstances surrounding the crash of Major Miller’s AC-130A Specter remain a mystery to this day. But Susan said she accepted his death years ago. “He was intelligent, innovative, creative and had a will of iron,” she said. “If he could get away and come back to me he would.” The first of three excavations of the crash site was conducted in 1985. Miller’s remains were the last to be found and the last to be identified. Susan flew out Sunday to the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii to bring him home. She plans to attend another funeral for crew members this spring at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C. But as for Curtis, “He’s a Texas boy,” she said. “He needs to rest in Texas.” |
|
