This reminiscence was included in the book Henri Huet: J’etais Photographe de Guerre au Vietnam by Horst Faas and Hélène Gédouin. Published in French in 2006, the book includes a collection of photographs by Huet, one of four news photographers killed when their helicopter was shot down over Laos on February 10, 1971–49 years ago.

By Michael Putzel
© 2006 All Rights Reserved

I went looking for Henri to give him a message. It was February 10, 1971, in the mountainous northwestern corner of what was then South Vietnam. We were both covering the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese invasion of Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but we had been with separate units when the operation kicked off, and we hadn’t seen each other in a couple of days. I liked working with Henri when I got the chance. He had a quiet, gentle streak that instilled confidence in those of us more than a decade younger with only a fraction of his experience covering combat. In our world, he was legend, but he didn’t lord it over us.

After dawn, I hitched a ride aboard the first Army helicopter I could find flying out to Khe Sanh, the just re-opened combat base in the mountains where U.S. and South Vietnamese forces had set up their forward headquarters. The weather was chilly—even cold for the tropics—and the gray sky drained the color from the hilly jungle. I found Henri on high ground near the South Vietnamese “TOC,” the sandbag-fortified tactical operations center where he and several other photographers had been told they would be in the first group of journalists permitted to witness the offensive inside Laos. It wasn’t Henri’s kind of assignment; he preferred going out with small combat units, where the interaction was more personal and where he so often captured the faces of war. This group was to accompany the operation’s commanding general and his top staff, a “press trip” less likely to encounter actual combat or produce dramatic photos. But up until then, no news photographers or correspondents had been permitted to cross the border, and Henri liked to be first.

The night before I had managed to get a phone call through to the AP’s Saigon bureau, and the photo desk told me that if I saw Henri I should remind him his South Vietnamese visa was about to expire and that he should return to Saigon to take care of it. The bureaucracy required all foreign journalists to renew their visas every three months, and to do that, we had to leave the country, apply for a new visa at a consulate abroad and wait about a week to get back into the country. It was a nuisance—but also an opportunity to take a few days off from the war. Most of us looked forward to the chance for some rest, good food and the conveniences of a modern capital anywhere but Vietnam. I told Henri I’d take his seat on the chopper and cover for both news and photos in order for him to return to take care of his paperwork. It was a futile gesture.  He wasn’t about to abandon one of the biggest military operations of the war to fly home to tend to some technicality. He looked at me and smiled, the crow’s feet by his eyes crinkling, lending his smile a familiar warmth. We both knew the bureaucrats would give him and the AP trouble if he overstayed his visa, but problems like that eventually got resolved, perhaps with the help of a couple cartons of American cigarettes or a few rolls of Kodak film. Henri was determined to keep his seat, and we parted before the flight took off. I left him outside the headquarters below the helicopter landing zone, standing around with the other photographers who were planning to go on the mission. I headed back to the U.S. side of the base to do some reporting on the progress of the operation.

A couple hours later, I was walking past an American unit’s makeshift temporary headquarters and overheard a voice on a radio saying in English through heavy static something about “helicopters down.” That was enough to alert me to trouble, but I didn’t know at first that it involved Henri. An officer emerged from the sandbagged bunker and gave me another tidbit. Two Huey helicopters apparently had been shot down. It wasn’t immediately clear whether they were U.S. or South Vietnamese, but in the course of the next few minutes I was able to gather enough information to be horrified at the prospect that I had lost my friends. I was a reporter working the story, but I also remember a pit in my stomach, a rushing anxiety—and a sense of urgency to tell the AP what I knew. There was no way to call Saigon from Khe Sanh; there weren’t any phones. I had to get back to Camp Red Devil, a U.S. base about 25 miles away that had better communications and was serving as a press center for the journalists covering the Laos operation. By the time I found a helicopter going that way and persuaded its pilot to take me, I knew I was carrying terrible news. The details came later. An American chopper pilot and cavalry troop commander, Major Jim Newman, and his co-pilot had watched helplessly from a distance as a string of olive drab Huey helicopters flew, apparently lost, over a known and charted North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun position a few miles inside Laos. The skilled gunners on the ground below fired on the first and third choppers in the string. Henri and his companions were aboard the first aircraft, which took a direct hit, exploded in flames and fell a few thousand feet in a fireball, smashing into a mountainside. Newman later flew me over the crash site surreptitiously to show me no one could have survived the shoot-down.

“Red Devil, get me MAC-V!” “MAC-V, get me Tiger!” Fighting the phone system in Vietnam was part of a correspondent’s life. We had to know the relay points, claim military priorities we probably weren’t entitled to and shout like soldiers to be heard over the waves of static that drowned our voices. It could take hours, and then the connection might be lost in a moment. When the bureau answered 500 miles to the south, I bellowed for Richard Pyle, the chief of bureau. He picked up the phone, and I started to dictate, slowly and clearly. I had no idea how long the connection would last.

“A VNAF helicopter…has been shot down in Laos…. All aboard are missing and feared dead…. They include…four civilian news photographers. They are…Henri Huet of AP….” Pyle, a consummate professional, choked in horror as he pounded the keys of his aging typewriter, then barked for silence in the office to enable him to capture every word. I gave the other names: Larry Burrows of Life magazine, Kent Potter of United Press International, Keisaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek. One other photographer, Sergeant Tu Vu of the South Vietnamese army, was also aboard. He had aspired to shoot for the AP if he ever got out of the army and sometimes slipped me rolls of film that he shot on operations no Westerners got to see. Two senior South Vietnamese officers and a four-man flight crew went down with them. I didn’t know at the time that one of the officers was carrying the plans and communications codes for the whole operation, a potentially devastating loss if the documents fell into the hands of the North Vietnamese.

I told Pyle everything I had learned about the crash, still a sketchy report that left many questions unanswered. Then I went in search of colleagues from the other news organizations that had people on the flight. At the military briefing for the press that afternoon, a local version of what were known in Saigon as the “Five O’Clock Follies,” I asked an officer for a few minutes to tell my fellow correspondents what we knew of the crash that had claimed Henri and the others. By that time we knew they weren’t coming back.

Henri had stowed his gear, a rucksack with some spare fatigues and a shaving kit, in a bunkroom known as a “hootch” that had been set aside as sleeping quarters for the press. There were no cameras or valuables; he had all his photo equipment with him. I collected what was left behind and made arrangements for someone to carry it back to the bureau in Saigon. For some reason, Henri had not taken his “boonie hat,” a floppy, wide-brimmed military cap he frequently wore in the field. He had stuck a flêchette, an inch-long, sharpened blue steel dart, in the cotton hatband for decoration. Flêchettes, since banned, were packed in artillery shells and fired only at point-blank range when a unit was about to be overrun. They testified to close-quarter combat. I kept the hat and wore it in Henri’s memory until it blew off my head into the sea from a sailboat in February 1974, almost three years to the day after his death.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 – The remains of four war photographers and their companions shot down in Laos during the Vietnam War were removed from the defunct Newseum here Tuesday and returned to U.S. military custody for safekeeping until a permanent resting place is found.  

Maeve Scott (right), Newseum registrar and collections director, preparing to transfer box of remains to military archeologist Jesse Stephan (left). Photo/Michael Putzel.

The civilian photographers, in addition to Burrows, were Henri Huet of The Associated Press, Keisaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek and Kent Potter of United Press International. A fifth person aboard, Sgt. Tu Vu, was a South Vietnamese combat photographer who served as a part-time “stringer” for AP. The South Vietnamese military helicopter also carried four crew members and two senior officers.  Carrie Christoffersen, executive director of the Newseum, oversaw the transfer and expressed gratitude for the service of the journalists who perished covering the war. Patty Rhule, who planned and directed exhibits at the Newseum, including the memorial to journalists killed doing their jobs, held a moment of silence observed by the small gathering of staff and observers.  The Newseum, which attracted millions of visitors during its 11 years at the edge of the National Mall, struggled financially for most of that time and finally sold its strikingly modern building to Johns Hopkins University and closed its doors on Dec. 31. Some of its functions, including traveling exhibits, public events and online activities will continue under the auspices of its parent, the Freedom Forum.  

Jesse Stephens, an archaeologist with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, said the box would be kept at the agency’s lab at Offutt AFB that conducts continuing studies of remains from past wars in an attempt to identify and honor as many as possible of those who died in service but whose bodies weren’t recovered and buried at the time.  The trace remains of the journalists and South Vietnamese were recovered from the crash site 35 years after the Huey helicopter was shot down during an ill-fated invasion of Laos aimed at cutting the Communist North’s Ho Chi Minh Trail. The search operation was conducted by the Defense Department’s accounting agency, but military authorities chose not to bury the remains in a national cemetery because those killed were not U.S. military personnel. Instead, the pieces found at the site but unidentifiable as those of any individuals were comingled to represent the four civilian photographers, the army photographer and the officers and crew aboard the craft.  

Richard Pyle, the Saigon chief of bureau for The Associated Press at the time of the crash, pursued the missing helicopter for decades and accompanied the expedition that located it. He proposed that the unfinished Newseum, devoted to the news and those who cover it, would be the most appropriate resting place for the small, rectangular container. It was given a place of honor in the new Journalists Memorial shortly before the Newseum opened to the public in April 2008. The story of the photographers, the search for the crash site and later search for a place to preserve the remains are recounted in Lost Over Laos, a book published in 2003 by Pyle and Horst Faas, the AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and photo editor. Both men have since died.  The memorial, which houses giant glass panels etched with the names of hundreds of lost journalists, will be disassembled, and its future is undecided. However, former Rep. David Dreier, chairman of Tribune Publishing Co., is spearheading an effort to build a permanent Fallen Journalists Memorial in Washington.  Barbara Cochran, who has held leadership posts in national newspaper and broadcast outlets for many years, is president of the foundation Dreier started. She said the group’s immediate focus is winning passage of legislation to enable the foundation to work with the National Park Service to identify a location and begin design and permitting work for a privately financed memorial. The process is expected to take several years.  Although no decisions have been made, she said the foundation is open to discussion of designating the prospective memorial as a permanent site for the remains recovered from the Laos crash site.  

(Michael Putzel was an AP war correspondent in Vietnam and covered the shootdown of the photographers’ aircraft. A photo he took of the crash site the next day was used decades later to identify the site where the remains were discovered.)

The dramatic new podcast feature produced and hosted by Christof Putzel revealing his long-secret communications with an Alabama-born terrorist returned to the air Jan. 13 with the fifth episode of an eight-part series. “You will not want to miss what Omar reveals to me next,” Putzel said. ”Trust me: You want to keep listening.”

In previous episodes, the investigative reporter described his years seeking to understand the transition of Omar Hammami from popular high-school kid in Daphne, Alabama, to chief propagandist and guerrilla soldier for Al Shabaab, the Islamist rebel group headquartered in Somalia. Hammami eventually reacted in a cryptic email message that triggered nearly two years of clandestine exchanges between the two young men.

Endeavor Audio, a division of William Morris/Endeavor, will release the remaining episodes on Apple Podcasts and a wide array of audio outlets each Monday with the finale on February 3.

Christof Putzel is the host and Executive Producer of American Jihadi in partnership with Endeavor Audio, a division of Endeavor, the entertainment conglomerate. Other Executive Producers are Adam Levine, Josh Gummersall and Adam Harrison at 222 Productions.

This obituary of Bill Ebeltoft, a Huey helicopter pilot during the Vietnam war who never recovered from his combat experience, was written by his brother Paul and almost immediately went viral on the web. It is reprinted here from the funeral home’s website.

“Not everyone who lost his life in Vietnam died there.” The saying is true for CW2 William C. Ebeltoft. He died on December 15, 2019 at the Veteran’s Home in Columbia Falls, Montana. He died 50 years after he lost, in Vietnam, all that underpinned his life.  He was 73 years old.

Everyone called him “Bill.” He was loved by the nursing staff who cared for him. He was loved by the fellow veterans with whom he lived; those he helped when he was able and entertained with funny German slang and a stint at the piano when he could.  He was a virtuoso when playing “Waltzing Matilda.”

His small family loved him dearly. He was preceded in death by his parents, Paul and Mary Ebeltoft of Dickinson, North Dakota, whose devotion and care for their war-damaged boy was strong and unfailing.  He is survived by his brother, Paul Ebeltoft, and the one he loved as the sister he never had, Paul’s wife, Gail. Both live in Corning New York. They will miss him every day. He is also survived by his nephews, Robert Ebeltoft of Brooklyn, New York and David Ebeltoft of Corning, New York.  They both found Bill to be quirky, “old school,” soft hearted and generous. They valued their time with him and would have loved to have more, as would all who knew Bill well.

It is difficult to write about Bill.  He lived three lives: before, during and after Vietnam.  Before Vietnam, Bill was a handsome man, who wore clothing well; a man with white, straight teeth that showed in his ready smile.  A state champion trap shooter, a low handicap golfer, a 218-average bowler, a man of quick, earthy wit, with a fondness for children, old men, hunting, fast cars, and a cold Schlitz.  He told jokes well.

During Vietnam, he lived with horrors of which he would only seldom speak.   Slow Motion Four, Bill’s personal call sign, logged thousands of helicopter flight hours performing Forward Support Base resupply landings, medical evacuations, exfils and gun ship runs. We know of him there mostly through medals for valor he received, and these were many. The following is quoted from but one of these, recording events that occurred on February 3, 1969.

While acting as aircraft commander of a UH-1H helicopter, WO Ebeltoft distinguished himself when his ship came under heavy automatic weapons while on a resupply mission for Company B, 1 Battalion, 52 infantry.  While attempting to resupply B Company, WO Ebeltoft’s co-pilot became wounded.  Realizing the importance of the mission WO Ebeltoft elected to attempt completion of the mission.  Due to his superior knowledge of the aircraft, the helicopter was kept under control during the period in which the pilot was wounded and the ship was under fire.  Remaining under attack from automatic weapons fire, the supply mission was successfully completed.  While unloading the supplies, WO Ebeltoft received word that there were five emergency medical evacuation cases located 200 meters to his rear.  WO Ebeltoft re-positioned his helicopter and picked up the wounded personnel.  While evacuating the wounded, the commanding officer of Company B was injured.  WO Ebeltoft again maneuvered his aircraft to enable evacuation of the injured officer.  WO Ebeltoft then proceeded to evacuate all injured personnel by the fastest possible means.  Upon completion, examination of the aircraft revealed that the craft had sustained nine enemy .30 caliber hits.

Bill got the medal, of course, but he would have been the last to say anything about it.  The citation shows the type of man that he, and many of his brothers-in-arms in Vietnam were; and still are today, albeit battered hard and unfairly by the cruel winds of the times in which they fought.

After being discharged as a decorated hero, Bill had a rough re-entry into civilian life.  It is not necessary to recount Bill’s portion of what is an all-too-common story for wartime veterans, particularly those of the Vietnam era.  It may be sufficient to say that after a run at business, a marriage and while grappling daily with his demons, his mental faculties escaped him.  Bill became a resident of the Veteran’s Home in Columbia Falls, Montana in 1994. He lived there for the next 26 years.

At the Home, the patina of his memory covered life’s sorrows, and it was a blessing.   Bill was happy there, living a life that was a strange mixture of hunting stories, pickup trucks and memories of some of his better times with women, friends and the outdoor life. Bill denied that anyone he loved had died; could not understand why anyone would fill with gas at four bucks a gallon when “Johnny’s Standard sells it for 27 cents;” and still “drove” his 1968 Dodge Charger.  He was unfailingly courteous. His largest concerns were making his smoke breaks and finding his wallet (a search of 26 years).

In the past year, Bill’s shaky grip on physical health also slipped through his fingers.  Yet, despite this, what we loved in him remained, if only sometimes as a shadow.  Even after his serious decline, suffering fractures because of falls, Bill would tell the staff that he was “just fine” and not to worry about him.   Thin, hunched over, propelling himself with one foot, he would wheel himself into the room of a bed-ridden veteran and sit there, next to the bed, unspeaking.  The nursing staff was certain that Bill thought that the man in the bed was lonely and needed company.

Bill was always a proud man, remembering himself as he was in 1969, not as he became.  Who are we to suggest differently? His was not a life that many would wish for, but in some ways, Bill was a lucky man.  He was surrounded to the end by staff who enjoyed and respected him. He had a chance to be helpful to others who were doing less well than he.  And the passing of the seasons never diminished his plans for another elk hunt or to “see that beautiful girl again this weekend.”

When a small slice of reality penetrated his pleasant confusion, Bill struggled to understand why he was where he was.   Prematurely aged, his worldly goods in a small dresser, not knowing who the President might be or remembering why he should care, Bill’s losses were greater than most of us could endure.  Yet, to those who love him, his brother and his brother’s wife, and their sons, he will always be a brave, accomplished man, more generous than was wise, more trusting than was safe.

It is not possible to wrap your arms around a loved one who leaves.  But it is possible to wrap your heart around a memory.  Bill’s will be well taken care of.

Remembrances can be shared directly with the family by email to paulebeltoft@gmail.com.  Anyone who is so inclined is encouraged to donate to Stark County Veterans Memorial Association at P.O. Box 929, Dickinson, North Dakota 58602.  A private service, through Stevenson Funeral Home and Crematory, Dickinson, will be held in the spring.

My son Christof Putzel’s suspense-filled personal story of his search for and eventual intimate communications with an American-born terrorist launched Dec. 2, 2019, as a widely available podcast released by Endeavor Audio. Episode 1 of American Jihadi, an eight-part weekly series, is available on Apple, Google, Spotify and numerous audio outlets that distribute podcasts via the Internet.

Christof, an award-winning investigative reporter and documentary maker, is executive producer and host of the series that chronicles the transformation of Omar Hammami from a typical high school kid raised in Daphne, Alabama, to a radical Islamist fighting and recruiting for Al Shabab, the international terrorist group based in the failed state of Somalia.

Members of the once-secret 265th Radio Research Company and of C Troop, 2/17 Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division, offer a final salute to their comrade, Staff Sergeant Ed Keith, at Keith’s burial yesterday at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, DC. Keith, who was assigned to the 265th, was flying with C Troop over Laos in March 1971, when their helicopter was hit by enemy gunfire. Keith was severely wounded and lost a leg. In the photo, right to left: Dan Klem, Dan Altstaetter, Bruce Rollman, John Mastro (behind Rollman) John Purgason,Ted Hughes and Dennis Urick.

Staff Sgt. Edward Fulton Keith, who suffered severe pain for decades after he lost a leg in Vietnam, died Thursday, Oct. 4, 2018, in Bakersfield, Calif., waiting for a Silver Star medal that his Army buddies continued to pursue for him nearly a half-century after the war. They testified that his courage under fire saved countless lives.

His brother, William F. Keith, said the cause was multiple organ failure.

Keith, 76, was a signals intelligence specialist in Vietnam, gathering and analyzing information collected from the enemy electronically and passing it along to other U.S. military units. During the invasion of Laos in early 1971, when allied forces were suffering severe casualties, he got himself informally assigned to fly dangerous reconnaissance missions over Laos to help spot enemy forces. Although his unit did not authorize the flights, Maj. James T. Newman, commander of C Troop, 2^nd of the 17^th Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division, accepted Keith’s offer of help and let him fly aboard his command helicopter and with other pilots in the unit.

Keith believed a form of color blindness that had hampered his early military career actually made him unusually adept at identifying camouflaged enemy equipment and positions that others couldn’t find.

On March 17, 1971, his helicopter was hit by six rounds of heavy machine-gun fire. One of the bullets shattered Keith’s left leg.

The leg was amputated at a U.S.military hospital in Vietnam, and he spent several weeks in hospitals in Japan and San Francisco before he was able to go home to Bakersfield, where his family lived. During his recovery, he developed what is known as phantom limb pain, a little-understood syndrome in which an amputee feels pain as if the missing extremity were still in place. In Keith’s case, the sensation that he described as intense burning in his lost foot lasted four decades, resisting all attempts to mute it with pain-killing drugs. He blamed the pain for costing him his job as a dispatcher for his father’s trucking company and, at its worst, prevented him from reading or watching television, his favorite occupations.

At last, a physician at a Veterans Administration hospital suggested he try a drug called venlafaxine, a pharmaceutical usually used to treat depression. Within 48 hours, Keith said, he was essentially pain free for the first time since Vietnam.

Retired First Sergeant Douglas W. Bonnot, who had been Keith’s immediate superior in the intelligence unit, led a campaign to persuade the Army that Keith deserved a Silver Star, the nation’s third highest award for combat valor. He contended that Keith’s knowledge of enemy movements and spotting targets saved many lives by helping U.S. and South Vietnamese aviators avoid enemy gunners and attack enemy ground positions and supplies. Others in the secretive radio research unit and members of the air cavalry troop Keith flew with signed witness statements and recommendations in support of the appeal.

In July, Keith learned from a staff member in the office of his congressman, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, that the Army Awards Branch had recommended he receive the Silver Star, but it still sought clarification of a few minor points. That recommendation apparently is still pending.

Upon hearing there was one more hurdle to get over before the medal was awarded, Keith said, “I only hope I get it before I die.” He fell critically ill a couple weeks later and did not recover.

Keith was the son of the late Don Edward Keith and Johnnie Roberts Keith of Bakersfield, who died Sept. 11 at 93. He had four siblings:  brothers William Fred Keith, Robert Kenworth Keith, the late Chan Craig Keith and a sister, Rena Dawne Keith. Keith was born in Corcoran, Calif., and spent his early years there before moving to Bakersfield.

Many soldiers severely wounded in war celebrate the anniversary of the day they didn’t die. They call it their “Alive Day.”

On July 25, 2018, John Fogle marked the 49th anniversary of his Alive Day by calling the surgeons who saved his life in a makeshift military hospital in Vietnam.

Fogle was a crew chief aboard an Army OH-6 scout helicopter until that day, when his low-flying aircraft surprised a group of North Vietnamese soldiers in a canyon. One of them fired up at the chopper with his AK-47 rifle and hit Fogle in the leg. The bullet ripped open his femoral artery that pumped blood out of his body in huge spurts. The wounded soldier surely would have bled to death without quick and expert surgery performed minutes later after he was raced to the 22nd Surgical Hospital, a temporary unit set up next to the air strip at nearby Phu Bai, an American base in northern South Vietnam.

Fogle got back most of the use of his leg, was discharged from the Army, became an electrical engineer and worked on helicopters, airplanes and satellites until he retired a few years ago. After seeing some old buddies at a reunion last year of his unit in Vietnam, C Troop, 2nd of the 17th Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division, Fogle decided to fulfill a long-ago promise to thank the surgeons to whom he owed everything. There were really two teams responsible: those at the 22nd Surg, as it was called, and four days later at the U.S. military’s 249th General Hospital at Camp Drake in Japan, where doctors reconstructed the shattered bones and saved the leg. It was just the beginning of a long recovery that included more than a year of in-patient traction and physical therapy at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver.

The temporary hospital at Phu Bai was closed a few months after Fogle was wounded, and he lost touch, but he never forgot his long struggle and those he credited with saving his life, especially Dr. Mo Levine, one of the surgeons who worked on him in those first hours. Levine is one of the masked figures in the photo snapped by another member of the medical team.

With modern technology, it didn’t take long to find several members of the OR team that turned out to be having a reunion in Florida in the spring. Fogle flew out from California to greet them and gave a talk about his recovery to the doctors who rarely saw the long-term results of their labors during the war. However, Levine was ill at the time and couldn’t attend, but Fogle waited until he recovered, then flew to Colorado to express his gratitude in person.

When his Alive Day came around, Fogle telephoned Levine and Terry Caskey, another member of the team he saw at the Florida reunion. He has another trip planned to see and thank two other surgeons, Drs. Clyde Kernek & Dr. Robert Thompson, who worked on his wounds at the 249th in Japan. That will take him from home in California to Virginia and West Virginia.

Dr. Kernek, who unearthed an arteriogram of the vein graft used to repair the femoral artery and fracture of the large upper leg bone, wrote Fogle, “I am so happy that you were able to go on and have a good life.”

WASHINGTON–After the ceremony ended and the crowd was gone, two women, dressed in black and facing each other, knelt in silence and bowed their heads at a plaque embedded in the polished stone floor of the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial in Washington. They were there to say farewell at last to an unheralded soldier-photographer killed in war almost a half century ago.

Vu Thuy, the younger woman, could not remember her father, a South Vietnamese combat photographer who saw her only twice, once soon after she was born and for the last time when she was 5 months old. He was on a helicopter flying over Laos on February 10, 1971, when the aircraft was shot down by North Vietnamese gunners, killing all 11 aboard, including four celebrated war photographers working for Western news organizations. The other woman on her knees was Thuy’s mother, Pham Thi Tin, a war widow who waited 37 years before learning what had happened to her husband.

He simply never came home after the war, which ended in South Vietnam’s defeat four years after the downing of his helicopter.

Thuy’s father, known as Tu Vu, was a sergeant in the South Vietnamese army assigned to the commander of his country’s northern, and most dangerous, region. When he took pictures he thought the outside world should see, he sent his film to the Saigon bureau of The Associated Press, which maintained a network of part-time “stringers” like Tu Vu. No one at the AP knew he left a young widow and infant daughter behind. In 2009, the AP learned from a Vietnamese friend of the Vu family living in the United States that Tu Vu had a wife and daughter still living near Ho Chi Minh City. The late Richard Pyle, a former AP bureau chief in Vietnam who participated in a successful mission to locate the crash site and recover a few remains years after the war, contacted Tin and Thuy and sent them a book entitled Lost Over Laos that he wrote about the lost photographers and the search for their crash site. The few human remains recovered were not traceable to individuals but were commingled and interred in the Newseum when it opened its Journalists Memorial in 2008. The plaque names the four news photographers and refers to seven other victims but doesn’t name Tu Vu or the two senior military officers and four crew members who died with them.

Upon learning her father’s remains were in the Newseum, Thuy quickly launched an effort to visit the site, but she was repeatedly denied a visa by the U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. Earlier this year, the Newseum formally invited her and her immediate family to attend the June 4 rededication of the Journalists Memorial, when the names of journalists killed on assignment the previous year are added to the frosted glass panels of the soaring wall rising high above the floor. In early May, she and her mother received the long-sought travel documents and quickly arranged to travel  halfway around the world to fulfill their mission.

There to meet them on Monday were John Daniszewski, AP’s vice president of standards; Russell Burrows, son of LIFE photographer Larry Burrows, who was aboard the doomed aircraft with Tu Vu; Richard Darnell of Edmond, Oklahoma, who was a U.S. Army captain assigned to the same headquarters as Tu Vu and a friend of the photographer; Patty Rhule, the Newseum exhibitions director who invited the family to attend; and several members of the Vu family who  resettled in the United States after the war.