Margot Carlson Delogne is the founder of the 2 Sides Project, a nonprofit that unites sons and daughters who lost fathers on both sides of the Vietnam War, and the producer of a documentary about the project that aired on PBS stations nationwide. She resides in Arizona and is working on a memoir.
My father, Air Force Capt. John W. Carlson, was killed in Vietnam in December 1966. He was 27 years old when he died and, since his crash site was never officially found, he is still classified as missing in action.
Every Memorial Day is a reminder that he is gone. While I can honor his service, I cannot easily preserve his memory, because I have no memories of my own.
I’m not alone. An estimated 20,000 children lost fathers on the American side of the Vietnam War. Some remember their dads, but their memories are now faint. Many more were either too young or not born when their fathers died. A handful, like me, may visit an empty grave because their fathers were never found.
I was two years old when my father died. The official report from that day said he had just dropped a bomb when his single-man jet suddenly rolled to the left, inverted and crashed. Death was deemed instantaneous, and no recovery attempts were made. The search for his crash site restarted only when the United States and Vietnam re-established relations in 1995. Despite the best efforts of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), he remains one of the more than 1,500 missing from the war.
