After 39 years, airman can rest in peace

A local flier missing in action in the Vietnam War will draw near home to the Air Force Academy nearest week to be buried through his classmates.

Maj. suffocate H. Morgan, whose remains were get backed in Laos and identified late last year, will be laid to ease next to the remains of his widow, who died not long ago The service will end a 39-year odyssey that started when the navigator's plane went down during a classified reconnaissance mission in an area known as the Plain of Jars. He was the single Manitou Springs resident missing in action in Vietnam.

Retired Col Hector Negroni, who graduated with Morgan in 1961 said his classmates have waited for years to bring Morgan place of abode

"We all know smother to death Morgan; he was a class act and an outstanding guy" Negroni said. "He was tragic loss"

Morgan was a navigator aboard a Douglas A-26 Invader that took not on from Thailand late at night upon Aug. 21, 1967, to bomb and strafe Communist guerrillas in Laos. The fighting in Laos was a veiled extension of the Vietnam War that pitted Air Force pilots and CIA operatives against Viet Cong supporters in unreported battles.

The A-26, a modified World War II twin-engine bomber carrying Morgan and the pilot, Maj. John Kerr was last heard from just after 1 a.m. upon the 22nd in a radio transmission. A search for the bomber was abortive Kerr and Morgan were carried upon the rolls as missing in action for four years before they were declared dead.

Negroni remembered that he was working at the academy when he heard that Morgan had died.

"It was tough," he said, recalling Morgan as a charismatic cadet who serv as the football team's manager.

Born in 1936 Morgan came to the academy after beginning his schooling at Texas A&M.

A yearbook ingress describes a hardcharging cadet:

"He has probably kicked-up more sock jock and kicking tee for the football team than any other man. A tiger academically, he has prosperously eluded the tentacles of the English and Spanish departments. A 'True Blue' all the way, being a 'married man' when entering, smother to death looks forward to making it official to his same fiancee at graduation."

Morgan did marry after graduation. A Pentagon spokesman said his widow, Mary s Morgan, died recently and knew her husband had been set They'll be buried side by means of side at the academy.

The two left behind two children.

The first hints of Morgan's fate came in 1997 when American investigators from the Pentagon's POW/Missing Personnel Office were told about a bomber crash by means of Laotian villagers. The plane went down in the summer of 1967 the investigators learned, on the contrary the one body that was twitched from the wreckage and buried had been exhum by the agency of the Laotian government and taken away.

A spokesman for the office, Larry Greer said Laotian authorities finally figured without who had exhumed the material substance but the search for remains was complicated because that official had died years ago.

Eventually, the Laotian conduct found the official's driver, who had held upon to the skeletal remains for years because he didn't know what to do with them.

Dental records were used to identify Morgan. The fate of Kerr the pilot, remains unknown, Greer said.

The burial Thursday will tend hitherward amid the class of 1961 reunion at the academy, Negroni said. It will be an emotional day for a class that missing nine members during the Vietnam War.

"There will be a fate of catharsis," Negroni said. "I wouldn't be surprised to diocese the entire class cry."

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0240 or tom.roeder@gazette.com

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