{"id":127098,"date":"2005-03-15T08:19:11","date_gmt":"2005-03-15T13:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=127098"},"modified":"2019-09-19T08:56:46","modified_gmt":"2019-09-19T12:56:46","slug":"harry-mossman-65-finally-comes-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2005\/03\/15\/harry-mossman-65-finally-comes-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry Mossman ’65 finally comes home"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the summer of 1972, Rocky Wild Mossman \u201967 and several other Navy wives fly to Hong Kong to meet their husbands\u2019 aircraft carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk<\/em>. Except for one bash with the officers and wives, Rocky and Harry Mossman \u201965 spend their days and nights with just each other.<\/p>\n

Rocky gives him cookies that she and their sons, Tom, 4, and Bill, 2, made together. At one point, Harry shows her \u2014 but doesn\u2019t give her \u2014 a sheaf of handwritten pages, a letter to be delivered to the boys if Harry, an A-6A bombardier-navigator, is killed in action.<\/p>\n

\u201cI read it briefly,\u201d Rocky recalls. \u201cBut I remember not wanting to deal with the possibility of death that they were dealing with every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

A month later, the possible has become real.<\/p>\n

Harry and his pilot, Roger Lester, are reported missing after their fighter-bomber, call sign Viceroy 502,<\/em> disappears the night of Aug. 20, 1972, over heavily defended Haiphong, North Vietnam. A radio transmission is heard: \u201cLet\u2019s get the hell out of here.\u201d An explosive flash illuminates the clouds.<\/p>\n

\"In<\/a>

In 1972, members of the VA-52 Knightriders, including Harry Mossman ’65, seated third from left with glasses, prepare to depart Naval Air Station Cubi Point in the Philippines for combat operations off North Vietnam aboard the USS Kitty Hawk<\/em>. Roger Lester, pilot of Mossman’s ill-fated A-6A fighter-bomber, is at the steering wheel. At far left, in aviator glasses, is Mike Smith, who would be pilot of the doomed space shuttle Challenger<\/em> in 1986. (Photograph by Greg Wood)<\/p><\/div>\n

Back in Oak Harbor, Wash., near Whidbey Island Naval Air Station where Harry\u2019s VA-52 squadron is stationed, Rocky prepares to tell her two boys.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Oak Harbor it just wasn\u2019t unusual for a father to be missing,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI was trying to be the stoic New Englander, so I just told these two little kids, \u2018Our daddy won\u2019t be coming home with the ship. He\u2019s missing, like Jerry and Terry\u2019s daddy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s told that Harry is almost certainly dead. But a year later, when the POWs come home, the Navy puts Rocky and other wives of missing airmen on alert in case their names come up during debriefings. But no one speaks of Mossman or Lester.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel bad that I was silent about their father,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I strived not to be the pitiful widow.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1975, Rocky remarries; so that the wedding can occur, the Navy makes a finding of death in Harry\u2019s case. (Her second husband, Terry Moore, will later die in a car crash, and years later she marries a third time. That\u2019s the last name she uses today \u2014 she is Rocky Harvey.)<\/p>\n

The memory of Harry recedes. Rocky doesn\u2019t try to keep it alive. \u201cI feel bad that I was silent about their father,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I strived not to be the pitiful widow, and I didn\u2019t want to perpetuate a myth that [Bill and Tom] were poor children because they lost their father.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rocky later corresponds with other Vietnam widows and sees a pattern. \u201cWe didn\u2019t talk about our husbands or Vietnam. You just didn\u2019t know what kind of reaction you might get.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Harry<\/a>

Harry Mossman ’65, Rocky Wild Mossman ’67, and their first son, Tommy pose in September 1968.<\/p><\/div>\n

Harry\u2019s entire side of the family seems to fade away. His parents, Julian \u201927 and Eleanor Seeber Mossman \u201927, are dead by 1967. Harry\u2019s only sibling, Carol, dies relatively young.<\/p>\n

But there is Harry\u2019s letter, 25 pages of lined tablet paper, filled on both sides. Reluctant to read it in Hong Kong, Rocky\u2019s first thought after Harry\u2019s plane goes down is: Get that letter. Harry\u2019s roommate, Larry Yarham, sends it to her.<\/p>\n

Their son Bill first reads the letter in his Central Washington University dorm room. \u201cIt was like going through 20 years of his hopes for me in one sitting,\u201d he says. \u201cSome things I agreed with. Some I didn\u2019t. And some made me cry. I knew he was trying to do the very best he could as our father.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harry \u2014 the quiet, clear-thinking English major, the determined if undersized football player nicknamed \u201cHarry the Horse\u201d for how he kept on keeping on \u2014 would write to his sons: \u201cMany persons have learned things from the dead individual…. In some small way, living persons share parts of his soul, conscious or otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Then<\/a>

Then a Bates sophomore, Harry Mossman ’65 poses with other football halfbacks in fall 1962.<\/p><\/div>\n

He expresses the conflict between military duty and his belief in rational thought. \u201cThe saddest part of the job I have undertaken is that the armed services represent… the last resort, when rational solutions… have failed.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Bill and Tom, growing from boys to men, the fact that his remains never come home is the yeast for unwelcome fantasies. \u201cIt was always in the back of my mind,\u201d says Bill, now 34. \u201cWhat if he somehow was alive? What if I\u2019ve met him, but his memory is gone and he doesn\u2019t know me?\u201d<\/p>\n

By the 1990s, the closure isn\u2019t perfect, but Rocky doesn\u2019t participate in the call for \u201cfull accounting\u201d by MIA families. For one, she long assumed that Harry went down over water, making recovery of a body impossible. And there dewas a memorial service and other Navy ceremonies and dedications.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had no idea about the grim reports I would get.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI just braced myself to go on, and I felt like I\u2019d done enough of those things,\u201d she says. Trying to be a rock, however, takes its toll and she suffers bouts of depression. \u201cBeing stoic didn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the letters begin to arrive.<\/p>\n

In 1994, an A-6A crash site is found east of Haiphong. With each discovery at the site, elder brother Tom receives a terse military letter detailing the findings.<\/p>\n

Looking back, Rocky is today awed by the military\u2019s scrupulous efforts to find and identify remains of lost soldiers. (The Joint POW\/MIA Accounting Command<\/a> directs those efforts, and according to its Web site 78,000 Americans are missing from World War II; 8,100 from the Korean War; 1,800 from Vietnam; 120 from the Cold War; and one from the Gulf War.)<\/p>\n

But at the time the letters are unsettling. \u201cI had no idea about the grim reports I would get,\u201d says Rocky. \u201cBits of flight suits. A report from a neighboring village about a boot. It felt macabre. The Navy was doing this in an entirely honorable way, doing what the military has always done. But for me, it felt 25 years too late.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, in a sense, it was just in time. As the letters arrive, Tom asks his mother about Harry, and she puts together an album: Harry\u2019s Bates report cards and papers, drawings he\u2019d made of their dream house, photos. She writes a note to Tom: \u201cThank you for asking to know more about him as a man.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2003 a Joint Accounting Command team recovers bone fragments. Next comes DNA analysis, which in this case requires a blood sample from a relative besides Tom or Bill. Harry\u2019s only sibling, Carol, is dead, but fate lends a hand: Carol\u2019s daughter has reconnected with Rocky in the past year, after her son finds a Web page tribute to Harry as part of a genealogy project. \u201cYou start being a believer when something like that happens,\u201d Rocky says.<\/p>\n

“I didn\u2019t think this would strike me as it did. Yet this has been very \u2014 very \u2014 good for us.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In May 2004, using a blood sample from Harry\u2019s niece, his remains are ID\u2019d. (No identification has been made for Roger Lester.) In August, Harry\u2019s burial takes place in Kent, Wash., and Bill delivers the eulogy<\/a>: \u201cThere had always been a part of me that wondered \u2014 and even hoped \u2014 \u2018What if they got out of that plane?\u2019 That little part of me is now being put to rest with my Dad\u2019s recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Rocky, a woman who always tried to look ahead, she is stunned by the impact on her life of this final chapter of her and Harry\u2019s story together, one that began with a chance meeting in the Bobcat Den more than 40 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am more settled and peaceful than I ever thought I would be,\u201d she says. \u201cI didn\u2019t think this would strike me as it did. Yet this has been very \u2014 very \u2014 good for us. We are a close family. But we are now closer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

The A-6A Intruder<\/strong><\/p>\n

Displayed at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Wash., is a vintage A-6 Intruder <\/a>painted in the scheme of the plane, call sign Viceroy 502<\/em>, that flew from the USS Kitty Hawk<\/em> and was shot down in August 1972, killing Harry Mossman ’65 and Roger Lester.<\/p>\n

Their names appear on each side of the canopy.<\/p>\n

\"(Photograph<\/a>

(Photograph by John Lanza ’67)<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The discovery \u2014 and final burial \u2014 of the remains of Harry Mossman \u201965, missing in action in Vietnam since 1972, happens 25 years later. In a sense, it\u2019s just in time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":127104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[7,224],"tags":[9054],"class_list":["post-127098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-society-culture","tag-vietnam-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127098"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":127106,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127098\/revisions\/127106"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}