Name: Henry Muir Serex (known as Mickey) Rank/Branch: Q4/US Air Force Unit: 42nd Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron, Korat AB TH Date of Birth: 09 May 1931 Home City of Record: New Orleans, LA (family in CA) Date of Loss: 02 April 1972 Country of Loss: South Vietnam Loss Coordinates: 165000N 1070100E (YD146612) Status (in 1973): Missing in Action Category: 2 Acft/Vehicle/Ground: EB66E ("Bat 21")
Personnel in Incident: Robin F. Gatwood, Wayne L. Bolte, Anthony Giannangeli, Charles A. Levis, Henry M. Serex, Iceal Hambleton, Ronald P. Paschall, Bryon K. Kulland, John W. Frink, Jose M. Astorga, William J. Henderson, Mark Clark, James. H. Alley, Allen J. Avery, Peter H. Chapman, John H. Call, William R. Pearson, and Roy D. Prater. Also in close proximity to "Bat 21" on April 3: Allen D. Christensen, Douglas L O'Neil, Edward W. Williams, Larry a Zich, Bruce Charles Walker, and Larry F. Potts.
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project, 31 April 1990 from one or more of the following: raw data from US Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources and interviews.
REMARKS:
SYNOPSIS: On the afternoon of April 2, 1972, two Thailand-based EB66 aircraft (Bat 21 & Cat 22), from the 30th Air Division, were flying pathfinder escort for a cell of B52s bombing near the DMZ. Bat 21 took a direct SAM hit and the plane went down. The aircraft was observed by other flight members to break apart and crash. A single beeper signal was heard, that of navigator Hambleton. At this time it was assumed the rest of the crew died in the crash. The crew included Maj. Wayne L. Bolte, pilot; 1Lt. Robin F. Gatwood, Lt.Col. Anthony R. Giannangeli, Lt.Col. Charles A. Levis, and Maj. Henry M. Serex; all crew members. It should be noted that the lowest ranking man aboard this plane was Gatwood. This was not an ordinary crew, and its members, particularly Hambleton, would be a prize capture for the enemy because of the military knowledge they possessed. It became critical, therefore, that the U.S. locate Hambleton, and any other surviving crew members before the Vietnamese did -- and the Vietnamese were trying hard to find them.
An Army search and rescue team was nearby and dispatched two Uh1H "slicks" and two UH1B "Cobras". When they approached Hambleton's position just before dark, at about 50 feet off the ground, with one of the AH1G Cobra gunships flying at 300 feet for cover, two of the helicopters were shot down. One, the Cobra (Blue Ghost 28) reached safety and the crew was picked up, without having seen the other downed helicopter. The other, a UH1H, had just flown over some huts into a clearing when they encountered ground fire, and the helicopter exploded. Jose Astorga, the gunner, was injured in the chest and knee by the gunfire. Astorga became unconscious, and when he recovered, the helicopter was on the ground. He found the pilot, lying outside the helicopter. The co-pilot was strapped in his seat and conscious. The crew chief was pinned by his leg in the helicopter, but alive. WO Franks urged Astorga to leave them, and Astorga was captured. He soon observed the aircraft to be hit by automatic weapons fire, and to explode with the rest of the crew inside. He never saw the rest of the crew again. Astorga was released by the North Vietnamese in 1973.
On April 6, an attempt was made to pick up Clark and Hambleton which resulted in an HH53C helicopter being shot down. The chopper was badly hit. The helicopter landed on its side and continued to burn, consuming the entire craft, and presumably all 6 men aboard. The crew of this aircraft consisted of James H. Alley, Allen J. Avery, John H. Call III, Peter H. Chapman William R. Pearson, and Roy D. Prater. Search and rescue noted no signs of survivors, but it is felt that the Vietnamese probably know the fate of this crew because of the close proximity of the downed aircraft to enemy locations.
On April 7 another Air Force OV10A went down in the area with Larry Potts and Bruce Walker aboard. Walker, evaded capture for 11 days, whie it is reported that Potts was captured and died in Quang Binh prison. Potts, the observer, was a Marine Corps offiver. Walker's last radio transmission to search and rescue was for SAR not to make an attemp to rescue, the enemy was closing in. Both men remain unaccounted for.
Hambleton and Clark were rescued after 12 incredible days. Hambleton continually changed positions reported on enemy activity as he went, even to the extent of calling in close air strikes near his position. He was tracked by a code he devised relating to the length and lie direction of various golf holes that he knew well. ANother 20 or so Americans were not so fortunate.
In July 1986, the daughter of Henry Serex learned that, one week after all search and rescue had been called off for Bat 21, another mission was mounted to recover another downed crewmember from Bat 21. She doesn't know whether this crewmember was her father or another man on the EB66 air- craft. No additional information has been released. When the movie "Bat 21" was released, she was horrified to learn that virtually no mention of the rest of the crew was made in the film.
In Vietnam, to most fighting men, the man that fought beside them, whether in the air or on the ground, was worth dying for. Each understood that the other would die for him if necessary. Thus, also considering the critical knowledge possessed by Hambleton and some of the others, the seemingly uncanny means taken to recover Clark and Hambleton are not so unusual at all.
Henry M. Serex was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel during the period he was maintained missing.
General Wold states in his letter, "With regard to the purported 'SEREX' symbol, no employee of the Defense Department has ever observed the word 'SEREX' on any satellite imagery or photography maintained by the United States Government."
From the Senate Select Committee Report:
They (JSSA analysts) correlated 19 of those authenticator numbers with numbers belonging to Americans still listed as missing in Southeast Asia. They also identified what appeared to be a name scratched in a field near a prison compound, in a 1992 photo. The significance of this possible symbol is reflected in testimony received during the Committee's hearing on symbols:
Senator Grassley: Mr. Dussault, did you also think that you saw [sic] faintly scratched in the field?
Mr. Dussault: Yes, sir.
Senator Grassley: Without telling us the name, did you try to match it with the names on the missing list?
Mr. Dussault: About three days later, yes, sir. At first I didn't realize it was a name.
Senator Grassley: Did you see, 72 TA 88?
Mr. Dussault: Yes, sir. To my recollection that's what I saw.
Senator Grassley: How did you interpret that?
Mr. Dussault: At first, my first interpretation of that is --72 was the year the guy went down. TA was his E&E code letters. And 88 could have been the year he arrived there or the year he left. And that was my interpretation. I don't know if that's even close. That's just speculation.
Senator Grassley: When you saw 72 TA 88, did it match a person that was missing?
Mr. Dussault: Sir, again, we are talking a year, two letters, TA--and those are E&E code letters that applied during 1972.
Senator Grassley: When you found the name, though, did it match when that person went down?
Mr. Dussault: Yes, sir." (page 203)
The symbol in question, which Robert Dussault was asked during questioning not to mention, was later revealed to be the 'SEREX' symbol. Robert Dussault is not only a Defense Department employee, but is the Deputy Director of JSSA, the pentagon unit tasked with the responsibility of devising distress signals, training pilots how to use them, and interpreting evidence of distress signals. Dussault, who had also been schooled in photo imagery, was the subject of another Sydney Schanberg article dated, 07 Jan 1994:
"Dussault came across the SEREX photo on Aug. 13, 1992, while at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters. He had been invited there to brief CIA photo interpreters on his area of expertise -- distress signals." "While he was briefing the CIA men, they brought out several satellite photos to show him some of the areas they had photographed. Among the photos was a blown-up print, about 2 feet by 2 1/2 , of a piece of a field alongside the Dong Vai prison in North Vietnam. 'My eyebrows went way up,' Dussault told someone later."
"On the photo, he saw not only the letters S-E-R-E-X but a string of nine or 10 numbers above it and a legend below it that read '72TA88'. T and A, said Dussault, were distress letters assigned to pilots in 1972, the year Serex went down. Struck hard by the photo, he circled the symbols in red ink."
"Dussault described the before and after in testimony to the Senate committee: 'The CIA guys...said look, we saw the numbers. They admitted seeing the same numbers I did. When I circled it, they were right there and they said yeah, we saw it'.
Listed clearly on the official Missing-In-Action Report is the name: Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Henry M. SEREX.
Robert Dussault is still working for the Defense Department, but the photograph with the red circle has apparently not been seen since and the photo imagery itself is locked tightly away in Defense Department files.
Regarding General Wold's statement, "To our knowledge, the letters 'TA' were never used as an official evasion and escape or distress symbol during the war in Southeast Asia", please note Deputy Director Dussault's statements specifically addressing this point in his questioning before the Senate Committee above. Also, please see (attached) copies of two recently declassified Defense Department documents clearly showing 'T' as the very first code listed under the heading of "PRIMARY E&E CODE LETTERS" and 'A' the very first code listed under the heading "BACK-UP E&E CODE LETTERS".
Although the Pathet Lao stated publicly they held "tens of tens" of American POWs, the U.S. never negotiated their release because the U.S. did not officially recognize the Pathet Lao as a governmental entity. Consequently, nearly 600 Americans lost in Laos disappeared. Not one American held by the Lao was ever released.
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