An old pal from the Compu$erve Military Forum days, Joe Hannon, is flying in from Texas today. He'll stay with us tonight, then tomorrow we'll head for Providence RI where he'll hook up with a knot of his old SF buddies. They will start to say goodbye to Joe's best pal, "Walt," who was declared missing in the western A Shau Valley with two other Americans and their Vietnamese MACV-SOG CCN team members of RT Asp on May 10, 1971. Information from the traitor Walker spy ring gave the NVA time to prepare an ambush in the insertion LZ; the bad guys were waiting for them.

Walt's remains have finally been found, and his funeral will be this Saturday morning in Providence.

But tomorrow, before the wake, and before the funeral, the SF stories will start, most of them involving the shenanigans of Hannon and Walt, both in Vietnam and here at home.

Mike Curran and Larry Gwin will drive down from Boston to be with Joe for the funeral on Saturday; Max Nicholas will actually leave the island nation of Nantucket to attend and see Joe again; Al Mixer and John Krasnitski will drive in with me. The Patriot Guard Riders are set to go. The RI Chapter of the SF Assn is participating, as are several National Guard and active Army SF Groups.

Providence Journal piece follows:

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36 years later, a Vietnam vet is finally home

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, May 3, 2007
By Bob Kerr
Journal Staff Writer

The remains of Special Forces Staff Sgt. Lewis C. Walton were taken from a plane at T.F. Green Airport yesterday morning and formally accepted by an honor guard of his own.

Members of Company A, 2nd Battalion of the 19th Special Forces Group of the Rhode Island National Guard stood on the tarmac in Warwick for the brief ceremony as travelers stood at the windows of the terminal above to take in the return of a Rhode Islander from a war that claimed him 36 years ago.

Walton’s remains were accompanied from Hawaii by his son, Sgt. Lewis C. Walton Jr., a member of the Rhode Island National Guard who has served two tours in Iraq. The remains were transferred to a hearse from the Carpenter-Jenks Funeral Home. Before the procession left the airport, it was joined by members of a Vietnam veterans motorcycle club who had large American flags flying from their bikes.

There will be a wake at the funeral home in West Warwick tomorrow from 4 to 6 p.m. to which family and friends are invited. The public is invited to the funeral Mass Saturday at 9 a.m. at St. Anthony Church, 547 Plainfield St., Providence. That will be followed by a procession to the Rhode Island Veterans Cemetery in Exeter, where the remains will be buried with full military honors.

While many of the spectators in the airport terminal yesterday probably had no idea what they were seeing, a rich piece of Army history was unfolding below them. Walton, who had served in Korea, returned to Rhode Island, then reenlisted to serve in Vietnam, was a Green Beret, that storied and sometimes controversial band of soldiers who often measured success by the lack of attention they brought to themselves. They operated in small units and were often inserted behind enemy lines to gather intelligence.

On May 3, 1971, a reconnaissance team made up of Walton and two other staff sergeants, Klaus Bingham and James Luttrell, and three Montagnards, was inserted by helicopter in an area in Quang Nam Province about 10 miles from the Laotian border in South Vietnam. They were to report on enemy activity along a tributary to the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Pilots reported seeing mirror flashes from the area two days later, but rescue teams were unsuccessful in finding team members. The three Green Berets were declared missing in action. In the late ’70s, they were declared dead/body not recovered.

But the search was never officially called off. Evidence continued to be collected. Vietnamese who remembered action in the areas where Americans were missing were interviewed.

“We never lost hope,” said Jacquelyn Walton-Williams, Walton’s daughter, who was in elementary school when her father left for Vietnam.

In late 2004, the family heard from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii that some remains had been found. A positive identification was delayed while the site was searched.

Positive identification was made earlier this year and Lewis Walton Jr. made plans to head for Hawaii to bring the remains home.

Remains of the men Walton was with were not found.

Now, Jacquelyn Walton-Williams can finally open the letter, the one she sent to her father when she was 7 years old. It could not be delivered. It was returned, but she has held off opening it. She said she would do so when his remains were back in Rhode Island.

She plans to read parts of the letter at her father’s Mass on Saturday.

bkerr@projo.com