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MIA bracelet finds its way back to McCook
McCOOK, Neb. --Cheryl Wild of Bellevue likes to go "hunting" at thrift stores. This January, Wild walked into a thrift store in Papillion and immediately spotted something in the display case she had to have.
"The first thing I noticed was the MIA bracelet. And I thought, what is an MIA bracelet doing in a junk store?" she said. "This is somebody's life, and it's selling for $4.99." The daughter of an Air Force mechanic who worked on damaged planes in the Vietnam War, Wild admitted she was slightly outraged.
She bought the bracelet and upon reading the enclosed insert, she found out it honored a Nebraska boy. "I knew then that it had to come home, home to McCook," she said.
So on Saturday morning, the MIA bracelet of Capt. Michael L. Klingner was returned to a memorial display dedicated to him at the McCook City Library, attended by a smattering of McCook Junior College (now McCook Community College) graduates of 1963-64, who were in town over the weekend for a reunion.
What was otherwise a lighthearted reunion turned somber as classmates remembered the turbulent times of the late 1960s, when young men faced being called up to serve at any moment, the loss of other local boys lost in Vietnam and the belated acknowledgment of those who served.
The nation was in an uproar by the late 1960s-early 1970s, seemingly split in two, with peace and love on side and the patriotic obligation to serve the county on the other.
"Mike was a tender-hearted guy, he spoke to everyone in the (school) hallways," recalled high school classmate Sharon Huegel. "He was one of the first in McCook to die and when we heard the news, we were really heartbroken. It was devastating."
According to the insert that came with the bracelet, on July 6, 1970, Klingner was the pilot of a F-100 "Super Sabre" in a flight of two that was conducting an early afternoon flight strike against an enemy supply line in Laos. The site was in a mountainous, jungled area, overrun with enemy troops. After hitting his target, a cache of 55-gallon drums, his low-flying aircraft impacted a nearby hillside. Klingner was declared Killed In Action/Body Not Recovered.
In 1992, in a joint task force between U.S. and Vietnamese, logbooks kept by the Viet Cong reported that a F-100 was shot down, corresponding to the same time and site of Klingner's crash. The report added cryptically, "the pilot paid for his crime." Klingner's body was never found.
Classmates of Klingner opened up and told their own experiences of Vietnam. McCook High School grad Bob Lundberg, a classmate of Klingner who was drafted and sent to Vietnam the same time as Klingner, learned Vietnamese and worked as a translator, intercepted Viet Cong messages in Morse code. McCook Junior College grad Andy Heck was recruited to the college from New Jersey on a football scholarship and was on the ground in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine Corps "grunt." While a doctor was applying compresses to his chest after he was injured, the doctor was shot in the head by a sniper and killed. His squad "went through a lot of people," Heck said.
Bob Harris also graduated with Klingner at MHS and was overcome with emotion when speaking of his former classmate, as were many in attendance.
Huegel recalled the sentiment at the time, her husband David also called up to Vietnam. "These Nebraska boys were following orders, doing what they though was the right thing to do," she said.
Good times in McCook were also remembered, many agreeing that it a privilege to grow up in the tight-knitted community. Harris recalled selling brooms door-to-door for his father and Janice Walker remembered how the cast of the first "big" musical at the high school, South Pacific, were allowed to sing in the picture windows at the department store DeGroffs, so enough tickets would be sold.
After the bracelet presentation, audience members slowly filed out of the room, giving each other hugs and planning another meet-up at a local eatery.
The bracelet will be kept in a display class in the library, along with the letter "M" from Klingner's high school jacket, a photograph of he and his wife newly married, smiling and walking down an aisle, and other memorabilia.