January 14, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Ed Sykes tells the remarkable story of his unbreakable bond with his compatriot Dave Dinan and the unrelenting and ultimately successful task of recovering his remains from the jungles of Vietnam.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. From nineteen fifty
nine to nineteen seventy five, the Civil War raged on
in the Jungles west of Vietnam between the Kingdom of
Laos supported by the United States and Lootian Communists supported
by North Vietnam. The Hidden War saw a great devastation
(00:33):
not only to the Laosians living in the middle of it,
but to Americans fighting in it as well. One of
those Americans fighting was at sikes Ed was the commander
of the one hundred and eighty fourth Kansas Air National
Guard and is a well regarded fighter pilot. He is
here to tell his story of service and a bond
(00:54):
that was formed between him and another brother in arms
that lasted far beyond the end of the Vietnam War.
And by the way, his son Bart Sykes will be
doing a reading from his father's book, and Bart's is
himself a former Air Force pilot.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Take it away at it.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
I decided I was going to be a fighter pilot
pretty young. I had gone to a movie Saber Jets
with a good friend of mine. It was about f
eighty six is in Korea, and we were sitting out
on the swings after that, his name was Butch Pasture,
Frank Pasture, and we were sitting out on the swings
(01:39):
and we decided we're going to be fighter pilots, and
we followed through on that. But I was sort of
dumb about this. I thought, in order to be a
fighter pilot, I needed to be an engineer. So I
headed off to the University of Wiscon in Madison and
(02:03):
joined Air Force ROTC. Made sort of a fool of
myself by being a young kid from Kentucky. And the
first encounter I had with a military officer, Colonel Hosman,
he threw me out of his office when I walked
up and told him I wanted to.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Be a fighter pilot.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
He said, ah, you come back tomorrow for ROTC orientation.
I said, I don't need to come back. He looked
at me and said, young man, get out of my office.
You come back to orientation tomorrow, Yes, sir. Anyway, I
went through that whole process. I got married between my
fourth and fifth year of the engineering curriculum at Madison.
(02:42):
Mary and I met on a beach in Chicago, and
it just happened that same guy who had talked to
me about being a fighter pilot was the guy that
was with me when we met Mary and another friend
of hers, and somehow, I don't know why she put
up with me, but she did, and we were married
a couple of years later, and the rest is history.
(03:09):
When I graduated from college, I went to fly in
school at Reese Air Force Base, Texas.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
And somehow in my mind I came up.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
With this idea that I wanted to fly the best
fighter that the Air Force had at that time. The
F one O five was the airplane that was probably
the best fighter, but it was also the fighter that
had the most dangerous mission. So like a dummy, I
worked hard to get myself in that position.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Here's Ed's Sun reading a quote from his father's book.
Speaker 5 (03:42):
You love a lot of things if you live around them.
But there isn't any woman, and there isn't any horse,
nor any before nor any after that is as lovely
as a great airplane, and men who love them are
faithful to them, even though they leave them for others.
A man has only one virginity to lose in fighters,
and if it is a lovely plane, he loses it
(04:03):
to there his heart will always be ernest hemingway.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yours AD's wife Mary.
Speaker 6 (04:12):
When he got his assignment, he was at work. He
called me at our apartment. He said, Harry, I got the.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
One on five.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
I said, what, oh five?
Speaker 6 (04:21):
And I cried because a lot of people were getting
killed in that And it was at that point that
I decided to start trying to get pregnant in every baby,
so if he got killed, I'd have something left.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
As a matter of fact, she did get pregnant here
at McConnell when I was going through training, and when
I left for Southeast Asia, she was six months pregnant
with our first child. So yeah, that departure from the
United States when I was on my way to Thailand
was well, it was just pretty emotion I guess for
(05:00):
both of us. I could feel that little kid kicking
in her stomach, and both of us wondered if I
ever get to see him. We didn't know it was
a little boy at the time, but it did turn
out to be a little boy who subsequently graduated from
the Air Force Academy and was spent his career as
in F sixteen.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
Pilot made me proud. All my kids made me proud.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Right anyway, Hemingway nailed it.
Speaker 5 (05:30):
The F and O five thunder Chief was that fighter
for me. Few men on this planet ever got a
chance to strap a beautiful fighter to their back and
give it life. I lost my virginity as described by
Hemingway in the F one O five in nineteen sixty eight,
and would go on to fly other fighters. But somehow
the Thud, as it was called by its pilots and maintainers,
(05:51):
will always hold my heart. Why did you get so enamored.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
With that plane?
Speaker 3 (05:56):
I think it's called testosterol. I think there are certain
people that just have this chemical need to go out and.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Do stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
It was actually built as a penetration bomber against the Russians.
We needed an airplane that would go really fast carry
nuclear weapons into the heart of Russia or the Soviet
Union at that time. That was why they built it,
and it was built to go super fast. It was
(06:34):
a mockt airplane was on the deck. This is at
sea level. That airplane would go well past the speed
of sound and like almost one thousand.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
Miles an hour on the deck.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
It was pretty amazing to sit in the cockpit of
an airplane going that fast. In fact, I had the
opportunity to go supersonic below sea level. Now you probably
never on that, but supersonic below sea level is pretty
amazing just watching things go by. Actually, you don't look
(07:09):
at anything on the side when you're going that fast.
You're looking straight ahead. Everything else is a blur because
you're going as fast as a bullet. I mean, you're
really going fast. And there was a movie that came
out while I was in flight school. It's called There
Is a Way, and it was a story the F
one o five's flying missions out of Karat, Thailand, and
(07:31):
it was pretty exciting and they interviewed some of the
pilots and stuff. As soon as I saw that, I said, yep,
that's me.
Speaker 6 (07:38):
Well they showed that to the wives too, But I
don't remember any fatalities happening during the movie.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
No, there, it was all this great stuff. The other
thing that motivated me was if you got to fly
the one oh five in Southeast Asia and you completed
a hundred missions, you've got a patch that you could
wear on your arm. It's called a hundred mission patch.
I wanted that patch so bad. That was the reason
(08:10):
it was. It was pure and simple stupidity. But you know,
I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Speaker 6 (08:17):
Well, I think watching them from the periphery, the seduction
about those airplanes is that they are with another group
of men who know exactly what they're talking about when
they talk about, Oh, I did this, I did that.
And it's that lifestyle of being with a small group
(08:40):
of people that really you can share everything with, all
the exciting things, all the terrifying things, and that's part
of the attraction.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
There's a there's a hell of a lot of bonding
that goes on between fighter polots who go to combat
together or who have shared that experience of going It's
just it's hard to explain, but it is a bond.
It is a bond of brotherhood. And like I had
said it Dave's eulogy, he was a brother because that's
(09:18):
exactly the way I felt.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
You've been listening to Ed Sykes, his bride Mary and
his son Barts. And by the way, when you join
the military, it's a family affair. It's not just the soldier.
He got the idea to be a fighter pilot by
watching a movie when he was a kid, and when
he announces to his wife that he got the one
oh five, he said a lot of people were getting
killed in that She didn't quite have the enthusiasm he
(09:43):
did about landing his dream plane, the thud by the
way it's called. When we come back more of the
story of Ed Sikes, his family, and that band of
brother aviators. Here on our American stories, and we returned
(10:10):
to our American stories and our story with Ed Sykes,
author of The Patch and the Stream.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Where the American Fell.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
When we last left off, Ed was telling us all
about how he became a fighter pilot. It was an
early dream of his after watching the war films Sabre Jet,
and it was a dream he managed to chase down,
eventually becoming the pilot of an F one O five.
Ed would be sent to fight in Vietnam, and while
stationed in that neck of the woods, he'd become close
(10:39):
to a fellow pilot, a brother named Dave Dinan. Let's
get back to the story once again. Here's Ed and
his son Bart's reading from the aforementioned book.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Went to Southeast Asia, flew one hundred and eighteen combat
missions in the one oh five, got shot at a
few times, did not get shot down.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Luckily.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
I have a good number of my friends who were
shot down, and a number of them died at any rate.
In two thousand and nine, I was something I did
every year as I planted my garden. I planted my
potatoes on Saint Patrick's Day. And it just turned out
(11:20):
that one of my friends who had been killed, a
guy named Dave Dining, had been shot down on Saint
Patrick's Day in nineteen sixty nine, and I always wondered
what had happened to Dave. And I'll tell you one
of the reasons that Dave meant so much to me
was while he was it was sort of interesting. Another
(11:43):
friend of ours, another Lieutenant Bob Zukowski, had been rooming
with Dave Dining, and Zukowski got killed in January of
nineteen sixty nine, and Dave and Bob Zukowski were very
close from friends. Dave was a pretty sensible guy. He
(12:04):
was very smart. He had a degree in physics from
a university out on the East Coast. He had attended
MIT for quite a while. But anyway, Dave was I
could tell he was not very happy about what had
happened and Dave, because Bob was gone and I just arrived,
they moved me in with Dave, and he was now
(12:25):
my roommate, and he would sit around and because he
had probably seventy five missions by now, and he had
a lot of experience. And I still remember it him
sitting there and said saying, ed only dump the Strafe
gun sits talking about taking your gun and trying to
(12:46):
shoot another gun site or a gun sight on the ground.
He said, you know you're moving. He's sitting there stationary,
and you're going to lose that. And I'll be damned
if he didn't get shot down Straf in a gun sight.
And I think it was because this whole brother thing.
You know, he was really upset that he had lost
(13:09):
Bob Zakowski and he just started doing some stuff that
he knew he shouldn't be doing. He told me not
to do it, but he was out there doing it
and it cost him his life. I think he wanted
some revenge. I don't know if that's what it was.
But he jumped out of an airplane. He came down
(13:30):
in the parachute, hit the ground. A PJ, a pair
of rescue jumper and a jolly green Giant came in
to pick him up.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
They found his body. He was dead.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
He was wedged between a tree and a rock. They
thought they were getting shot at and they left the body.
And I knew that while I was still in Thailand,
but I had no idea that they hadn't recovered his
body at the time. But a couple days actually, the
day after I got after Dave was shot down, squadron
(14:00):
commander told me that I was going to be the
summary courts officer for Dave. And what that meant was
I was going to pack up all of his belongings,
put him in a box for delivery back to his parents,
and then I was required to write a letter to
his parents. While I was doing this, I got a
(14:20):
knock on the door and it was a young lady
who I recognized. She was an intelligence officer, one of
the very first females in the combat zone during Vietnam.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Her name was val Galula.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
And Valerie knocked on the door and I said, hey, Val,
what's going on? She was crying, she was really upset,
and I said, what is it, Valerie? And she said, well,
could I have a couple of Dave's things? I said, Valerie,
I've read the orders that I have. I can't give
you anything of Dave's And she said, well, it would
(14:57):
it make any difference if I told you we're going
to be married Saturday? I said, well, Valerie, I don't know.
I really don't have an idea. I didn't realize you
were going to get married. She said, go ask father
Jean gets spare of it. He was the Catholic chaplain,
and he'll let you know that we were supposed to
get married on Saturday. So I went over to visit
(15:20):
my good friend father Jean, really great guy, and he said, ed,
I know why you're here. And I asked him about
Valerie and Dave and he said, yep, they're going to
get married Saturday, and unfortunately that's not going to happen.
Went back to the Hooch is the room we lived in,
(15:41):
completed packing his stuff. The next morning, Valerie came by again,
and this time she was really really upset, and she said, ed,
did you go talk to Father Jean? And I said, well, yes,
I did, Valerie, and he told me that you were
going to be married Saturday. And I said well, and
she said, well, does it make any difference? Can I
(16:02):
have those items that I want now? And she said
and I said, Valor, I've read the regulation. I don't
think I can give you anything because it belongs to
the family. She looked at me and said, Edward, make
any difference if I told you I'm pregnant. And I said,
what would you like? And I gave her a couple
of a little teddy bear, a bracelet and maybe a necklace,
(16:25):
some stuff that I'm sure the parents wouldn't have recognized
the value of it. But and in those days, if
you became pregnant, a female became pregnant in the Air Force,
you're out of there. He simply discharged you. So within
a couple of days, Valerie was sent back to the US.
And one of the things I've talked to her since,
(16:46):
but one of the things she talked about was when
she hit the US in California, in the airport at
San Francisco, she pulled her wedding dress out of her
bag and threw it in the trash.
Speaker 4 (16:59):
And she obviously.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Distraught at any rate. Going back to two thousand and nine,
I had planted my potatoes and I thought of Dave.
And that same year, my son was stationed at Washington,
d C was taking language training to go to Moscow, Russia.
He was going to work in the embassy there.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
So I went to Washington, d C. Went to the.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
War Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, looked at all the names
of guys that I had flown with who I knew
had been killed over there, and it turned out that
three of them had not had their remains brought back
to the US. I can't even begin to explain how
bad I felt about that.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
These are all.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Guys I knew. They were, guys I'd fought with. I'd
covered their six o'clock and they'd covered my six o'clock.
And I thought to myself, you know the worst thing
that could have happened to me is that I've been
shot down in my body had been left on the
ground in Laws or Noalth, Vietnam or wherever. It just
(18:06):
didn't seem right. So I decided then that I was
going to go find Dave Dinan's remains.
Speaker 5 (18:12):
People would occasionally ask me what motivated me to continue
the search, and I would talk about Dave's family and
our friendship and in a few cases Valerie, but I
would never state what was really my driving force. My
country on this issue is an embarrassment, and I want
to fix it.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
And what a story you're hearing from Ed Sykes about
this brotherhood of aviators and the loss and the price
paid for serving during times of war he lost not
one but several friends pals, And that story of his
friend Dave Dinan and his two b bride Valerie Well
(18:53):
finding out that that wedding would never happen and that
she'd be raising a child without the love of her life.
These are the reasons we tell these stories, and they
move us. And for all those still serving, now prepared
to fight for us, that same risk.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Is there for anyone in uniform.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
When we come back the story of Ed Sykes, the
story of so much more his family and the families
had served during the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Here on our American stories, and we.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Returned to our American stories and the story of Ed
Sykes and his brother in arms Dave Dinan. When we
last left off, Ed had come to the conclusion, while
planting potatoes on Saint Patrick's Day, years after the Vietnam War,
that he'd find out what happened to Dave Dinan's body.
(19:59):
He would find out that not only were Dave's remains
never recovered during the war, but they hadn't been recovered
after either. So he made it his mission to give
Dave a proper burial in the United States. There was
one problem. Let's get back to the story here again
is Ed Sykes, his wife Mary, and his son Bart's
(20:21):
reading from Dave's book, The Patch and the Stream Where
the American Fell.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
Didn't know where to start. The first thing I did
is start looking for his family.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
I remember that Dave was from New Jersey, and one night,
as I was having trouble getting to sleep, my mind
threw out a name, Nutley. It's amazing how much the
human brain has stored in its hard drive, and how
it can sometimes spit out of detail without any reasonable explanation.
I got out of bed and wrote Nutley down on
a notepad in my office. The next morning, I found
(20:56):
Nutley printed on my notepad and went straight to Google
to see if it was a real place. Bingo, it's
a town in New Jersey. I then googled Nutley, New Jersey, dining,
but got no results.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
I finally found he had two brothers.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Left.
Speaker 5 (21:17):
Over the holidays, my youngest son, Ezra, brought his fiancee,
Jill Rockoff to visit us in Kansas. She was a lovely,
fun loving young lady, who had played hockey for Dartmouth.
She and Ezra were settled in Boston with good jobs,
and we're going to get married. The following August. We
talked about the wedding and Mary and I agreed we
would host the rehearsal dinner. We also decided to make
(21:39):
a trip to Boston in February to do some planning
and pick out a site for the dinner. So what
does this have to do with Dave Dinan? It turns
out a lot. Mary and I packed our bags and
made the trip to Boston. When we arrived, Jill and
Ezra drove us to Hingham, Massachusetts, where we had been
invited to stay with her parents, Mark and Throckoff. And
(22:01):
Mark provided us with a great seafood dinner that evening.
During dinner, he mentioned that on Sunday mornings he always
walked down the street to the Atlantic Bagel and Coffee
Company to pick up a week's supply of bagels. I
asked him to let me tag along. I'll leave the
house at seven thirty. Are you up for that? Don't
leave without me, I replied. Early the next morning, we
(22:22):
made the short hike to the bagel company. Mark placed
his order, and we sat down with some coffee waiting
for the order to be filled. Have you lived her
all your life? Mark? No, My family is from New Jersey. Originally,
doesn't hurt to ask? Are you familiar with Nutley? Sure,
it's a short drive from where my father owned a
tailor shop in Elizabeth. I went on to ask him
(22:43):
if he had ever known any Diners while he was
growing up. Don't remember anyone by that name, but I'll
ask my father if he knew the family. I mentioned
my search for Dave's remains, and he was interested as
I explained the circumstances of Dave's death and my unsuccessful
quest to find the Dining family. When Mark's order ready,
we took the bagels and headed back to their house.
(23:04):
Mark's curiosity about Dave had clearly been aroused, because when
we got back, he took me to his computer and
entered Dave Dining US Air Force nineteen sixty nine. There
were several hits, and as we went through them, I
recognized them as items I had seen before. However, he
selected one I had not seen. As I read it,
(23:24):
I exclaimed I didn't know he graduated from MIT. The
cobwebs in my brain suddenly broke loose, and I remember
Dave telling me back in the day that he had
started out at MIT but had finished somewhere else with
a degree in physics. I also remember discussing science issues
with him, as we had similar backgrounds. Mark then volunteered,
(23:45):
I'm an MIT graduate. I'll bet I started at MIT
about the time Dave graduated.
Speaker 4 (23:50):
Next week, I'll contact.
Speaker 5 (23:51):
The alumni association and see if they have any information
on Dave's family. Mark, bless his soul, got right on it.
After a little research through the MIT Mark found the
following article in the MIT Alumni magazine. Air Force Pilot
Lieutenant David dined In the third sixty five was killed
in the line of duty in March of nineteen sixty
nine in Laos after he was forced to bail out
(24:14):
of an F one Z five jet that had been
hit by ground fire. His name was the last to
be added to the war memorial in Lobby ten. The
class of nineteen eighty two has been the sponsor of
the Vietnam Memorial plaque in Building ten since its exception
and paid for the engraving. MITMA. The MIIT Military Alumni
(24:34):
Association is working with MIT staff to ensure that the
memorial is updated to include all conflicts since nineteen sixty nine.
If uinov An miit Alum who was killed in the
line of duty, please contact Fran Moron. Fran Moron was
an administrative assistant for the Dean of Students. Mark sent
(24:54):
an email to Fran. Within a few days, Mark received
an email back from Fran. This is a bittersweet surprise
that you would contact me concerning David Dining's memorial at MIT. Yes,
this is very much a coincidence that your daughter's future
father in law was a pilot with David. Perhaps he
the future father in law, is in touch with or
(25:15):
will now because of this email, be in touch with
Charles Dinan Jr. David's brother.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
I talked to those two brothers, told them what I
wanted to do, and they laughed and said, there's no
reason to do that. Ed, we gave up twenty five
years ago. We don't expect that you're going to find anything.
I said, well, do you mind if I try? He
said no, we go ahead and give it a try.
And I told them that I wanted them to become
(25:41):
more involved with the bureaucrats that ran the system, and
I asked them to come with me to Washington, DC
and meet some of these people and let them know
that the family wanted those remains returned, and they agreed
to do that. Over the next few years, I made
three trips to Laos looking for any clues or any
(26:04):
idea of where Dave's remains might be. And this is
the part that I figured would make a difference is
but now I was sixty eight years old and I
was over there stomping around in the jungle doing the
work that these guys from the recovery teams were supposed
(26:24):
to be doing. Mary was not all a big fan
of this. When I started, well, you tell what.
Speaker 6 (26:29):
You say a few things, let's make this real, you said.
When he first said, oh, I'm going to go over
Loos and find his body, I thought, oh my god.
I said, if you get attacked by the Laotian tribesmen,
(26:51):
falling a crator or something, I am not going to
come and get your body.
Speaker 4 (26:59):
And it worked.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
They started paying attention to me, and then when I
brought those two brothers in to Washington, d C. They
really started getting interested. And then finally, after a couple
of years, we found that PJ, who had gone down,
found Dave's body and asked the people of the bureaucrats
to take him back to Southeast Asia and looked for
(27:25):
any clues of Day's remains. They went back and just
luckily found Dave's ID card laying on the ground way
up at Northern Laws, in a real obscure place.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
At any rate.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
This PJ came back and he called me up on
the telephone through some kind of magic telephone line. It
was real early in the morning. Mary was doing something.
I think she got the phone call in the house.
I was outside and I just had a really nice
little litter of pigs, and I was really happy. The
(28:02):
sun was shining, and I was walking to the house
and Mary opens the sliding glass door and said, hey, Ed,
it's Leland Sorensen on the line.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
Leland was the name of the guy.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
I got on the line with him and he said, hey, Ed,
you're not going to believe this, but we just found
Dave's ID card laying on the ground way to hell out.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
And the sticks in the jungle.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
He said, I can't believe it, and I said I
can't believe it either, Leland. But from then on now
that the bureaucrats had all kinds of interest in going
back and looking for the body. A couple of years later,
I went over there and did some little coersion to
make sure they got to that site and looked for
his remains. They went in, started looking for his remains,
(28:52):
immediately started finding bone fragments and teeth and some other stuff.
They sent it back to the laboratory where they checked
on the remains.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
It's in Hawaii.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
They did the DnaA DNA samples that had been sent
by the brothers, and they said, hey, that's him. And
in April of twenty eighteen we set up a recovery
ceremony at Arlington. They flew the body in from Hawaii,
(29:30):
landed at Reagan Airport, and I was lucky enough to
be asked to do the eulogy for Dave at the
chapel at Arlington. It was probably one of the best
days of my life. It was pretty phenomenal that I
could stand in front of all these people who knew
Dave and had been around him and said, hey, we're
(29:51):
not going to quit.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
We're going to find Dave's remains. And we did. It
was pretty neat.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
The story of Ed Sikes and his family, of Dave
Dinan and his pals lost in combat, and the story
of so much more.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Here on our American Stories.
And we returned to our American stories. From nineteen fifty
nine to nineteen seventy five, the Civil War raged on
in the Jungles west of Vietnam between the Kingdom of
Laos supported by the United States and Lootian Communists supported
by North Vietnam. The Hidden War saw a great devastation
(00:33):
not only to the Laosians living in the middle of it,
but to Americans fighting in it as well. One of
those Americans fighting was at sikes Ed was the commander
of the one hundred and eighty fourth Kansas Air National
Guard and is a well regarded fighter pilot. He is
here to tell his story of service and a bond
(00:54):
that was formed between him and another brother in arms
that lasted far beyond the end of the Vietnam War.
And by the way, his son Bart Sykes will be
doing a reading from his father's book, and Bart's is
himself a former Air Force pilot.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Take it away at it.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
I decided I was going to be a fighter pilot
pretty young. I had gone to a movie Saber Jets
with a good friend of mine. It was about f
eighty six is in Korea, and we were sitting out
on the swings after that, his name was Butch Pasture,
Frank Pasture, and we were sitting out on the swings
(01:39):
and we decided we're going to be fighter pilots, and
we followed through on that. But I was sort of
dumb about this. I thought, in order to be a
fighter pilot, I needed to be an engineer. So I
headed off to the University of Wiscon in Madison and
(02:03):
joined Air Force ROTC. Made sort of a fool of
myself by being a young kid from Kentucky. And the
first encounter I had with a military officer, Colonel Hosman,
he threw me out of his office when I walked
up and told him I wanted to.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Be a fighter pilot.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
He said, ah, you come back tomorrow for ROTC orientation.
I said, I don't need to come back. He looked
at me and said, young man, get out of my office.
You come back to orientation tomorrow, Yes, sir. Anyway, I
went through that whole process. I got married between my
fourth and fifth year of the engineering curriculum at Madison.
(02:42):
Mary and I met on a beach in Chicago, and
it just happened that same guy who had talked to
me about being a fighter pilot was the guy that
was with me when we met Mary and another friend
of hers, and somehow, I don't know why she put
up with me, but she did, and we were married
a couple of years later, and the rest is history.
(03:09):
When I graduated from college, I went to fly in
school at Reese Air Force Base, Texas.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
And somehow in my mind I came up.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
With this idea that I wanted to fly the best
fighter that the Air Force had at that time. The
F one O five was the airplane that was probably
the best fighter, but it was also the fighter that
had the most dangerous mission. So like a dummy, I
worked hard to get myself in that position.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Here's Ed's Sun reading a quote from his father's book.
Speaker 5 (03:42):
You love a lot of things if you live around them.
But there isn't any woman, and there isn't any horse,
nor any before nor any after that is as lovely
as a great airplane, and men who love them are
faithful to them, even though they leave them for others.
A man has only one virginity to lose in fighters,
and if it is a lovely plane, he loses it
(04:03):
to there his heart will always be ernest hemingway.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yours AD's wife Mary.
Speaker 6 (04:12):
When he got his assignment, he was at work. He
called me at our apartment. He said, Harry, I got the.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
One on five.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
I said, what, oh five?
Speaker 6 (04:21):
And I cried because a lot of people were getting
killed in that And it was at that point that
I decided to start trying to get pregnant in every baby,
so if he got killed, I'd have something left.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
As a matter of fact, she did get pregnant here
at McConnell when I was going through training, and when
I left for Southeast Asia, she was six months pregnant
with our first child. So yeah, that departure from the
United States when I was on my way to Thailand
was well, it was just pretty emotion I guess for
(05:00):
both of us. I could feel that little kid kicking
in her stomach, and both of us wondered if I
ever get to see him. We didn't know it was
a little boy at the time, but it did turn
out to be a little boy who subsequently graduated from
the Air Force Academy and was spent his career as
in F sixteen.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
Pilot made me proud. All my kids made me proud.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Right anyway, Hemingway nailed it.
Speaker 5 (05:30):
The F and O five thunder Chief was that fighter
for me. Few men on this planet ever got a
chance to strap a beautiful fighter to their back and
give it life. I lost my virginity as described by
Hemingway in the F one O five in nineteen sixty eight,
and would go on to fly other fighters. But somehow
the Thud, as it was called by its pilots and maintainers,
(05:51):
will always hold my heart. Why did you get so enamored.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
With that plane?
Speaker 3 (05:56):
I think it's called testosterol. I think there are certain
people that just have this chemical need to go out and.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Do stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
It was actually built as a penetration bomber against the Russians.
We needed an airplane that would go really fast carry
nuclear weapons into the heart of Russia or the Soviet
Union at that time. That was why they built it,
and it was built to go super fast. It was
(06:34):
a mockt airplane was on the deck. This is at
sea level. That airplane would go well past the speed
of sound and like almost one thousand.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
Miles an hour on the deck.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
It was pretty amazing to sit in the cockpit of
an airplane going that fast. In fact, I had the
opportunity to go supersonic below sea level. Now you probably
never on that, but supersonic below sea level is pretty
amazing just watching things go by. Actually, you don't look
(07:09):
at anything on the side when you're going that fast.
You're looking straight ahead. Everything else is a blur because
you're going as fast as a bullet. I mean, you're
really going fast. And there was a movie that came
out while I was in flight school. It's called There
Is a Way, and it was a story the F
one o five's flying missions out of Karat, Thailand, and
(07:31):
it was pretty exciting and they interviewed some of the
pilots and stuff. As soon as I saw that, I said, yep,
that's me.
Speaker 6 (07:38):
Well they showed that to the wives too, But I
don't remember any fatalities happening during the movie.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
No, there, it was all this great stuff. The other
thing that motivated me was if you got to fly
the one oh five in Southeast Asia and you completed
a hundred missions, you've got a patch that you could
wear on your arm. It's called a hundred mission patch.
I wanted that patch so bad. That was the reason
(08:10):
it was. It was pure and simple stupidity. But you know,
I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Speaker 6 (08:17):
Well, I think watching them from the periphery, the seduction
about those airplanes is that they are with another group
of men who know exactly what they're talking about when
they talk about, Oh, I did this, I did that.
And it's that lifestyle of being with a small group
(08:40):
of people that really you can share everything with, all
the exciting things, all the terrifying things, and that's part
of the attraction.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
There's a there's a hell of a lot of bonding
that goes on between fighter polots who go to combat
together or who have shared that experience of going It's
just it's hard to explain, but it is a bond.
It is a bond of brotherhood. And like I had
said it Dave's eulogy, he was a brother because that's
(09:18):
exactly the way I felt.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
You've been listening to Ed Sykes, his bride Mary and
his son Barts. And by the way, when you join
the military, it's a family affair. It's not just the soldier.
He got the idea to be a fighter pilot by
watching a movie when he was a kid, and when
he announces to his wife that he got the one
oh five, he said a lot of people were getting
killed in that She didn't quite have the enthusiasm he
(09:43):
did about landing his dream plane, the thud by the
way it's called. When we come back more of the
story of Ed Sikes, his family, and that band of
brother aviators. Here on our American stories, and we returned
(10:10):
to our American stories and our story with Ed Sykes,
author of The Patch and the Stream.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Where the American Fell.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
When we last left off, Ed was telling us all
about how he became a fighter pilot. It was an
early dream of his after watching the war films Sabre Jet,
and it was a dream he managed to chase down,
eventually becoming the pilot of an F one O five.
Ed would be sent to fight in Vietnam, and while
stationed in that neck of the woods, he'd become close
(10:39):
to a fellow pilot, a brother named Dave Dinan. Let's
get back to the story once again. Here's Ed and
his son Bart's reading from the aforementioned book.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Went to Southeast Asia, flew one hundred and eighteen combat
missions in the one oh five, got shot at a
few times, did not get shot down.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Luckily.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
I have a good number of my friends who were
shot down, and a number of them died at any rate.
In two thousand and nine, I was something I did
every year as I planted my garden. I planted my
potatoes on Saint Patrick's Day. And it just turned out
(11:20):
that one of my friends who had been killed, a
guy named Dave Dining, had been shot down on Saint
Patrick's Day in nineteen sixty nine, and I always wondered
what had happened to Dave. And I'll tell you one
of the reasons that Dave meant so much to me
was while he was it was sort of interesting. Another
(11:43):
friend of ours, another Lieutenant Bob Zukowski, had been rooming
with Dave Dining, and Zukowski got killed in January of
nineteen sixty nine, and Dave and Bob Zukowski were very
close from friends. Dave was a pretty sensible guy. He
(12:04):
was very smart. He had a degree in physics from
a university out on the East Coast. He had attended
MIT for quite a while. But anyway, Dave was I
could tell he was not very happy about what had
happened and Dave, because Bob was gone and I just arrived,
they moved me in with Dave, and he was now
(12:25):
my roommate, and he would sit around and because he
had probably seventy five missions by now, and he had
a lot of experience. And I still remember it him
sitting there and said saying, ed only dump the Strafe
gun sits talking about taking your gun and trying to
(12:46):
shoot another gun site or a gun sight on the ground.
He said, you know you're moving. He's sitting there stationary,
and you're going to lose that. And I'll be damned
if he didn't get shot down Straf in a gun sight.
And I think it was because this whole brother thing.
You know, he was really upset that he had lost
(13:09):
Bob Zakowski and he just started doing some stuff that
he knew he shouldn't be doing. He told me not
to do it, but he was out there doing it
and it cost him his life. I think he wanted
some revenge. I don't know if that's what it was.
But he jumped out of an airplane. He came down
(13:30):
in the parachute, hit the ground. A PJ, a pair
of rescue jumper and a jolly green Giant came in
to pick him up.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
They found his body. He was dead.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
He was wedged between a tree and a rock. They
thought they were getting shot at and they left the body.
And I knew that while I was still in Thailand,
but I had no idea that they hadn't recovered his
body at the time. But a couple days actually, the
day after I got after Dave was shot down, squadron
(14:00):
commander told me that I was going to be the
summary courts officer for Dave. And what that meant was
I was going to pack up all of his belongings,
put him in a box for delivery back to his parents,
and then I was required to write a letter to
his parents. While I was doing this, I got a
(14:20):
knock on the door and it was a young lady
who I recognized. She was an intelligence officer, one of
the very first females in the combat zone during Vietnam.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Her name was val Galula.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
And Valerie knocked on the door and I said, hey, Val,
what's going on? She was crying, she was really upset,
and I said, what is it, Valerie? And she said, well,
could I have a couple of Dave's things? I said, Valerie,
I've read the orders that I have. I can't give
you anything of Dave's And she said, well, it would
(14:57):
it make any difference if I told you we're going
to be married Saturday? I said, well, Valerie, I don't know.
I really don't have an idea. I didn't realize you
were going to get married. She said, go ask father
Jean gets spare of it. He was the Catholic chaplain,
and he'll let you know that we were supposed to
get married on Saturday. So I went over to visit
(15:20):
my good friend father Jean, really great guy, and he said, ed,
I know why you're here. And I asked him about
Valerie and Dave and he said, yep, they're going to
get married Saturday, and unfortunately that's not going to happen.
Went back to the Hooch is the room we lived in,
(15:41):
completed packing his stuff. The next morning, Valerie came by again,
and this time she was really really upset, and she said, ed,
did you go talk to Father Jean? And I said, well, yes,
I did, Valerie, and he told me that you were
going to be married Saturday. And I said well, and
she said, well, does it make any difference? Can I
(16:02):
have those items that I want now? And she said
and I said, Valor, I've read the regulation. I don't
think I can give you anything because it belongs to
the family. She looked at me and said, Edward, make
any difference if I told you I'm pregnant. And I said,
what would you like? And I gave her a couple
of a little teddy bear, a bracelet and maybe a necklace,
(16:25):
some stuff that I'm sure the parents wouldn't have recognized
the value of it. But and in those days, if
you became pregnant, a female became pregnant in the Air Force,
you're out of there. He simply discharged you. So within
a couple of days, Valerie was sent back to the US.
And one of the things I've talked to her since,
(16:46):
but one of the things she talked about was when
she hit the US in California, in the airport at
San Francisco, she pulled her wedding dress out of her
bag and threw it in the trash.
Speaker 4 (16:59):
And she obviously.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Distraught at any rate. Going back to two thousand and nine,
I had planted my potatoes and I thought of Dave.
And that same year, my son was stationed at Washington,
d C was taking language training to go to Moscow, Russia.
He was going to work in the embassy there.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
So I went to Washington, d C. Went to the.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
War Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, looked at all the names
of guys that I had flown with who I knew
had been killed over there, and it turned out that
three of them had not had their remains brought back
to the US. I can't even begin to explain how
bad I felt about that.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
These are all.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Guys I knew. They were, guys I'd fought with. I'd
covered their six o'clock and they'd covered my six o'clock.
And I thought to myself, you know the worst thing
that could have happened to me is that I've been
shot down in my body had been left on the
ground in Laws or Noalth, Vietnam or wherever. It just
(18:06):
didn't seem right. So I decided then that I was
going to go find Dave Dinan's remains.
Speaker 5 (18:12):
People would occasionally ask me what motivated me to continue
the search, and I would talk about Dave's family and
our friendship and in a few cases Valerie, but I
would never state what was really my driving force. My
country on this issue is an embarrassment, and I want
to fix it.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
And what a story you're hearing from Ed Sykes about
this brotherhood of aviators and the loss and the price
paid for serving during times of war he lost not
one but several friends pals, And that story of his
friend Dave Dinan and his two b bride Valerie Well
(18:53):
finding out that that wedding would never happen and that
she'd be raising a child without the love of her life.
These are the reasons we tell these stories, and they
move us. And for all those still serving, now prepared
to fight for us, that same risk.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Is there for anyone in uniform.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
When we come back the story of Ed Sykes, the
story of so much more his family and the families
had served during the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Here on our American stories, and we.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Returned to our American stories and the story of Ed
Sykes and his brother in arms Dave Dinan. When we
last left off, Ed had come to the conclusion, while
planting potatoes on Saint Patrick's Day, years after the Vietnam War,
that he'd find out what happened to Dave Dinan's body.
(19:59):
He would find out that not only were Dave's remains
never recovered during the war, but they hadn't been recovered
after either. So he made it his mission to give
Dave a proper burial in the United States. There was
one problem. Let's get back to the story here again
is Ed Sykes, his wife Mary, and his son Bart's
(20:21):
reading from Dave's book, The Patch and the Stream Where
the American Fell.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
Didn't know where to start. The first thing I did
is start looking for his family.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
I remember that Dave was from New Jersey, and one night,
as I was having trouble getting to sleep, my mind
threw out a name, Nutley. It's amazing how much the
human brain has stored in its hard drive, and how
it can sometimes spit out of detail without any reasonable explanation.
I got out of bed and wrote Nutley down on
a notepad in my office. The next morning, I found
(20:56):
Nutley printed on my notepad and went straight to Google
to see if it was a real place. Bingo, it's
a town in New Jersey. I then googled Nutley, New Jersey, dining,
but got no results.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
I finally found he had two brothers.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Left.
Speaker 5 (21:17):
Over the holidays, my youngest son, Ezra, brought his fiancee,
Jill Rockoff to visit us in Kansas. She was a lovely,
fun loving young lady, who had played hockey for Dartmouth.
She and Ezra were settled in Boston with good jobs,
and we're going to get married. The following August. We
talked about the wedding and Mary and I agreed we
would host the rehearsal dinner. We also decided to make
(21:39):
a trip to Boston in February to do some planning
and pick out a site for the dinner. So what
does this have to do with Dave Dinan? It turns
out a lot. Mary and I packed our bags and
made the trip to Boston. When we arrived, Jill and
Ezra drove us to Hingham, Massachusetts, where we had been
invited to stay with her parents, Mark and Throckoff. And
(22:01):
Mark provided us with a great seafood dinner that evening.
During dinner, he mentioned that on Sunday mornings he always
walked down the street to the Atlantic Bagel and Coffee
Company to pick up a week's supply of bagels. I
asked him to let me tag along. I'll leave the
house at seven thirty. Are you up for that? Don't
leave without me, I replied. Early the next morning, we
(22:22):
made the short hike to the bagel company. Mark placed
his order, and we sat down with some coffee waiting
for the order to be filled. Have you lived her
all your life? Mark? No, My family is from New Jersey. Originally,
doesn't hurt to ask? Are you familiar with Nutley? Sure,
it's a short drive from where my father owned a
tailor shop in Elizabeth. I went on to ask him
(22:43):
if he had ever known any Diners while he was
growing up. Don't remember anyone by that name, but I'll
ask my father if he knew the family. I mentioned
my search for Dave's remains, and he was interested as
I explained the circumstances of Dave's death and my unsuccessful
quest to find the Dining family. When Mark's order ready,
we took the bagels and headed back to their house.
(23:04):
Mark's curiosity about Dave had clearly been aroused, because when
we got back, he took me to his computer and
entered Dave Dining US Air Force nineteen sixty nine. There
were several hits, and as we went through them, I
recognized them as items I had seen before. However, he
selected one I had not seen. As I read it,
(23:24):
I exclaimed I didn't know he graduated from MIT. The
cobwebs in my brain suddenly broke loose, and I remember
Dave telling me back in the day that he had
started out at MIT but had finished somewhere else with
a degree in physics. I also remember discussing science issues
with him, as we had similar backgrounds. Mark then volunteered,
(23:45):
I'm an MIT graduate. I'll bet I started at MIT
about the time Dave graduated.
Speaker 4 (23:50):
Next week, I'll contact.
Speaker 5 (23:51):
The alumni association and see if they have any information
on Dave's family. Mark, bless his soul, got right on it.
After a little research through the MIT Mark found the
following article in the MIT Alumni magazine. Air Force Pilot
Lieutenant David dined In the third sixty five was killed
in the line of duty in March of nineteen sixty
nine in Laos after he was forced to bail out
(24:14):
of an F one Z five jet that had been
hit by ground fire. His name was the last to
be added to the war memorial in Lobby ten. The
class of nineteen eighty two has been the sponsor of
the Vietnam Memorial plaque in Building ten since its exception
and paid for the engraving. MITMA. The MIIT Military Alumni
(24:34):
Association is working with MIT staff to ensure that the
memorial is updated to include all conflicts since nineteen sixty nine.
If uinov An miit Alum who was killed in the
line of duty, please contact Fran Moron. Fran Moron was
an administrative assistant for the Dean of Students. Mark sent
(24:54):
an email to Fran. Within a few days, Mark received
an email back from Fran. This is a bittersweet surprise
that you would contact me concerning David Dining's memorial at MIT. Yes,
this is very much a coincidence that your daughter's future
father in law was a pilot with David. Perhaps he
the future father in law, is in touch with or
(25:15):
will now because of this email, be in touch with
Charles Dinan Jr. David's brother.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
I talked to those two brothers, told them what I
wanted to do, and they laughed and said, there's no
reason to do that. Ed, we gave up twenty five
years ago. We don't expect that you're going to find anything.
I said, well, do you mind if I try? He
said no, we go ahead and give it a try.
And I told them that I wanted them to become
(25:41):
more involved with the bureaucrats that ran the system, and
I asked them to come with me to Washington, DC
and meet some of these people and let them know
that the family wanted those remains returned, and they agreed
to do that. Over the next few years, I made
three trips to Laos looking for any clues or any
(26:04):
idea of where Dave's remains might be. And this is
the part that I figured would make a difference is
but now I was sixty eight years old and I
was over there stomping around in the jungle doing the
work that these guys from the recovery teams were supposed
(26:24):
to be doing. Mary was not all a big fan
of this. When I started, well, you tell what.
Speaker 6 (26:29):
You say a few things, let's make this real, you said.
When he first said, oh, I'm going to go over
Loos and find his body, I thought, oh my god.
I said, if you get attacked by the Laotian tribesmen,
(26:51):
falling a crator or something, I am not going to
come and get your body.
Speaker 4 (26:59):
And it worked.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
They started paying attention to me, and then when I
brought those two brothers in to Washington, d C. They
really started getting interested. And then finally, after a couple
of years, we found that PJ, who had gone down,
found Dave's body and asked the people of the bureaucrats
to take him back to Southeast Asia and looked for
(27:25):
any clues of Day's remains. They went back and just
luckily found Dave's ID card laying on the ground way
up at Northern Laws, in a real obscure place.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
At any rate.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
This PJ came back and he called me up on
the telephone through some kind of magic telephone line. It
was real early in the morning. Mary was doing something.
I think she got the phone call in the house.
I was outside and I just had a really nice
little litter of pigs, and I was really happy. The
(28:02):
sun was shining, and I was walking to the house
and Mary opens the sliding glass door and said, hey, Ed,
it's Leland Sorensen on the line.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
Leland was the name of the guy.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
I got on the line with him and he said, hey, Ed,
you're not going to believe this, but we just found
Dave's ID card laying on the ground way to hell out.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
And the sticks in the jungle.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
He said, I can't believe it, and I said I
can't believe it either, Leland. But from then on now
that the bureaucrats had all kinds of interest in going
back and looking for the body. A couple of years later,
I went over there and did some little coersion to
make sure they got to that site and looked for
his remains. They went in, started looking for his remains,
(28:52):
immediately started finding bone fragments and teeth and some other stuff.
They sent it back to the laboratory where they checked
on the remains.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
It's in Hawaii.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
They did the DnaA DNA samples that had been sent
by the brothers, and they said, hey, that's him. And
in April of twenty eighteen we set up a recovery
ceremony at Arlington. They flew the body in from Hawaii,
(29:30):
landed at Reagan Airport, and I was lucky enough to
be asked to do the eulogy for Dave at the
chapel at Arlington. It was probably one of the best
days of my life. It was pretty phenomenal that I
could stand in front of all these people who knew
Dave and had been around him and said, hey, we're
(29:51):
not going to quit.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
We're going to find Dave's remains. And we did. It
was pretty neat.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
The story of Ed Sikes and his family, of Dave
Dinan and his pals lost in combat, and the story
of so much more.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Fudd Around And Find Out
UConn basketball star Azzi Fudd brings her championship swag to iHeart Women’s Sports with Fudd Around and Find Out, a weekly podcast that takes fans along for the ride as Azzi spends her final year of college trying to reclaim the National Championship and prepare to be a first round WNBA draft pick. Ever wonder what it’s like to be a world-class athlete in the public spotlight while still managing schoolwork, friendships and family time? It’s time to Fudd Around and Find Out!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!