Just one tooth. A wisdom tooth.
That’s all that’s left for Chief Warrant Officer 3 Larry Zich’s family to bury a week after this year's Memorial Day — 51 years after the Army helicopter pilot from Lincoln disappeared along with three members of his crew during the Vietnam War.
His sister, Waltina “Tina” Mueller, and his widow, Debbie Zich Peters, both of Lincoln, will join the Patriot Riders and a large contingent of veterans when those last remains are buried at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery on June 5 at 10 a.m. near the grave of his infant son, Shane.
Zich's identification is remarkable, considering the tooth has been in the possession of the Department of Defense for 35 years, and the crash site has never been found. It took advances in DNA, and some bolt–from-the-blue insight by a forensic dentist at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lab in Hawaii to conclusively link the tooth to Zich. He is the 10th of 24 Vietnam War MIAs from Nebraska who has been accounted for, according to DPAA.
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“I look at it as kind of like a miracle,” Mueller said.
The long-delayed burial will be a way to say goodbye to the younger brother she had hoped for years would someday, somehow, come home alive.
“It’s closure, in a way,” she said. “But then, it’s not.”
'Need for speed'
Larry Zich was born in Sturgis, South Dakota, the middle child out of five. The family moved to Lincoln by the time he was in high school.
Tina, the oldest, remembers him as a quiet kid, smart — and with a need for speed. He liked drag racing, and was a whiz with a wrench.
“He loved working with his hands, working on cars,” Mueller recalled.
Debbie met Larry while both were attending night school in Lincoln. They were married May 29, 1969, when he was 21 and she was 19. He sold the engine out of his beloved '57 Chevy to buy her engagement ring.
Zich was incredibly creative at fixing things, Peters said. Like the time they were driving through rural Kansas, and their car’s fan belt broke.
“He took the shoelaces out of his boots and rigged a fan belt that got us into Marysville,” she said. “Failure was just not in his vocabulary.”
When the Army came calling in early 1969, Zich knew he wanted to be a pilot. He enlisted so he had a better chance to get the assignment he wanted: flying helicopters.
"He has a fascination with engines, anything that went fast,” Debbie said. “He wanted to fly.”
Mueller said she was relieved that he had dodged an infantry assignment, unlike another brother who recently completed a combat tour shortly before Zich deployed.
“I thought, ‘He’s a helicopter pilot. He’s not going to be in much danger,'” she said.
Debbie said neither she nor Larry had any such illusions.
“Anyone involved in flight school, we knew it was extremely dangerous,” she said.
Zich was assigned to a communications unit, the 37th Signal Battalion. He was scheduled to go to Vietnam, but his deployment was pushed back after their son, Shane, died just hours after his birth in Nov. 6, 1970.
The couple had mixed feelings about his deployment seven months later.
“No one’s happy about it," Debbie said. "But he had the attitude he’d rather go fight a war someplace else and keep it out of our country.”
Zich came home the following February after Debbie required emergency surgery. He had just 45 days left in his deployment. There was talk of him cutting his tour short because of the hardship, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t want to leave his men behind.
“He felt he had a responsibility to return to Vietnam,” Debbie said.
'They lost contact'
Zich had been back only a few days when on April 3, 1972 — his 24th birthday — he was assigned as a co-pilot on a UH-1H Huey along with the pilot, Warrant Officer Douglas L. O’Neil; the crew chief, Spec. 5 Allen D. Christensen; and the gunner, Spec. 4 Edward D. Williams.
These were the first days of the North Vietnamese army’s Easter Offensive, a months-long attack on South Vietnam across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separated them.
Zich’s crew was ferrying a load of explosives from Da Nang to a South Vietnamese base near the DMZ, in Quang Tri province, that was about to be overrun.
The crew left Da Nang’s Marble Mountain airfield, flying above a heavy cloud cover. They got lost looking for the base, despite the urgent efforts of ground controllers to find them, and guide them.
“They couldn’t get a ground fix because of the clouds,” Mueller said. “They lost contact.”
DPAA investigators theorize the Huey was hit by a North Vietnamese shoulder-fired or surface-to-air missile. Other 37th Signal Battalion pilots broke off their mission to search for Zich’s helicopter. They never found a trace.
“That helicopter was the only one they lost,” said Mueller, who has connected with several of the soldiers who served with her brother. “Not a day goes by that they don’t think about it.”
Debbie was driving home from the store with her mother when she saw an Army staff car cross their paths once, then a second time. The third time, the car pulled in behind and followed them.
“I had a gut feeling,” Debbie recalled.
The officers in the staff car broke the news that Zich was missing. From that moment, she said, her "whole world stopped."
"How do you process it, when you don't even know what happened?" she asked.
Mueller said she was in shock, too. But she took comfort that he hadn’t been declared dead.
“I remember hoping, almost certain that he was alive,” she said. “That when they made the deal, bringing back the prisoners (of war), he would be among them.”
The U.S. negotiated its withdrawal from Vietnam in early 1973, and North Vietnam released the prisoners it was holding.
Larry Zich was not among them.
Two years after Zich’s disappearance, Air Force ROTC cadets from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln planted a “Freedom Tree” at a rest stop along Interstate 80 in Milford in Zich’s memory. Lt. Gov. Frank Marsh presented Debbie with a plaque.
The country was very much ready to put Vietnam behind it, particularly after North Vietnam invaded its neighbor in 1975. The South Vietnamese regime quickly collapsed, and the country was reunited under a communist government. Tens of thousands of refugees fled, many of them coming to the United States.
Debbie moved to San Diego to attend college and earn a degree in social work, but she still tried to keep the plight of missing soldiers in the public eye.
She joined the National League of Families of POW/MIA, and joined a lawsuit to prevent the Defense Department from declaring Zich and the other Vietnam War MIAs to be dead. They lost.
Eventually she remarried and raised a new family. But she never forgot her first love.
“I can guarantee, not one day in 51 years this has not been on my mind,” Debbie said.
For a long while, the loss of Zich’s crew dropped off the Defense Department’s radar screen. Even as relations with Vietnam’s government thawed, no one came forward with information about the helicopter or a crash site.
They were just gone.
Nine packets
But one thing did happen. In 1988, as Vietnamese refugees were processed in nearby countries, one refugee in Malaysia told an intriguing story to a military debriefer seeking information on missing U.S. service members.
He presented a military debriefer with nine small packets containing bone chips and teeth. He said the packets had been given to him by his uncle and came from a crash site in Quảng Nam province, near Da Nang.
At the time, DNA technology was in its infancy. The DoD didn’t begin using DNA for identifications until the first Gulf War, in 1991, said Timothy McMahon, director of DNA operations for the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System.
About that time, the Defense Department took on an organized effort to find and identify missing service members from the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The nine packets were sent to the department’s forensic laboratory in Hawaii, in the care of a predecessor organization to the DPAA. (A second laboratory was opened at Offutt Air Force Base in 2013.)
But anthropologists had little to go on. They had no information about when or where the remains were found, or family reference samples to which they could compare the DNA.
They didn’t even know for sure whether the teeth and bone chips were actually the remains of U.S. soldiers. At the time, there was a busy black market in illicit remains, fueled by rumors that they might be worth money to the Americans, or boost a refugee’s immigration bid.
“A lot of times this turns into a dead-end lead,” said Franklin Damann, director of DPAA’a Offutt laboratory.
Between 1993 and 2014, 12 investigations were conducted without making an identification.
Anthropologists determined through DNA testing that almost all of the meager remains came from people of Asian heritage. Most likely they were Vietnamese.
All except one tooth, which came from someone with European heritage.
“That’s why this one tooth remained in the system,” Damann said.
By 2014, the Defense Department had gathered family reference samples for 85% of MIAs from the Vietnam War, McMahon said. And anthropologists had just developed a way to test the DNA in a tooth without destroying it.
The DNA in the tooth matched two Vietnam MIAs: Zich, and one other soldier. But even after pulling the two men’s dental x-rays, they could not determine whose it was.
So the tooth returned to storage.
An 'a-ha' moment
Last year, a new forensic dentist at DPAA’s Hawaii lab, Lt. Cmdr. Ryan Takeda, took a fresh look at the case.
Takeda knew the tooth was a wisdom tooth. But Zich’s x-ray showed no tooth in that spot.
At the time, dentists stamped a physical dimple on x-ray film so it would be oriented properly. But Takeda had an idea: what if Zich’s dentist had stamped the dimple on the x-ray the opposite way?
So he flipped the x-ray over. And it matched, perfectly.
“He realized the dentist was from a different school,” Damann said. “That’s what broke the case wide open.”
“It took somebody to look at it a different way,” McMahon added. “He was able to provide that ‘a-ha!’ moment.”
Takeda’s inspiration allowed the accounting agency to officially identify Zich last October. Mueller — his official next-of-kin — received a briefing on her brother’s case in March, allowing the family to plan for his funeral next week.
“In my mind, the service that we’re having on the 5th of June will be a celebration of his life,” Debbie said. “Larry deserves to be celebrated. He was a fantastic person.”
The family has decided to open up the graveside service to the public, so that the community can celebrate his memory, too. Mueller said she has contacted local American Legion and VFW posts, along with motorcycle veterans. Some of the soldiers her brother served with are expected, too.
“They said it’s going to be big,” she said.
But the burial of a single tooth is not quite an end for those who remember Larry Zich, and loved him.
“You have a tooth. To me that’s not his remains,” Debbie said.
After years of seeking information from the military about the fate of her husband, she was upset to learn about his identification from a TV news report — though Damann later met Debbie to brief her personally on the agency’s findings.
She also still questions where the tooth came from, and why the Defense Department hasn’t been able to trace the refugee who turned it in.
“There’s too many holes in the case for me to find peace,” Debbie said. "Even with this new information, it has raised more questions than answers."
Mueller is concerned for the fate of Zich’s three crew mates, who are still missing.
“We’re in a hard place here. We have no idea,” she said. “I’m doing a lot of praying that they do find these guys.”
Damann said the case illustrates the lengths DPAA will go to find and ID missing service members. Advances in DNA technology allow forensic anthropologists to attach names to remains that were unidentifiable just a few years ago— like Larry Zich’s.
“We’re going back to some of the earliest cases in our lab,” he said. “We’re going to keep pushing the science.”
For Debbie Zich Peters, late May is a bittersweet time. Memorial Day and the anniversary of her wedding to Larry are always close together. This year, they are one and the same.
Soon after he disappeared, Debbie wrote a poem about the plight of the families of the missing that read, in part:
The war is over, so many will say
But to us it’s a mass of endless days.
No one understands the life we live
Waiting for answers others won’t give . . .
So let’s band together — Unity is the word.
We will bring back these men
Who so gallantly served.
This report includes material from the Lincoln Journal-Star.