Daughters of missing Vietnam War pilots campaign for renewal of MIA memorial

Natalie Rauch points to the name of her father, Col. Warren Anderson, engraved into the marble of the Court of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific on June 11, 2024. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)

NATIONAL MEMORIAL CEMETERY OF THE PACIFIC, Hawaii — The daughters of two Air Force pilots missing during the Vietnam War are spearheading an effort to properly assign the names on the Courts of the Missing memorial in Honolulu.

The memorial’s high marble walls list the names of all soldiers who went missing in the Pacific during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

The American Battle Monuments Commission, which oversees the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, places a bronze rosette next to the names of the missing whose remains have since been recovered and identified.

The two Vietnam War walls, built in 1980, contain 2,504 names. The remains of more than 900 of these soldiers have been identified and documented since their construction, but only one rosette has been installed so far.

This fall, the Monuments Commission will hold a ceremony at the cemetery to mark the beginning of work to install the long-overdue Vietnam War rosettes on the walls.

Fathers lost in the war

The idea for this ceremony came from Colleen Shine and Natalie Rauch, the daughters of pilots killed in the Vietnam War.

Rauch, a longtime Hawaii resident, was 8 years old when her father, Air Force Col. Warren Anderson, disappeared in 1966 in the reconnaissance plane he was piloting over North Vietnam. His remains were never found.

Shine, of Arlington, Virginia, was also just eight years old when her father, Air Force Lt. Col. Anthony Shine, disappeared while flying a reconnaissance plane over the Laos border in 1972. His remains were identified in 1996.

Both have long been involved in the National League of POW/MIA Families and the U.S. Department of Defense’s efforts to find and identify those still missing from the country’s wars.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is the agency currently entrusted with this task.

An example of the bronze rosette that is placed next to the names of those whose remains have been recovered and identified is shown on a plaque at the Court of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)

Missing rosettes

In early 2023, during a trip to Oahu, Shine and Rauch visited the missing persons court to find out her father’s name, Shine said by phone from home on June 11.

“I thought I would see the American Battle Monuments Commission rosette indicating that he was missing,” Shine said.

But there was neither a rosette nor one among the many other names of missing people that she had learned during her years of working for the families of missing people.

Later that summer, when Rauch was in Washington, D.C., attending DPAA’s annual briefing for families of the still-missing, the two met with representatives of the Monuments Commission, Shine said.

This led to a plan to hold a ceremony on September 20, immediately following the National POW/MIA Recognition Day ceremony held each year by the DPAA.

“Everyone is just staying in their place,” Rauch said at the cemetery on June 11. “(The monument commission) will hold a much shorter ceremony to talk about the meaning of the rosettes.”

The walls of the Courts of the Missing stand on either side of the grand staircase at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. In the foreground on either side are two walls from the Vietnam War. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)

“We hope that a representative family from each branch of the military will symbolically place a rosette during the ceremony,” she said. Shine will place a rosette next to her father’s name on behalf of the Air Force.

Other family members who wish to add a rosette can do so after the ceremony. A pre-drilled hole in the marble is required for installation.

An honour

Rauch said she and Shine have been reaching out to veterans’ organizations such as the VFW and Vietnam Veterans of America to spread the word about the ceremony.

“We want to make sure people know the event is happening, just in case they can send someone,” she said.

Questions and requests for further information can be sent via email to [email protected].

Rauch and Shine both said they would rather have focused on the ceremony than on why the rosettes were not installed on time.

The American Battle Monuments Commission did not respond to written questions from Stars and Stripes.

“This is important to the families,” Shine said of the rosette placement. “It’s important to honor my father in this way.”

“It is also important for our Vietnam veterans that when they go to this memorial, they see that their fallen comrades are being given the honor they deserve.”