Vietnam still there today for survivors
"Going down," said David "Zeke" Zimmerman, the aircraft commander seated next to Kevin Frye. "Going down."
Frye, the son of a Navy gunner, had been in Vietnam for five months, fulfilling a childhood dream of being a military pilot. Although he had been put in plenty of dangerous situations while flying over jungle treetops as part of an elite Army air cavalry unit, until this day in July 1970, he had been lucky or good -- or, most likely, a combination of both.
The Cobra helicopter was falling from 2,000 feet.
It hadn't been shot down.
Its engine had stalled.
The Cobra pilots were trained for exactly this situation. They were taught how to put the helicopters down in all kinds of strange places. Trees, water, whereever. In this case, according to the official military report, there was a large open field a little more than a mile away.
"While still over the trees, the aircraft was observed to assume a radical decelerating attitude with subsequent loss of airspeed and motor RPM," the report said. "The aircraft's momentum carried it just clear of the trees, where it settled vertically with zero airspeed and rotor RPM."
In other words, the AH-1G Cobra crashed.
The accompanying Light Observation Helicopter quickly landed beside the Cobra. The sleek helicopter, billed as the first in the world specifically designed to fight wars, was on its side, starting to burn.
The soldiers ran to the helicopter and pulled out the two pilots, first Frye, then Zimmerman.
It began as a normal day
Back in Jacksonville, July 28, 1970, started fairly typically for the Frye family. It was a Tuesday. Warren Frye was stationed at Cecil Field. Irene Frye, then 42, was going to school at Florida Community College at Jacksonville.
With their three children getting older -- Kevin was 20, Todd was 17, Paige was 9 -- she was working toward a new career as a registered nurse. By the end of the summer, she would have her degree.
--------------------------------------------------
Irene Frye, 77, holds medals her son Kevin earned during his service as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. JON M. FLETCHER/The Times-Union --------------------------------------------------
She came home from classes that day, pulled up to their house in Hyde Park, and found a khaki-colored military car sitting at the curb.
She took one look at it and froze, just for a moment, then ran to the door, flung it open and went inside.
She found her sister, Rita, and two Army officers waiting.
"You've come about my son, haven't you?" she said.
"Yes, ma'am," one of the officers said.
"You're going to tell me he's dead, aren't you?" she said.
"I'm sorry, ma'am," he said. "Yes, I am."
Reading the letter
The first two parts of this series were about the 20 years that Kevin Frye lived. This final part -- on the weekend that marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the war -- is about the 35 years since he died.
Irene Frye is 77. Her husband died in 1982. She has her two living children, four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and three more on the way. She recently moved back to Jacksonville from Virginia Beach, Va. She lives in an apartment off Blanding Boulevard.
Atop her entertainment center, there is a model of the Cobra. On a table, there is an 8-by-10 black-and-white photo of Kevin inside a helicopter, flying over Texas. It is her favorite photo of him.
"For months afterward I was grieving so bad all I did was run around clutching an 8-by-10 photo of him," she said. "I couldn't be consoled."
She has his medals, some of them framed, some of the tucked away in boxes. But her prized possession might be one of the many letters he wrote. When she visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, she found his name and left a copy of this letter -- the one he wrote the night before leaving home.
He addressed it to his parents, sealed it, gave it to his father and told him to open it only if he didn't come home.
"I didn't know about it," she said. "If I had, I probably would have freaked out."
She learned about the letter when Warren Frye gathered the family members, including two of Irene's sisters, in the living room of their home and read the 505-word letter aloud.
"Mom and Dad," it began, "I address this specifically to you, my parents, but it is an open letter to all who have been close to me. By now you have been contacted by telegram and appropriate personnel extending the regrets of the Department of the Army."
Kevin began by trying to comfort those who would read the letter. He talked about heaven, about being together again some day. He said death did not scare him. He said he was not a hero. And in the end, he tried to explain why he had worked so hard to go to a place that others were avoiding, to fight a war that was becoming increasingly unpopular in 1970.
"I could never claim a patriotic motive for wanting to go to Vietnam," he wrote. "My driving force was more out of loyalty to those of my age who have gone before me and failed to return. It is a stupid war. But who can tell me what war has never been stupid?
"My dream of flying has been fulfilled. I was an officer in the United States Army. What more could one ask for? I am proud of my accomplishments."
Warrant Officer 1st Class Kevin Mark Frye was buried in a Gainesville cemetery, next to Carla Hembree, his childhood sweetheart who died 18 months before him after being thrown from a horse.
Charlie Troop reflects
To this day, some of his Vietnam buddies are angry that the aircraft commander, who also died in the crash, wasn't able to safely land the helicopter. They say both of them should have made it through that July day in Vietnam and maybe, just maybe, even made it to the annual reunions of Charlie Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry of the 1st Cavalry Division.
"When we get back together, it's like no time has passed," said Randy Zahn, Frye's roommate in Vietnam.
But, of course, it has. Today, the soldiers are in their 50s and 60s, fathers and grandfathers, living all over the country. For a while, Zahn lived outside the country, moving to Scotland partly out of frustration over the reaction to Vietnam back home.
During the war, Zahn sent cassette tapes home. His parents saved them and gave them to him in 1981. It wasn't until a few years ago that he managed to sit down and listen to them. The result is Snake Pilot, a book that proved to be an invaluable resource for telling the story of Kevin Frye.
One of the hardest tapes to listen to, Zahn says, was one of the funniest. It is the one Frye's voice is on.
While Zahn had been taping a message to send back to his parents, Frye had grabbed the microphone and done a "little monologue." Decades later, Zahn had his wife listen to all the tapes, helping to sort out what would be interesting material for the book.
When they got to the tape with his roommate's voice, they both had tears in their eyes. Hers because she was laughing so hard. His for another reason.
"She stopped the tape and asked me, 'What's wrong?'" Zahn said last week. "I said, 'Kevin's going to die in two weeks, and I can't do anything about it.' It was like he was alive again. And I had the most helpless feeling."
While writing the book, Zahn contacted Irene Frye. He apologized for waiting so long. And after talking to her, he wrote her a letter that said: "I have to tell you that I was scared to death to call. We lost Kevin almost 28 years ago, but his loss is still fresh in my mind, and it hurts like hell whenever I think of him."
When the book was published, he sent her a copy with a personal note written inside. "This is the best way I know how to keep Kevin's memory alive," he said. "There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about him ... and miss him."
He isn't alone. You expect to hear such sentiments from family members. But go online, to a "virtual wall" for those who died in Vietnam, and you will find tributes to Frye from people like Clarence Walker, Frye's roommate at the University of South Carolina.
"I will never, ever forget the letter from his dad telling me he had been killed," he said. "So much of my youth died with him." That message was posted this year.
It has been three decades. Yet like the Vietnam War itself, what happened in the jungles of Southeast Asia and in the intense debate back home continues to affect America today. We were reminded of that last summer, when Vietnam became one of the most volatile issues in a presidential election full of volatility. But even when Vietnam isn't in the news, even when we aren't hearing about Swift boat veterans or National Guard records, even when we're wrapped up in another war in another far-away country, Vietnam is there.
It's still hard
Death always creates ripples. But usually those ripples get smaller and smaller as times passes. With Vietnam, the ripples remain remarkably strong, especially for the survivors, the fellow veterans and the family members.
Irene Frye says Todd, Kevin's younger brother, still can't talk about him. "If we bring up Kevin, his eyes fill up, and he has to leave the room," she said. For her, talking helps.
She described the day he left, how she kept grabbing his hand at the airport, and he kept wriggling it free, and she kept grabbing it again. Fearing she wasn't ever going to see him again. "And I didn't," she said. "It was raining when he left. And it was raining when they brought his body back."
Warren Frye had the casket closed at the airport. He wanted his wife's last memory of Kevin to be of him the day he left. For a while, this made it harder for her to let go. She wanted to believe that because she hadn't seen him, he wasn't actually in the casket, he was alive and well somewhere.
Now she seems to like the final memory she has of him. Alive, and slightly embarrassed that his mom keeps trying to hold his hand. She'll always have that. And the letter.
Thirty-five years later, sitting in her apartment in Jacksonville, handing a copy of the letter to a visitor, it is this last paragraph that his mother echoes.
My dream of flying has been fulfilled. I was an officer in the United States Army. What more could one ask for? I am proud of my accomplishments.
She says he is so proud of him. Proud he became a pilot. Proud he served in Vietnam.
When the war finally ended, more than 58,000 American troops were dead. And although Kevin Frye clearly made a remarkable impression on many people in a short time, there undoubtedly are thousands of stories out there like his.
That doesn't make his story less powerful.
In a way, it makes it more powerful.
http://cgi.jacksonville.com/cgi-bin/printit.cgi?story=050105/woo_survivors.shtml
Go to
Part 1
Part 2