Mark Millican: At great cost

Published 2:00 pm Friday, September 15, 2023

Ray Broadrick was walking along Hamilton Street when Thomas Parrott pulled over and asked him where he was going. Broadrick was headed to a basketball game between Dalton High and Murray County High.

“We weren’t pals as far as being pals, but we were classmates,” Broadrick said of the DHS class of 1956. “The only time I had any dealings with him was when he picked me up that night — and we made it to Chatsworth in 10 minutes!”

He added it was no surprise that the late Parrott, who spent 2,042 days in a North Vietnamese prison camp, was destined to fly.

“He was a jet pilot in high school — his Chrysler was a jet airplane!” Broadrick declared. “He was a quiet guy, but when he drove a car he drove it fast. So when he transferred over to an F-4 or whatever he flew that he got shot down in, he didn’t have much trouble with the speed.”

Parrott was serving as the navigator aboard an RF-4 reconnaissance plane when it was downed by a surface-to-air (SAM) missile on Aug. 12, 1967, during a surveillance mission in the Vietnam War. He and his co-pilot were captured, and Parrott was unconscious from the crash impact for a week. His co-pilot attempted to escape at one point, got recaptured and was eventually tortured to death, according to reports. Although many in the Dalton area remember Parrott’s captivity and release, those closest to him have also passed or are not well enough to be interviewed.

Today, Sept. 15, is National POW (prisoner of war)/MIA (missing in action) Recognition Day. Parrott died in 1998.

The MIA bracelet

Several months ago, high school friend Glenda Ridley Fisher sent me a POW/MIA bracelet she found in a “grab bag” of jewelry items she ordered online.

“Little did I know among the tangled chains, beads and orphaned earrings would be a dirty tarnished bracelet that has brought me the most joy,” she said. “After cleaning it, I was surprised to see it was a MIA/POW bracelet for Sgt. Peter Cressman from 1973. My first thought was to try to find family and return it to them, but my internet searches hit a dead end. However, I did find some information regarding his military service. That’s when I called on classmate Mark Millican for help.”

Glenda had already done a commendable job in her research, and knew I possibly had more resources because of writing extensively about Vietnam veterans in the last few years. One resource that has proven invaluable is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Wall-of-Faces website (www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/). It was there I found a post on the “Leave a Remembrance” page that sounded as if the person making the comments knew Cressman personally. Not knowing if the friend was dead or alive, I tried the email address — and days later, Steve Adams in Massachusetts responded. You can read his — and Pete’s — stories in one of today’s feature articles.

Steve, in turn, got me in touch with one of Pete’s five other brothers, Bob Cressman of Arizona, the oldest of the six. Bob served in the Army in Vietnam and received a Purple Heart, and interestingly, earned a Bronze Star for meritorious service that he only received a couple of months ago in July. He spoke at length about his brother who disappeared after his flight went down just a few days after the Paris Peace Accords to end the war.

“I was at work at a Montgomery Ward store in Florida, and one of my parents called and said they just got a telegram saying (Pete) was missing in action,” said Bob in a phone interview. “My first thoughts were they’ll find where the plane is and go in and pull the people out. I had no serious concern about him; I figured they parachuted out or found a place to land. I wasn’t concerned about him getting killed or even captured.”

However, in a few days the Air Force said although they found the flight they hadn’t located all eight crew members — just four.

“Then they said it appeared the plane had gone straight down into the ground and everyone had died in the crash, so the family just accepted that,” he recalled. “That was 1973, and then in 1979 my dad got a call from Jack Anderson, the columnist (published widely by United Features Syndicate), and Anderson told him that he had received classified Air Force documents that indicated they knew that four people in the back of the aircraft had been captured. He was going to release the story the next day, and wanted our family to know about it before they read it in the paper.”

Bob said his family’s immediate reaction was “’What’s going on? For six years now they’ve been saying he was dead.’ So the Air Force knew that somebody might have survived.”

The Cressman parents, along with Bob and his late brother Patrick, became deeply involved in the POW issue, first in the National League of POW/MIA Families. They eventually formed another group that was open for the public to join, the National Forget-Me-Not Association for POWs and MIAs.

“It was named that since Pete visited an orphanage in Da Nang when he was off-duty and worked with the nuns and played with the kids,” Bob said. “He wrote home to his local church and asked if they could get a collection going for clothing and stuff for the kids, and the church started a program and called it the Forget-Me-Not Foundation. They ended up shipping several tractor-trailer loads overseas.”

Bob said the family not getting the whole story about Pete “made my father just totally nuts.”

“Because he was a career military man,” he explained. “His first reaction was ‘I fought for this country in World War II and dedicated my life to the military, and they lied to me about Pete being killed in ’73.’”

Pete’s parents and three of his brothers died without knowing, and the remaining two who are alive in this country still do not know what happened to Pete. More than 80,000 American service personnel are still missing from “previous conflicts” and 38,000 of them are estimated to be recoverable, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. Recoverable is explained thus: “Each year, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency conducts investigation-and-recovery team missions across the globe to search last known locations of missing American service members.”

“The Defense POW/MIA Agency remains restless in its mission to provide the fullest possible accounting to their families and the nation, until they’re home,” the Department of Defense states.

After talking with Steve Adams during a sometimes emotional interview, I sent him Pete’s bracelet that Glenda had sent to me. The one he’d been wearing had broken in two. It was the right thing to do.

“When Mark told me about finding Sgt. Cressman’s best friend from childhood and how much their friendship meant to him, I could barely hold back the tears,” Glenda told me. “This story makes me happy and sad at the same time. I am so happy to know there is still someone alive who could share his story with us. But it makes me sad he had to live his life without his friend.”

Now exactly 50 years after Sgt. Cressman’s plane went down, the once-dirty and tarnished bracelet is exactly where it belongs. This country has a Memorial Day to honor its war dead, and Sept. 15 is National POW/MIA Recognition Day. There are former prisoners of war who have gone on to lead productive lives, while others have been scarred for life by the brutality of their captors and the prison camp conditions that led to malnutrition and disease.

Then there are the POWs who died in captivity and whose families were left to grieve the loss. Other families were informed of their loved one’s missing status and never learned what happened. They all should be recognized and remembered, for all their sacrifices have come at great cost.

Mark Millican is a former staff writer for the Dalton Daily Citizen.