If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you take a few minutes to read a powerful story this week by Craig Sailor of The News Tribune about a Tenino woman, her soldier husband, and a bureaucratic mistake that dishonors a life of service and a lifetime of mourning. The story was printed on page 7 of Tuesday’s Chronicle.
In very brief summary, the story recounts how Mary Dowling has for 56 years visited the grave of her husband, Bob Dowling, a decorated helicopter pilot who died heroically during the Vietnam War. For that entire time she had assurances from the U.S. Army that she would be able to be buried in an empty plot next to her husband.
Last November she visited his grave only to find that her burial plot — which had long been marked with the Dowling name on a map at the cemetery entrance — was now the resting place of a newly buried veteran.
The Army has met with the family and admitted it made a mistake and offered several alternatives that fall short of what Mary, 83, said she can accept.
Reading the story is a reminder of the bravely and sacrifice of American soldiers and their families — and the importance of keeping our promises to them.
Bob and Mary Dowling both grew up in Centralia. They were married in November 1958. Bob, who had been a pilot since age 16, left the Marines to join the Army and become a helicopter pilot. He was deployed to Vietnam in the spring of 1965.
At the time the couple lived on Newaukum Hill in Chehalis. They had three daughters, ages 2, 3 and 5, and a son, Bobby, age 4.
The night before he shipped out, Bob had a poignant talk with his son. That little boy vividly remembers that conversation like it was yesterday.
“He came into my bedroom. He was in his uniform,” Bobby told The News Tribune. “I just remember standing up and he gave me a hug. And he said, ‘You’re man of the house now, Bobby. You take care of your mom and your sisters’.”
“And I always have,” Bobby said, his voice choked with emotion.
Less than a year later, on Jan. 1, 1966, Bob’s helicopter was shot down. He was banged up badly but managed to salvage a grenade launcher and rifle to return fire. When a rescue helicopter landed, he provided cover fire and refused to leave until his crew was safety aboard.
“I'm okay,” he wrote to Mary in a letter dated Jan. 11. “I gotta admit, I was kind of shook up for a few days. I want to come home so darn bad. Only four more months to go. That feels like such a long time.”
He never had the chance.
The next day he was flying over a beach at Tuy Hoa on the coast of the South China Sea to pick up a load of Korean Marines and spotted what he thought was a body floating in the water. It turned out to be a dummy — a trap set by the Vietcong, who shot down his Huey.
When a rescue chopper came, Bob waved them over to first pick up his wounded co-pilot, Russ Kistler. They did, but as they were coming back for Bob, a huge hammerhead shark lifted him out of the water and took him down.
“It should be made record that Bob Dowling died a hero,” said Dowling’s wingman, Lt. Col. Byron Byerly. “His unselfishness in telling me to take care of Russ first was the bravest act I ever saw and it cost him his life.”
Bob, 27, was the first soldier from Lewis County to die during the Vietnam War. The Veterans of Foreign Wars group in Chehalis later named their post after him.
His widow never remarried.
“I couldn't find anyone like him," Mary told The Chronicle in 2006.
The Dowling family has served in the U.S. military since the Civil War. That service continues — young Bobby, who pledged to be “the man of the house” at age 4, went on to serve as a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and later with the Department of Homeland Security, assigned to the FBI.
He has been named a Distinguished Alumnus of Centralia College, along with his older sister, Laura Dowling, who served as chief florist at the White House, including designing wreaths for the president to lay on soldiers’ graves. She remembers the flowers on her own father’s grave when he came home from war and was laid to rest when she was just 6 years old.
They Army has promised for decades that Mary could be buried next to her fallen husband. They need to make this right.
Granted, they are in a tough position, having given the neighboring burial plot to another worthy soldier, but the options they’ve presented to Mary aren’t acceptable.
She is losing sleep over this. Her children worry that this is affecting her health. Perhaps it is time for our members of Congress to step in to push for a solution.
Bob Dowling died a hero, brave and selfless to the end. His widow deserves a resting place alongside him, after her lifetime of devotion to the memory of a man who, in Lincoln’s words, gave the last full measure of devotion to our country.
Brian Mittge can be reached at brianmittge@hotmail.com.
