SYNOPSIS: The Phantom, used by Air Force, Marine and Navy air wings, served a multitude of functions including fighter-bomber and interceptor, photo and electronic surveillance. The two man aircraft was extremely fast (Mach 2), and had a long range (900 - 2300 miles, depending on stores and mission type). The F4 was also extremely maneuverable and handled well at low and high altitudes. Most pilots considered it one of the "hottest" planes around.

Capt. Roscoe H. Fobair was the pilot and Capt. Richard P. Keirn the weapons/systems operator on an F4C sent on a combat mission near Hanoi on July 24, 1965. About 40 miles east-northeast of Hanoi, in Vinh Phu Province, the aircraft was shot down.

Roscoe Fobair was captured by the North Vietnamese, but Fobair's fate remained unclear. Sometime in late 1972 or early 1973, the North Vietnamese announced that Fobair had died, failing to say when, or if he had been a captive. Fobair remained classified Missing in Action.

Keirn spent the next 7 1/2 years as a prisoner of war. Like other Americans, he endured torture and deprivation at the hands of the Vietnamese. Then on February 12, 1973, he was released in Operation Homecoming.

Since the war ended, over 10,000 reports relating to Americans missing, prisoner or unaccounted for in Southeast Asia have been received by the U.S. Government. Many authorities who have examined this largely classified information are convinced that hundreds of Americans are still held captive today. These reports are the source of serious distress to many returned American prisoners. They had a code that no one could honorably return unless all of the prisoners returned. Not only that code of honor, but the honor of our country is at stake as long as even one man remains unjustly held. It's time we brought our men home.

Roscoe H. Fobair was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel during the period he was maintained missing.

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UPDATE LINE: February 6, 2001

Thank you for calling the National League of Families Update Line.  This
message is being recorded on Tuesday, February 6th.  According to the
Department of Defense, the number of Americans missing and unaccounted for
from the Vietnam War is now 1,990.

The Department of Defense announced last week that LtCol Roscoe Fobair,
USAF, is now accounted for.  Missing since July 24th, 1965, LtCol Fobair's
remains, jointly recovered in Vietnam, were repatriated on January 16, 1998.
The League extends understanding to the relatives and friends of LtCol
Fobair, confident that the accounting for him brings long awaited peace of
mind. This brings the number still missing and unaccounted for from the
Vietnam War to 1,990.  Of these losses, 1497 are in Vietnam, 418 are in
Laos, 67 are in Cambodia and 8 are in the territorial waters of the PRC,
though over 90% of all losses from the Vietnam War occurred in areas under
Vietnamese wartime control.

------------------------------------------------------

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, April 1, 2001

VALLEY NEWS MIA Mystery Solved Search: After 34 years of waiting, a family
will hold a memorial service for missing Air Force pilot whose remains were
found in Vietnam.

DAVID PIERSON
Times Staff Writer

As a boy, Bruce Giffin idolized his uncle Ross.

Few children had a relative who could fly a jet on a moment's notice to come
visit for the weekend.

Ross Fobair was his nephew's all-American hero. He looked like a knight in
his flight suit. And then he was shot down, 45 miles northeast of Hanoi in
1965, the first American pilot claimed by a SAM surface-to-air missile in
the Vietnam War.

Fobair, who was 30 years old at the time, was listed as missing in action.
He did not appear among the hundreds of American prisoners of war who
returned home in 1973 during Operation Homecoming. His family's despair was
heightened when others' was being quelled.

Fobair was believed to be dead.

But rumors abounded. Squadron mates said they saw him, along with his flight
partner, eject from his F4 Phantom. Others told Giffin, who was 9 at the
time of the crash, that his uncle could still be alive, perhaps captive in
the Soviet Union, where his expertise in electronics would prove invaluable.

Giffin needed certainty.

He got it late last year, 34 years after his uncle vanished.

Military forensic scientists told the family in December that a tooth found
at the reported crash site was Fobair's.

It was a somber, yet comforting, piece of news for Giffin, who documented
the 1997 excavation of the crash site with a film crew. He and his mother,
Betty McDermott, have organized a memorial service for April 29 in Santa
Barbara, where Giffin lives.

Fobair will receive full military honors, including a flyover conducted by
pilots from Edwards Air Force Base.

"He was a father figure," the 45-year-old Giffin said. "This mystery of what
happened to him was a constant thing. There came the opportunity to solve
the mystery, and I took it."

Giffin's trip to Vietnam in 1997 coincided with that of a task force
responsible for investigating the fates of 1,986 Americans still unaccounted
for.

Created in 1992, the Joint Task Force for Accounting has closed the books on
the cases of 281 missing military men and women through its investigations.

For many Americans, Giffin included, returning the remains of fallen
soldiers is a national duty.

"We don't leave our dead on the battlefield," said Lt. Col. Franklin
Childress, a spokesman for the task force. "Until the remains come back and
we bury them, families can't close a chapter in their life."

And that's exactly what Giffin wanted to do. He said he was inspired to
search for his uncle after his eldest son was born in 1990, and after
renewed media attention on POWs. Giffin spent a month in Vietnam, leaving
work as a prominent building contractor and developer. The ultimate moment
came Nov. 12, 1997.

"The moment was so intense, it was a little surreal," Giffin said of the
discovery of a 1964 American penny, several zipper tabs, a .38-caliber
bullet and a tooth near Fobair's crash site.

The military experts hired Vietnamese to dig on the side of a 4,000-foot
mountain.

The site, with its rich greenish sprawl, was probably unchanged for
centuries until Fobair's plane crashed, Giffin said. Soil was sifted through
a mesh frame as the investigators interviewed nearby villagers. Some said
locals had buried a pilot after the crash.

That night, exhausted, Giffin returned to a hotel in Hanoi and faxed a
detailed account to his mother in Toluca Lake.

McDermott, 71, has a crate of letters, newspaper clippings, documents and
photographs of her brother.

She was especially close to Fobair; their father died when they were
children.

Even after all those years, McDermott said, she was overwhelmed with pain in
December when she received the call from military authorities, who had used
dental records to confirm that the tooth was Fobair's.

"The reconciliation is that we now know for sure that the remains are his,"
she said. "We know he died.

Now it's time to create closure. It's a process. It's not an open and shut
thing."

To McDermott, the memory of her brother remains.

Lt. Col. Fobair, a graduate of Covina High School, was a communications
expert for the Air Force.

He was the navigator the day his plane was shot down.

Fobair was flying a "top cat" mission, on which his plane was a decoy to
divert attacking enemy MIG fighters away from American F105 bombers. It was
believed that Communist North Vietnam could be persuaded to surrender by
America's air power.

Fobair's pilot, Capt. Richard P. Keirn, said he saw Fobair slumped in the
back seat of the Phantom with blood running from his nose after the missile
struck. Keirn ejected and spent the next 7 1/2 years in the prison dubbed
the "Hanoi Hilton."

Fobair left behind a wife of two years, Anne Hanto, who remarried eight
years later.

Their only child, David, had been born prematurely and died two weeks before
Fobair left for Thailand in 1963.

"I always felt bad that Ross didn't have someone to carry on his legacy,
other than Betty," Hanto, 59, said from her Tampa, Fla., home. "I'm glad
Bruce got so interested in his uncle. because he is Ross' legacy."

Giffin says he takes comfort in the fact that his uncle probably died
quickly.

But he warns that stories such as Fobair's should serve as a reminder that a
nation must understand what it is fighting for before sending off its
troops.

"I'm grateful for what we have and what we got," Giffin said. "Our family is
more fortunate than 2,000 other families, because we have an answer."

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