Shortly after noon on Friday, Feb. 19, 1971, an American pilot named Larry Hull-blond and blue-eyed, a lean warrior with a delicate face-crashed in the Laotian jungle. He died instantly. Moments earlier he’d been circling the treetops above a downed American helicopter while soldiers on the ground fought their way toward the wreckage with six body bags for the men inside. On its last, low, lingering pass, Hull’s O-2 Skymaster took a shelling from North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns and spun out of sight over a distant ridge.
By late afternoon, a 12-man recovery team had choppered to the crash site atop the western rim of A Shau Valley, just across the border from South Vietnam. They managed to retrieve the body of Sergeant First Class William Fernandez, who’d been riding alongside Hull in the cockpit, but Hull was trapped in the twisted plane, its engine resting against his chest. With darkness falling and enemy soldiers firing on them from the forest, the crew snapped off one of Hull’s dog tags and departed. He was still seated at the controls.
So vanished Air Force First Lieutenant James Larry Hull, who joined the service right out of college in 1968, knowing he’d be sent to Vietnam, and who, upon arrival there, signed up to fly strike control and reconnaissance missions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. After six perilous months of swooping in at night to pinpoint North Vietnamese supply trucks, he volunteered for the ultra-secret “Prairie Fire” unit, whose difficult and dangerous missions involved hovering low to scout out safe landing zones for Special Forces behind enemy lines. The casualty rate among Prairie Fire pilots was 50 percent; they flew as many as seven sorties a day, spending sometimes 10 hours in the air. When his plane went down, Hull had been with the Prairie Fire team almost two months, flying frequently into A Shau Valley, a 25-mile sliver of rough terrain through which the North Vietnamese funneled troops and supplies southward.
Back home in Lubbock, Texas, Hull’s wife Tyra knew none of these details. One day two officers showed up at her door with solemn news and a letter saying her husband’s plane had crashed in Southeast Asia and his body had not been recovered because reaching it would put other men in harm’s way. Two weeks later, military officials told her to go ahead with a memorial service; Hull’s remains, they warned, might never be recovered. “So we did,” she says. Mourners gathered at the Seminole, Texas, church she had attended as a little girl, and afterward they proceeded to the cemetery for a 21-gun salute. “We were told Larry’s remains would not be coming back, that we should try to make it as much like a funeral as possible.” Still, no casket accompanied them to a gravesite, and no tombstone marked the spot where they stood to grieve.
But now, 35 years later, Hull is coming home. On Oct. 12, the Pentagon announced that his remains had been excavated and identified and would soon be returned to his family. “This was something I always prayed would happen,” said Tyra Manning, who in 2004 retired after a dozen years as superintendent of River Forest’s District 90 elementary schools and who now teaches educational administration and directs two teacher-certification programs at Dominican University. “It was always a hope and something I never gave up on. Ever.”
On Nov. 8, Manning and her daughter Laura Hull, who at 37 years old does not remember her father, will travel to Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, Hawaii, to accept Hull’s remains and accompany them to Washington, D.C. On Nov. 13, he will be buried with full military honors at Arlington Cemetery. It will be the first military funeral Manning has ever attended. She’s asked that her daughter receive Hull’s medals-a Silver Star, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Purple Heart and nine Air Medals-and the flag from his casket. “It’s really a celebration and a blessing,” Manning says. “It’s an opportunity to recognize Larry and honor his life. It’s a way to treat his remains and him with the dignity and honor I’ve always felt he deserved. I can’t say it strong enough-it’s a huge blessing and relief.”
For the men who served with Hull-and could not, all those decades ago, bring his body out of the jungle-his belated homecoming brings similar closure to a long-unfinished chapter. “He was a dedicated and professional airman who would do anything to get his comrades out,” says retired Colonel Tom Yarborough, a Prairie Fire pilot who trained and flew with Hull. “And he did that. He went up against odds that he probably could never have survived.” In 1990 Yarborough recounted his wartime experiences in gripping and sometimes grim detail in a memoir called Da Nang Diary. Until she read it and called Yarborough three years later, Manning did not know the particulars of her husband’s death. “Look at all of us now,” Yarborough says. “We’re in our late 50s and early 60s. We’re not going to find many more of our comrades out there.” According to the national Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, some 1,805 Americans remain lost and unaccounted for in the Vietnam War, 364 of them in Laos. “For us,” Yarborough says, “this may be the last chance to bury one of our own.”
Manning met Hull in 1965 as a freshman at Texas Tech University. She was 18, he was 20. Friends introduced them in September, and the following May they got married. Forty years later, she remembers him as passionate, ambitious, kind and loving. He was funny, she says. He liked to laugh. But he was also intense. The son of an Air Force chief master sergeant, Hull had always planned to fly airplanes. After the age of 6 or 7, he never considered a different future. “And my dream,” Manning says, “was to finish college and become a teacher. So when we made the decision to get married, part of our goal was to help each other reach our dreams. It was sort of a precious promise.”
Hull enrolled in officer training school after graduation and received his commission in February 1969. After that he headed to Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock for pilot training. “He truly loved to fly,” Manning says. “He used to come home and say, ‘Oh you should have seen the sky today. You should have seen the clouds. They were beautiful. I know I could have touched God.'” In July 1970, he shipped out. Manning never saw him again. When he was killed, “we were planning R-and-R for Hawaii,” she says. Instead, she found herself a widow with a 2-year-old daughter and one year left of college. She was 24.
Manning pressed forward, driven by the promises she’d made to Hull. “I never doubted that I would continue my degree,” she says. “It was a commitment we had. ? You didn’t think about if it was daunting. It was-I was bewildered. But still, you had a job to do.” She had an example to follow, too: When Manning was 9, her father died of a heart attack, leaving behind two children and a pregnant wife. With only one year of college, Manning’s mother went back to school in 1956 and became a third-grade teacher. Later she went back to school again, earning a library-science master’s and a job as an elementary school librarian.
After Hull’s death, Manning left Texas to finish her bachelor’s at the University of Kansas. She remarried once, but it didn’t last. Going to school nights and weekends at the university, she got a master’s degree and, in 1980, a doctorate in education administration. Her first paid teaching job was as a substitute in Topeka. After a month, she got hired full time. “And then I was a middle school coordinator, and then did two principalships,” she says, “and then became director of personnel.” In 1984, Highland Park’s District 108 recruited Manning to be director of instruction. In 1992, after a two-year stint as superintendent in Stoughton, Wisconsin, she came to River Forest.
Along the way, Manning had raised her daughter, now a computer programmer in Chicago, answering questions about the father she never quite knew, sharing stories and photographs. For Laura, Manning transferred onto CD the taped messages Hull had mailed home from the war. The military’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) made sporadic contact, but its officers had little information to give.
Then one night in 1993, Manning returned home from a school board meeting to find a message. “I walked into my condo there in Oak Park and just flipped on the machine and went into the hallway to hang up my coat,” she recalls. “And on the machine this gentleman said, ‘Dr. Manning, we have information about your missing husband, and you can call me at home tonight.'” She called immediately. He told her that a Vietnamese civilian had stumbled upon what appeared to be a crash site over the border in Laos. Interviewed by American officers, he’d produced a bone fragment and a dog tag. It was Hull’s.
Over the next four years JPAC led several investigations, negotiating delicately for access to the wreckage. Hull’s mother donated a DNA sample, and analysts matched it to the bone fragment. An aircraft remnant from the same spot turned out to be part of Hull’s plane. This past May JPAC and Lao investigators finally excavated the entire crash site and recovered the last of Hull’s remains. His parents, who died a few years ago, knew their son had been found, but didn’t live to see him buried. “For me that’s the saddest part of this,” Manning says. “It was my hope that this would be resolved in their lifetimes.”
Yarborough takes solace from knowing it has resolved during his lifetime. “You live and breathe with these guys,” he says. “The bond among military aviators-I can’t really explain it, but it’s there for life.” The announcement about Hull’s remains has stirred up feelings that remained “under wraps for years,” he says, and Yarborough’s been inundated with phone calls and e-mails from former comrades. “People are coming from all over the U.S. to this funeral, paying out of their own pockets to come and honor one of their own. It will be nice for Tyra and Laura to see them.”
Manning, too, finds herself awash in old memories, some sad and surreal, but others pleasant. She remembers his joy at Laura’s birth and his flight-school graduation, when his father, the chief master sergeant, pinned the wings on Hull’s chest. “They were both so proud of each other.” Recently Manning discovered a cache of her husband’s photographic slides. Every single one is a picture of clouds, taken from the cockpit. “And I’m talking slides and slides of clouds, because he loved to fly,” she says. “Cumulus clouds to cirrus clouds, to sunset clouds, to morning sunshine clouds, to thunder clouds. He was in love with the sky.”
