Avery, Robert Douglas

Name: Robert Douglas Avery
Rank/Branch: United States Marine Corps/O2
Unit: VMFA 533 MAG 12
Date of Birth:18 December 1941
Home City of Record: Morganton NC
Date of Loss: 03 May 1968
Country of Loss: North Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 164658 North  1070157 East
Status (in 1973): Presumptive Finding of Death
Category: 2
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground:  A6A
Missions:
Other Personnel in Incident: Thomas Clem
Refno: 1156

Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw
data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews and CACCF = Combined Action
Combat Casualty File, and Senate Select Committee Hearings.

REMARKS:  DID NOT RETURN FROM MISSION

Capt. Avery was part of the A6A aircrew. Radar contact was lost after
leaving the target area of Quang Binh, 10 miles south of Quang Kue.

No further information available at this time.

=====================

Senate Select Committee Report:

North Vietnam            Robert D. Avery
                         Thomas D. Clem
                             (1156)

On May 3, 1968, Avery and Clem were the crew in an A-6A on an armed
reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam providing support to U.S.
Air Force operations along Route Package 1.  Radar contact was lost
with the aircraft when it was approximately 10 kilometers northwest
of the coastal town of Dong Hoi and six kilometers southeast of the
district seat of Bo Trach in Quang Binh Province.  SAR forces were
unable to locate any sign of the crew which was declared missing.

The two men were declared missing. The North Vietnamese did not claim them as 
captured, and the returning U.S. POWs had no knowledge of them. The 
Secretary of the Navy eventually approved Presumptive Findings of 
Death for the two men (Clem on 22 Jul 1974, Avery on 4 Sep 1974), 
changing their status to killed in action, body not recovered.

Returning U.S. POWs were unable to provide any information on the
eventual fate of the crew.  After Operation Homecoming they were
declared killed in action, body not recovered, based on a
presumptive finding of death.

In January 1991, a U.S. team in Vietnam visited Bo Trach District
and reviewed archival documents.  One document listed the downing
of an A-6A on May 3, 1968 in which both crewmen died.  In July
1991, U.S. researchers at the Military Region IV museum in Vinh
City obtained access to an archival list of gravesites of Americans
who died there during the war.  One entry listed Robert D. Avery as
buried in Quang Ninh District from an F-105 downed on April 15,
1968.  In January 1992, a Region IV air defense record listed an A-
6A downed on May 3, 1968 with both crewmen dead.  In December 1992,
a copy of the list of burial sites was turned over by Vietnam to
Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on
POW/MIA Affairs.  

=====================

In the early 1990's, U. S. teams reviewing archival documents in 

Vietnam came across three documents related to Clem and Avery:

A Bo Trach District archival document listed the downing of an A-6A 

on May 3, 1968 in which both crewmen died.

A Military Region IV Museum (Vinh City) archival list of 

gravesites of Americans who died there during the war listed 

Robert D. Avery as buried in Quang Ninh District. 

 

From an F-105 downed on April 15, 1968. [Note: two F-105s were

downed on 15 Apr 68; Col D. W. Winn safely ejected over water and

was rescued, while Maj James H. Metz died in captivity. His remains

were repatriated in March 1977.

     

Another Military Region IV Museum air defense record listed an A-6A

downed on May 3, 1968 with both crewmen dead.

=====================

Richmond Times-Dispatch
Tuesday, July 2, 2002

MIA MYSTERY LEFT FAMILY WONDERING; LEARNED ABOUT CRASH SITE 7 YEARS AFTER
DISCOVERY
Monte Mitchell

   The mystery of what happened to Doug Avery has tormented his family for
   34 years.

They know his Marine Corps jet vanished off radar while on a classified
mission over North Vietnam.

Years later, through a conversation at a Washington cocktail party, his wife
heard he had gone down over water. That would make finding him all but
impossible.

But his plane did not crash in the Gulf of Tonkin, though even the
Vietnamese believed it had.

In 1995, nearly three decades after Avery's plane disappeared, a joint
U.S.-Vietnamese team was probing the coast of Vietnam for another airplane,
part of a continuing effort to locate unaccounted- for veterans.

On a narrow, sandy plain near a row of scrub pines, they found a
brackish-water- filled crater they would later confirm as the crash site of
an A-6A.

The pilot of that plane was Lt. Thomas Dean Clem. His friend and crew mate
was Robert Douglas Avery.

Declassified records in the Library of Congress show that the plane's
mission in the dark, early morning of May 3, 1968, was to bomb enemy supply
routes to the south. The records also detail the government's attempts to
find the plane.

But though the military has known about the crash site since the mid-1990s,
the Avery family learned about it only within the past few weeks. The news
came too late for Avery's mother, who died last spring. His father died in
1984, enduring an agony of uncertainty.

Doug Avery's wife, Grace, who wrote him letters on forms supplied by the
North Vietnamese, died of cancer in 1986, not knowing for sure what
happened.

Fueled by Rambo movies and Internet tales of bamboo cages, a cultural myth
has arisen that the U.S. government is not doing anything to account for the
1,912 Americans still missing from the war in Southeast Asia.

But there is a year-round effort, supported by a $40 million annual budget
for the military's Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, as well as a $20
million annual budget for the Army's Central Identification Laboratory, both
based in Hawaii.

The Pentagon also has an office of POW/MIA affairs.

The Avery case shows the disconnect that sometimes occurs with family
members desperate for information.

Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara, a spokesman for the Joint Task Force, bristles at the
notion that the Avery family was not notified, even though the excavations
were done seven years ago and the family found out only through a newspaper
project.

"Every time we visit a case, the family gets a report. Every time, without
exception. We did dig in '95; they were given a report. That's automatic."

He would not release a copy of the latest excavation report, saying it could
go only to the next of kin.

"We know we had the right aircraft," he said. "We found personal effects. We
found crew materials. We found human remains [but they] have no DNA
potential."

Avery family members do not dispute that the military might have tried to
contact them, but for whatever reason they never got the news.

Avery's mother, "Lou Doug" Avery, was in a nursing home when the excavations
were done, and she could have received the report and not realized it,
family members said.

Avery's daughter, Cindy Avery Sugg, of Knoxville, was just 15 months old on
her father's last full day home. He chose to spend the afternoon playing
with her in the living room.

She gasps on hearing that a search team found bits of clothing and an
unexploded 500-pound bomb at the crash site.

As the daughter of an MIA who later was declared dead, Sugg longs for what
might have been.

"For me, it's a sadness and loss for something I never had," she said,
starting to cry.

 

 

 

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Sources:
The POW Network, Hobson's "Vietnam Air Losses", The Virtual Wall, and the US DoD POW/MIA Office.