After 30 Years, MIA’s Homecoming Brings a Range of Emotions, Relief : Vietnam: Airman’s remains were recovered by a joint operation in July. Despite the sadness, there is a feeling the incident has finally come full circle.

PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Freddie Garside, no longer missing in action, came home on a cold winter’s day just before Christmas.

Vietnam veterans wearing their jungle fatigues and battlefield medals stopped by to welcome him.

“To honor a brother.”

“He’s home after 30 years.”

“It’s about time.”

“He’s been in our hearts.”

Even the firetrucks at the airport saluted him, joining in the procession and hoisting American and MIA flags.

The father and mother of another MIA came by, their faces wet with tears.

“I just can’t explain it,” said the father. “It’s hard for both of us because two years ago we got our son back.”

But Freddie’s own parents were not there. They died years ago, their only son’s disappearance an open wound that never healed.

Staff Sgt. Frederick T. Garside, a crew engineer and photographer, was lost on March 23, 1961, when the C-47 he was aboard was shot down while on a secret spy mission over the Plain of Jars in Laos. Last July, his remains were recovered by a joint American-Laotian operation.

Had Freddie Garside survived, he would have been 55 today. As it is, he is forever 24. But at last he is home.

At the funeral services for Freddie, on Dec. 16, the organist played the United States Air Force Song, just for him.

Off we go into the wild blue yonder,

Climbing high into the sun . . .

We live in fame or go down in flame,

Nothing ‘ll stop the U.S. Air Force. . . .

They buried Freddie next to his grandfather beneath a pine tree. An Air Force honor guard fired a 21-gun salute and sounded “Taps.”

The friends and veterans who had kept a vigil over the years dropped their MIA bracelets bearing his name into an ammunition can lying next to his flag-draped coffin. The bracelets were buried with him.

One of Freddie’s three sisters, Alice Kent, rode with him from California, the last leg of his final journey home from Indochina. “I love my brother very much and I looked up to him and it means so much to me.”

Alice was just 12 when Freddie quit school to join the Air Force in 1953. Today she is 50 and the mother of four grown children.

Once, she was known as Freddie’s little sister, his constant shadow. So many years ago--the memories of food fights, of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, of the last time she saw him at his base in Niagara Falls.

“We were latchkey kids, as they call them now, and had to look out for one another. Being the youngest, he was always there watching over me.”

For years, in strange, recurring nightmares, Kent saw Freddie trying to come home to the grandfather who helped raise them.

“He’d stop in front of my grandfather’s house. He’d get out of the car. He’d walk to the front door. But he could never come in. I knew that he was dead but I didn’t want to believe it.”

Now the dreams have ended.

“He’s come home,” she said. “Thirty years, eight months, three weeks. Now I can watch out over him.”

What does it mean to reclaim the bones of a loved one who disappeared in a foreign war so many years ago?

Rosella and Walter Fitts, of Abington, Mass., attended Freddie Garside’s funeral. They had kept a 23-year vigil for their own son, Richard, a Special Forces sergeant, before receiving his remains and burying him in January, 1990, with full military honors.

“I know what these people are going through right now and it’s very hard. But at least they got him home. They can go and talk to him now,” said Fitts.

Sgt. Fitts had sent his father the green beret of the Special Forces for Father’s Day in 1968 with a letter, “When you hold that beret in your hands, you hold me because we are a part of each other.”

“We talk to it,” said Fitts. “The green beret is our son. We tell him we miss him very much.”

Maggie Burnett of Londonderry, N.H., does not have that solace. After 20 years, she still wears her husband’s MIA bracelet on her right wrist, though she doesn’t believe he’s alive. “Because he still hasn’t been accounted for.”

On her left hand is her wedding band and the miniature West Point ring, the one Shelly Burnett gave her for their engagement. She never remarried. Like so many others, Vietnam ruined her life.

“The uncertainty,” she said. “There was no way I could just put it aside and move on the way I should have. My life sort of stopped, just hung there for so many years.”

But when the bones come back, life can go on. And when the bones come back with great ceremony--as did Freddie Garside’s--Vietnam veterans feel that they are in some measure receiving the respect they were denied when they themselves returned from that unpopular war.

“It’s sort of completing the circle,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a Vietnam veteran and chairman of the Senate Committee on POW-MIA Affairs who attended the services. “It feels good as a Vietnam veteran to see somebody brought home to rest where they belong.”

Freddie Garside enlisted in the Air Force less than two weeks before Christmas of 1953 because he didn’t like school. Vietnam, Laos and Indochina were not the household words they would become.

Eight years later, it was his sister, Alice, who got the news that her brother was missing. By then, her parents had divorced. She and her mother had moved to Salem, Ore., where she now lives.

“We received a telegram. I opened it. My mother was at work. I fell apart. Bad as I did, she had to be the strong one and carry me through.”

Then came the nightmares. Kent said it might have been easier had she been able to return home for a memorial service for Freddie in December, 1962, after he was officially declared dead. But her children were just babies.

Thirty years later, his homecoming “will end some of the pain because I will know that he’s home, that he’s safe and knowing that he didn’t suffer any torture,” Kent said.

More than 2,000 men still are officially listed as missing in action in Southeast Asia. U.S. and Vietnamese officials say there is no hard evidence that any are alive. And many will never return, including more than 400 lost in waters off Vietnam, more than half of them from U.S. Navy aircraft carriers.

But there is always hope, and hope is something Freddie Garside’s family wants to impart to the loved ones of all those missing boys.

“I hope they can have what we have today,” said another of Garside’s sisters, Barbara Frizzell, of Plymouth. “That we could get them all home. That’s my greatest wish because this is the ending, the knowing. No more doubts, no more stress. Just knowing that they are home.”