Unwavering: The Wives Who Fought to Ensure No Man is Left Behind

Into the Jungle
July 1973

The signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973, and the subsequent live television coverage of the release of the longest-held group of POWs in the nation’s history six months ago lifted the collective mood in America. It was a celebratory moment for the nation, after an endless war. The returning POWs were feted with homecoming parades, lifetime passes to Major League Baseball games, free cars and vacations, keys issued by the mayors of their hometowns, and a celebrity-studded White House dinner. In contrast, other Vietnam veterans were greeted at American airports with derision, accused of being “baby killers,” spit on by fellow citizens. Americans did not seem to care about their service and sacrifices. The POWs are seemingly the only heroes of this unpopular and divisive war.

While the returned POWs and their wives revel in the lavish celebration, the wives of the missing were only able to watch the White House gala on television. They were not invited to Mrs. Nixon’s tea nor the president’s star-studded dinner in May. Pat Mearns purses her lips, “It hurt like hell.”

What about the missing men? They have not been accounted for, including Marian Shelton’s husband, Air Force Capt. Charles Shelton, missing since 1965. Who is searching for him now that the United States has withdrawn all troops from Southeast Asia? Marian is.

In a small plane above Laos, she drinks in the peaceful scene below. Surveying the patchwork of muddy brown and beige rice paddies, she notices the landscape seems covered by a thin, glistening layer of moisture. In the distance, lush hillsides glimmer. As the aircraft glides northeast, hills give way to mountains — dense and dark, and the vast paddies shrink into tiny squares carved into the mountainsides.

The little plane is heading toward Sam Neua, a provincial town in northeastern Laos near the North Vietnam border. This is where Charles Shelton disappeared eight years ago. She believes he might still be alive, here.

Marian has spent the last six weeks in Southeast Asia on a pilgrimage to find out. She is going to the spot where Charles vanished. The odyssey has led her to faraway places she never expected to see while growing up in rural Kentucky: Tokyo, Taipei, Phnom Penh, Saigon, Bangkok, and Vientiane. VIVA, the organization behind the wildly successful POW and MIA bracelet campaign, is sponsoring her trip. Gloria Coppin, the wealthy Los Angeles socialite chair of VIVA’s national advisory committee since 1966, planned the route. The goal is to meet with as many Communist party heads as possible. The fate of Marian’s missing husband lies somewhere in these jungles.

She is not alone. Trailing her every move is a reporter from a Louisville, Kentucky, newspaper, and Edgar Buell, an agricultural advisor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Marian hopes Buell can help her dig up something, anything, about what happened to her husband. Buell has been living among the Laotian people since 1961 and has become a fierce ally of the Hmong highlanders, resistance fighters backed by the CIA in their battle against the Communist Pathet Lao. Buell, who the Hmong call “Uncle Pop,” is also working closely with the CIA’s airline, Air America, which ferries supplies to the Hmong. He may be just the right person to uncover facts about the husband who disappeared on his 33rd birthday in April 1965.

The day he vanished, Charles was flying covert photo reconnaissance missions over the mountainous jungles of Laos. Marian was managing the home front on U.S. Air Force Base Kadena on the Japanese island of Okinawa, raising the couple’s five rambunctious young children. She was blissfully unaware of the risks associated with the Laotian missions her husband flew. Known for her naiveté, she questioned little. That is, until her husband went missing.

Growing up, it was best not to ask too many questions until Marian’s father sobered up. The family home in Owensboro, Kentucky, a small, predominantly white town nearly one hundred miles southwest of Louisville, was tense. Marian Vollman was the youngest of seven children — six girls and one boy — born to Carl and Mary Catherine Vollman, both Catholic. Carl was a sheet metal worker and Mary Catherine a homemaker. They lived in a small house, where the girls shared bedrooms and menstrual cycles. Owensboro was notoriously the site of the last public hanging in the United States when a young Black man convicted of raping an old white woman was executed in 1936, in front of 15,000 spectators. Besides that gruesome milestone, the town had little of note: it produced furniture, cars, and electric bulbs, and processed tobacco. After high school, most kids went to work at one of the local manufacturing plants and settled down. Marian was the rare resident who left.

Marian was just thirteen when she fell in love with Charles Shelton. The couple met on a tennis court. Their attraction was instant. A hillbilly who lived outside town in a home with no plumbing, Charles was also one of seven children. Unlike Marian, he was a Southern Baptist. Not particularly tall, his trim and sturdy frame — like a tree stump, some said — was topped with sandy blond hair, green eyes, a square jaw, and an easygoing and reassuring smile. Also blonde and green-eyed, with an almost cherubic smile, Marian could have been his sister. She was seventeen and pregnant when she married Charles, soon after graduating from high school. The first in his family to attend college, Charles was leaving Owensboro for the University of Evansville. Then, he would train to be an officer and an aviator in the U.S. Air Force. The life of a military wife was much more exciting and adventurous than a future in Owensboro.

Marian had lost her only brother, Buddy, during World War II. A Navy sailor, he died when his ship was sunk in the Pacific. His remains were never recovered. Marian claimed meeting and marrying Charles helped her get over the loss. But had she considered the risks of Charles’s chosen career?

The couple embraced itinerant military life. More than a decade later, after tours in Germany, South Carolina, Colorado, and Texas, Charles was a seasoned aviator, on his second deployment to Southeast Asia, rotating in and out of Udorn, Thailand, every thirty days.

Captain Shelton spent Easter of 1965 with his family in Okinawa. Nine days later he was flying the lead plane on an aerial mission, a single-seater RF-101C “Voodoo” reconnaissance jet that held up to six cameras in its nose and could fly at low altitudes. The assignment: to capture photos of the Communist Pathet Lao headquarters. Not an easy task, as they were warehoused in a jumble of massive caves near Sam Neua. Passing over the target, Charles descended to 3,000 feet. As he was lining up to snap his first shot, he was hit by ground fire.

Back on Okinawa, Marian was sipping a cocktail at the squadron commander’s home expecting Charles to walk in the door to celebrate his birthday. While the adults drank, the kids were sent to play in a bedroom where nine-year-old Johnny Shelton and eight-year-old Michael were transfixed by an extensive and colorful vinyl album collection. Wandering toward the living room, ostensibly to find the bathroom, Johnny caught a glimpse of his mother, surrounded by guests, crying and shaking in her flowery mu-mu. Johnny’s eyes widened as he watched them try to comfort his mother.

“I knew Charles went down in a jungle, yet I had no idea what kind of jungle it was. I can see why they can’t get him out.”

Captain Shelton was forced to eject from his plane. His wing man saw a good “chute” and an F-105 pilot rushing to assist with the rescue spied Shelton on a steep, sloping hill about thirty to forty yards from his parachute, which was caught in a tree. Search and rescue (SAR) helicopters picked up an intermittent signal from his beeper — a device worn by air crews that emits an electronic signal to rescuers. However, the signal was weak, the weather was bad, and the sun was sinking. Those factors made it difficult to pinpoint his exact location. SAR crews vowed to return in the morning when the weather improved.

Johnny ran to tell his four siblings that their dad’s plane had been shot down. Twelve-year-old Lea Ann, the oldest of the five Shelton children, did not believe him. “I told him to git out! And then he came back in and was telling me some more. ... So, I thought there must be something to this story. I went into the front room where Mama was, to get her word on it. I couldn’t even get to her. She was covered up with people, handing her drinks. And pills.” Everyone was consoling Marian, but no one thought to console her children.

A team was expected to rescue Charles before midnight Okinawa time, Marian was told. She believed it. She had to. She could not face the prospect of another family member lost in war.

SAR helicopter crews searched for several days. But Captain Shelton seemed to have been swallowed up by the jungles of Laos. He was never heard from again.

Hmong guerilla fighters working with the CIA reported that Charles was captured by the Pathet Lao and held in a warren of caves near Sam Neua. But the American ambassador to Laos, William Sullivan, was reticent to authorize rescue attempts. Sullivan was running a clandestine war for President Johnson in this nation he called a “landlocked, lousy little place.” And, while he was concerned about the American captives, he did not want to strain his meager search and rescue resources. Even less did he want to expose the covert war he was running, he admitted. “... I am consciously jeopardizing entire Air America [CIA] operation in this country and am risking severe embarrassment to both U.S. and Lao governments.”

Embarrassing the U.S. and Lao governments is of no concern now, in August of 1973. Marian wants answers. She is not afraid to speak out. Neither a diplomat nor an intelligence professional, she is serving in both roles. Stepping out of the small plane, Marian and her companions visit one of many small villages where Buell and USAID provide food and medical support to refugees. Then, they board a helicopter that whisks them to an even more remote location, the mountain valley of Houayxay, where Buell wants Marian to meet families who have emigrated from Sam Neua, the last place where her husband was seen alive.

Thick white clouds hang over the mountaintops as the Americans walk through the village. Banana trees droop over muddy roads as ducks wander aimlessly. Marian and Buell drop onto straw mats around a table at a village home, where they are served a hot corn whiskey, called “lau lau.” Marian proffers her hosts a picture of Charles. Buell interprets. The women draw blanks. No one recognizes her husband, but they have seen Americans in the caves of Sam Neua as recently as last year. Do not give up searching, one woman tells Marian. If Charles is alive, he will be in those caves. Marian hands her a POW bracelet inscribed with her husband’s name.

The meeting produces no leads but Marian refuses to give in to disappointment. “This has been the best thing on the whole trip,” Marian admits. “Just to get up here and see what’s happening. I knew Charles went down in a jungle, yet I had no idea what kind of jungle it was. I can see why they can’t get him out.”