3/30/03
By MELINDA BURNS 
SANTA BARBARA NEWS-PRESS
NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER 

Nearly 40 years after his father's plane crashed in the mountains of Laos, 60 miles from the border with North Vietnam, Tony Cordero is still trying to get closer to the man he barely knew. 
     Mr. Cordero, 41, was 4 years old when his father, U.S. Air Force Maj. William Cordero, became the first Santa Barbaran to die in the Vietnam War. It was Father's Day weekend in June 1965, and Bill Cordero was wrapping up his second tour of duty. He was 29. 
     This month, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Tony Cordero and 50 other sons and daughters of Americans who died in Vietnam took an unprecedented trip to the battlefields, rivers, rubber plantations, beaches and mountains where their fathers perished. They did so in a mission of peace, Mr. Cordero said, to honor both sides who had fought in the war and to deepen their understanding of Vietnam and its people. 
     "You're always somebody's child," Mr. Cordero said. "I wanted to visit the country my father had discussed in his letters, see the places he had flown in and out of, because it was a mystery. The trip would help me walk in his footsteps and trace his path." 
     And so it was that Mr. Cordero found himself landing in Ho Chi Minh City, seated in a planeful of people who could scarcely contain their excitement or hold back their tears. 
     "There were a couple of times I had to turn away and close my eyes," he said. "Because from the time we were children, we always wondered what it looked like." 
     Mr. Cordero, a San Pedro resident who works in business banking, is the co-founder of Sons and Daughters In Touch, a group of 3,500 people who lost their fathers in the Vietnam War. He formed the organization in 1990, when he was about to turn 30 -- an age his father had never known. The group held annual picnics at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Then, one year, Mr. Cordero took the microphone and said, "The time's come for us to make this journey." 
 

      The trip took three years to organize, but on March 4, Mr. Cordero was finally in the hot, humid climate of Saigon, adjusting to the geckos in the hotel rooms, the strong coffee sweetened with condensed milk, and the unchanging meals of rice, fish and soup. After a few days in the city, the group split into nine teams, accompanied by Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese guides, and began their pilgrimage. 
     Mr. Cordero set off alone with a guide to the border with Laos. His family, he said, did not learn until 1969 where his father's plane had gone down. 
     On June, 22, 1965, Bill Cordero and his pilot had taken off as usual from the Philippines, stopping in Saigon to refuel for a bombing mission in the interior. They were listed as missing for four years. 
     The crash site was discovered in 1969, and the remains of the two men were buried in the same grave at Arlington National Cemetery. No one could tell the families whether the plane had been lost in bad weather or shot down. 
     In 1994, Mr. Cordero said, U.S. investigators determined that the Laotian villagers near the crash site had buried some remains. 
     "My objective was to get to that crash site and learn more," he said. "I wanted to stand as close as possible to that ground zero. If there were remains of my father still in the ground, they needed to be brought home." 
 

SON OF A BLACKSMITH 

     Bill Cordero had a strong sense of his own worth, even as a young man. After all, he was the son of Walter Cordero, a renowned Santa Barbara blacksmith whose ironwork was on display at the Mission, the Courthouse and at the entrance to Hope Ranch. 
     Bill told his wife, Kay, a nurse, that when he got out of the service, he would become mayor of Santa Barbara. He joked with his friend Jack Woods, a fellow graduate of the Santa Barbara Catholic High School, now Bishop Garcia Diego High School, that he was going to be the first "American-Mexican general" in the U.S. military. 
     Bill's friends recall his ramrod-straight posture and soft-spoken, thoughtful ways. He delivered food baskets to the poor. His mother, Ida, was head of the Catholic Welfare Bureau, now Catholic Charities. 
     "I can see him right now in my mind's eye," said Mr. Woods, a retired Santa Barbara letter carrier who lives in Shingletown, east of Redding. "I know he didn't want to die. In our own minds, we were all eternal. You never think you could be the one who doesn't come back." 
     But Bill was a gung-ho patriot, Mr. Woods said. Once, on a visit to the Oxnard Air Force Base, where Bill was stationed, Mr. Woods asked him, "Why are we fighting this war?" And Bill responded, "Because it's the breadbasket of the Orient and a prime objective for the Communist Chinese." 

     On his first tour of duty in 1963-64, he navigated bombing missions in an old B-26, a World War II-era propeller plane. Bill Cordero wrote home critical of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. President Lyndon Johnson had not officially declared war on Vietnam. The American public had been told the U.S. presence was "advisory and noncombatant." 
     "My Dad was smart enough to know there were some parallels to the French fiasco in Vietnam and the way Washington was setting up the U.S. military for the same debacle," Mr. Cordero said. 
     At the time Bill Cordero died, he was flying a B-57, a sophisticated jet bomber, and the United States had sent 175,000 combat troops to Vietnam. The Johnson administration had chosen to escalate the war -- a decision that Mr. McNamara, years later, would characterize as a mistake. 
     "People are human; they are fallible," he wrote in his 1995 memoir. "I concede with painful candor and a heavy heart that the adage applies to me and to my generation of American leadership regarding Vietnam. Although we sought to do the right thing -- and believed we were doing the right thing -- in my judgment, hindsight proves us wrong." 
     Bill Cordero's name is first on the list at the Veterans Memorial Walk at Las Positas Park. His name also appears on a plaque honoring veterans at the flagpole at Bishop high. This June, as part of the 50th reunion of the Class of '53, his friends will place a wreath there in his memory. 
     His widow was left to raise five children. 

INTO THE JUNGLE

     Tony Cordero arrived at the Laotian village of Ban Namong on March 9, after a plane flight out of Ho Chi Minh City and a long car trip on dirt roads in torrential rains, with several stops along the way to push the vehicle out of the mud. He was shocked by the poverty of the village: a collection of wood shacks built on stilts, with no plumbing, sewage or electricity. A thick fog hung over the place. No wonder his father had lost his way, he thought. 
     The village leader held a meeting; Mr. Cordero explained his mission. He distributed some boxes of Red Vine Licorice for the children and gave the village chief a bottle of Jim Beam bourbon whiskey. The chief, in turn, passed around some homemade brew and pledged to guide him to the crash site in the mountains, seven hours away by foot. 

     The next day, the villagers showed Mr. Cordero a collection of parts they had taken from the crash site -- a metal pole, canister and tray. Mr. Cordero set off with his interpreter and four other men through the thick jungle. It required two men with machetes to hack a trail through the brush. The trip was hot and tiring, and the going was very slow, up and down mountainsides, across a river and over a ridge. 
     After more than four hours, Mr. Cordero was feeling isolated and exhausted. He tried to imagine how it would be, once he reached the downed plane. He decided to turn back. 
     "Had I gotten to that crash site, it would have been hollow," he said. "I would have been alone. I wouldn't have had anybody to celebrate or mourn with. The villagers didn't know my father." 
     Mr. Cordero lay down on the jungle floor and looked at the sun streaming through the trees. 
     "I thought about how I could transform myself and envision the last minutes of my father's life," he said. "What did he see before his eyes closed? Now I have the answer." 

     Back in the village, Mr. Cordero and the villagers prepared a shrine out of the airplane parts, some bouquets of rose brought by the interpreter, and several photos -- including one of his father in uniform, posed confidently next to his plane. As incense and candles were lighted, everyone gathered around. 
     "I told them I hoped they would remember me and my family," Mr. Cordero said. "The chief said they were honored to have me there, and impressed that I would come that far to honor my Dad."