19,708 days and counting. Family of airman missing in Vietnam asks for Tri-Cities help

Veterans Day 2022 marks the 19,708th day that the family of a Kennewick High School graduate has waited to bring the airman missing in Vietnam home.

Major San D. Francisco, who was a U.S. Air Force pilot, is one of 37 Washington state military members still unaccounted for in the Vietnam War.

His younger sister Terri Francisco-Farrell of Kennewick still has hope that her brother’s body can be found. But it may take pressure from the Tri-Cities community to continue the search, she said.

On Nov. 25, 1968, Francisco was a first lieutenant co-piloting an F-4 Phantom jet fighter, after volunteering for a mission when one of the original crew fell ill, said his younger sister Terri Francisco-Farrell of Kennewick.

His F-4 was shot down during the reconnaissance mission over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The pilot survived, only to be killed resisting capture.

Francisco had two broken legs and was being taken into captivity when he was hit by shrapnel from American bombs, according to accounts from Vietnamese witnesses.

Francisco-Farrell suspects that he was dragged into an open area by his captors in their attempt to ambush the Americans looking for him. She believes he died during the ambush after he would not lift his hands to the ladder of a rescue helicopter and put its crew in danger.

In 2014 a location where he may have been buried was identified.

That spot and another where witnesses said they believe he was buried have been excavated without finding his body.

Then excavations stopped during the COVID-19 pandemic, as mandatory quarantines limited the time available to dig.

However, the family was given hope just before the pandemic that the area where Francisco had been buried had been narrowed.

In 2019 the U.S. Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, reached out to two witnesses to Francisco’s final hours or burial, who had been interviewed years earlier.

One was guarding a tunnel and said he saw Francisco’s parachute land. The other helped bury him and later exhumed his body for Vietnamese Army propaganda on a claim that his was the 2,000th plane shot down during the war.

He is believed to have been reburied in the same area.

In the second round of interviews, the two witnesses were taken to the two sites that had been excavated. Both thought the burial was at the first site excavated, but that the excavation needed to be expanded to find Francisco’s body.

DPAA officials proposed expanding the excavation in 2020, but before that work could start, the pandemic put the plan on hold.

Now Francisco’s family wants the search to resume but have not had an answer from DPAA on when a final excavation will be done or why it evidently has not been rescheduled.

“They were on track in 2020, so how did it get derailed?” Francisco-Farrell asks.

Francisco-Farrell is asking that residents of the Tri-Cities — including Burbank, where Francisco grew up — contact Washington’s U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell to ask that the excavation be done.

Email Murray through her website at murray.senate.gov/write-to-patty. Email Cantwell through her website at cantwell.senate.gov/contact/email/form.