By Stan Finger
The Wichita Eagle August 8, 2001
Sue Jenkins has been married for more than 30 years and has four grown daughters.But she openly admits that another man besides her husband lingers in her heart and mind: Denis Anderson.
He was her college sweetheart, and they married in 1966. Four days before their first anniversary, he left for Vietnam. She never saw him again.
In January 1968, the plane he was co-piloting over the jungles of Laos crashed into the side of a mountain shrouded in clouds. There were no survivors -- and no way to get them home because of hostile forces, terrain and weather. "It's always on your mind," Jenkins concedes.
That's why she embraced news that an American search team had retrieved remains from Anderson's plane in March. The effort was chronicled in the July 22 issue of Parade magazine.
Besides Anderson, who was a native of Hope, Kan., the pilot of the plane, Delbert Olson, also has ties to Kansas. His son, David Olson, now lives in Prairie Village, a Kansas City suburb.
Jenkins has good reason for wanting to know if Anderson's remains were among those recovered. "For me, it's not so much a matter of closure. I can't imagine thinking any differently," Jenkins said from her home in San Marcos, Texas. "The important thing for me is to fulfill one of Denny's last requests." Anderson wanted to be buried in a national cemetery, and Jenkins hopes his remains and those of his crewmates can eventually be interred at Arlington National Cemetery.
Remains of at least some of the nine men who died in the crash were honored in a repatriation ceremony in Hawaii last month. It is expected to take months to identify the remains.
David Olson was in Hawaii for the repatriation ceremony. "I have a lot of good memories... the trips and going on drives with him and going to the base and getting on his plane and things like that," said Olson, who was 7 when his father died. When his own children reached the age that he and his sister were when the plane crashed, David Olson took them to POW/MIA meetings.
"They've been to the (Vietnam) wall several times," Olson said. "They understand. They think it's kind of nice to have a father past the age of 7 or 8."
Denis Anderson has always been a part of his wife's life -- even after she married a minister in 1970, two years after the plane crash. "Our four daughters have just grown up knowing," Jenkins said. "The twins, when they were 4, they thought Denis was their 'other daddy.' We've had some unusual conversations: 'What would you do if he came back?' "
But Denis Anderson suspected he wasn't going to come back. With a wink here, a few carefully chosen words there, he said goodbye to family and friends before he left in November 1967. He just couldn't bear to share that sense of foreboding with his wife. Anderson's concern was well-founded. His squadron was ordered to perform top-secret reconnaissance flights over Laos. They would drop sensors so that American forces could track enemy movements and bomb convoys. The mission required the planes to fly at low levels over enemy territory in difficult terrain.
That was fine with Anderson. He wanted to be a missionary pilot and thought the low-level flying over trees would be good training for his work spreading Christianity into remote areas.
On the morning of Jan. 11, 1968, completing their mission required dipping beneath a bank of clouds, dropping their sensors and climbing back to safety. The first two planes made the drops safely. Olson and Anderson dropped into the clouds -- and never returned.
At first, the crew was listed as missing in action.
Nearly eight weeks later, that was changed to killed in action.
The official Navy report stated that the plane flew into the side of a mountain. But Anderson's squadron mates couldn't accept that, given the skill of the pilots. They told Jenkins they were convinced the plane was shot down, which raised the possibility the crew had been able to bail out before the crash. They might be prisoners of war, their squadron mates said, or even somewhere out there in the jungle.
Jenkins moved back to Manhattan, staying with her in-laws.
"All summer I was kind of in limbo: 'Am I a widow or not?' " she said.
Then Jenkins began hearing about Anderson's farewell messages from his loved ones, and she heard an inner message of her own: She didn't have to pray for him as a prisoner anymore.
While there was no physical evidence yet of Anderson's death, she said, "There was a peace in my heart that God gave me at that point, that I could go ahead and move on with my life."
Military widows were allowed to use their husband's GI Bill for schooling, so Sue went to a Bible school in Texas. There, she met Tommy Jenkins. They married in December 1970.
"God gives him grace to deal with all of this," Jenkins said. "Most men wouldn't be able to deal with it."
Tommy Jenkins has offered to be the minister who presides over the funeral for Anderson, Olson and the others at Arlington National Cemetery. That will probably be more than a year away, given how long it will take to identify the remains retrieved from the wreckage.
"I really am hoping and praying that they will find Denny," Sue Jenkins said. "It won't be devastating if they don't, but it'll be disappointing."
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Reach Stan Finger at 268-6437
or sfinger@wichitaeagle.com.
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