Memorial Day: Daughter of Vietnam pilot longs for closure
Elizabeth McBride’s father was a Top Gun type, a brave and handsome fighter pilot.
But when she was born 60 years ago, so the story goes, he passed out. She never knew if it was the sight of childbirth or because she wasn’t the boy he had hoped for. Initial shock aside, Earl McBride loved his daughter. And, she idolized him. In her mind, she was his favorite. She was the baby.
When Dad was home, Elizabeth’s life teemed with joy. The picket fence around their Virginia Beach home earned its idyllic reputation. He’d take her and her older sister to sit in the cockpit of his airplanes. He’d pile his girls and the neighborhood kids into his convertible.
When Dad was deployed, she’d count the days until his return.
Lt. Commander Earl P. McBride never returned from Vietnam. He was 37. Fifty years later, Elizabeth McBride longs for more closure. Her father’s body was not recovered, though there’s an empty grave with his name at Arlington National Cemetery. This Memorial Day would have been his birthday.
“My father loved his country,” she said. “He died loving what he did.
“I miss him every day.”
Earl McBride’s photos and many medals are displayed in the south Fort Myers home she shares with her husband, Bob Goss, also a pilot.
The memory of one day in particular triggers her tears. In the fall of 1966, 10-year-old Elizabeth opened the door to find two men dressed just like Dad in fancy hats and shiny black shoes.
Is your mom here?
They had news. Her father was unaccounted for. Later, she would learn his plane went down over the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam after being attacked.
She recalls running upstairs and hiding in her bedroom closet. Darkness offered comfort to an implausible thought, Daddy’s not coming home?
They had always been a Navy family, moving often, living out of boxes. Her father, who went by “Mac,” enlisted at 18. The Navy sent him to college, where he met Elizabeth’s mother and earned an engineering degree, allowing him to become an officer and later a fighter pilot on aircraft carriers, she said. He had been to Vietnam twice before.
“He loved fighting for America and he chose to go back.”
Elizabeth has spent more time with memories of her father than in his physical presence. Yet, he has been a guiding force. She kept her maiden name to honor her father. She, too, pursued a life in the skies.
“Dad was flying away in a fast airplane and I wanted to do that too.”
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Wary of heights, she chose not to be a pilot. She felt protected inside the plane as a flight attendant. She made it her career for more than three decades.
For several years, Elizabeth was in denial about her father’s death. She imagined her father was still alive in Vietnam. Perhaps he had been captured? Maybe he had forgotten who he was? Maybe, he had remarried?
“As a kid, you’re thinking all these things to make him alive,” she said. “I wanted to go find him when I got older.”
Once Elizabeth settled into adulthood, her father’s death became more real, especially after she spoke with the radar and electronics officer in her father’s plane who had parachuted out before the crash. That man was rescued.
His survival was one of the reasons why her father was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his final flight on Oct. 22, 1966 during which he led a wave of aircraft against a railroad bridge in North Vietnam. The citation says he was awarded the medal posthumously for “his outstanding airmanship and dogged perseverance.”
Although his aircraft was hit by 57 mm fire, he courageously and skillfully pressed home a successful rocket attack, scoring direct hits...
At grave personal risk, he remained with and skillfully piloted his crippled and burning plane out to sea, ensuring the safe ejection and recovery of his radar intercept officer.
The Navy knows the coordinates of the aircraft, Elizabeth said, but has told her the wreckage is too deep to recover. At some point, she and her husband hope to rent a boat to visit the site and have a private memorial. She harbors a splinter of hope someday something of him will be recovered and his grave will no longer be empty. She would have something more to visit. On this Memorial Day, perhaps she’ll raise a glass in his honor instead.
“We just have to make the best out of it,” she said.