Christopher Rich
csrich@dhr.state.ga.us

My success story has nothing to do with making a buck, instead it has everything of finding the real answers of what happened to my Father.

The following is how I got involved with making web pages.

My father was the Executive Officer of the VF 96 Fighter Squadron on the USS Enterprise in 1966-1967. On May 19, 1967 he was flight leader of a flight of 4 F4 Phantoms flying a MIG suppression mission to cover the attack jets that were bombing several military sites over North Vietnam.

While they were at about 18,000 feet the radar intercept officer (RIO) sounded off that there was a Surface to Air Missile (SAM) in the air. Radar during this time could only tell when a SAM was fired but not where it was. My dad did evasive maneuvers, that brought them down to about 12,000 feet, but the SAM exploded to the rear and the left of the aircraft. No smoke, no fire, good communications and got a thumbs up from his wing man. A second SAM was fired about 2 seconds later, again he did evasive maneuvers. Again the SAM exploded to the rear and to the left of the aircraft. this took them down to about 2500 feet, but this time there were no communications.

The RIO was involuntarily ejected, so we thought and captured by the North Vietnamese Army about 25 miles south west of Hanoi. Where he spent about six and a half year as a POW. After speaking to the RIO and a good friend of my dad, who was also a Phantom pilot. It is thought that my dad was doing a command ejection where the backseater ejects first and than the pilot. Remember the movie Top Gun when they ejected from the aircraft, that was a F4. As the RIO told me that they were at about 2500 feet doing about 450 knots with about a 10 degree down angle. the command ejection takes about 9 seconds all together but doing they had about 7.5 seconds before the aircraft ran out of air.

But there was no word on my dad, Captain Richard Rich so he was listed as Missing in Action or (MIA). This designation is the worst one that a family member could have. As there is no closure and the not knowing what happened to your loved one. In my case my dad.

I was always very involved in the POW/MIA issue as you can see by my profile and Avatar. In 1991 I met a person on line that wanted me to build a web page on my dad to help with a new organization called Operation Just Cause, http://www.ojc.org, that dealt with this issue.

I remember staying up for about 36hrs getting the page made up and running. The way that my paged turned in to a success story that tens of thousands of people saw it in the years afterwards. I had updates on my dad's case, at one time the US Government said yes we know were your dad went down but we are closing the case. By the Web page I had made a form to be sent to the President, Vice President, Secretary of the Navy, and other department heads in the Department of Defense (DOD). Also had a separate form for House of representatives and senators. Along with the phone numbers and fax numbers for the appropriate agency's. I was told years later that the various departments had received over 1,000 emails, phone calls and faxes in one week of posting the information.

As I got more critical of how our government was handling this issue I started to get more hits from .mil and .gov. So someone was looking.

In 1997 my dad's case was reopened again and in 1998 they did the first excavation of my dads crash site. In March of 2000, then secretary of Defense Cohen traveled to Vietnam and he visited a excavation at a crash site. This site turned out to be my dads site.

So you see many make money on the web but I got something that money can never buy.
The Truth.

Thanks for reading

Chris Rich (Rewired)
Proud Son of Capt. Rich Richard, XO of the VF 96
USN 1945-1967
MIA 1967-2000
Remains found 3/13/2000
Remains identified 10/7/2000
Buried in Arlington National Cemetery 11/7/2000