Betsy Reese Bommer's Brother Comes Home

Our classmate Betsy Reese Bommer lost her younger brother, pilot Gomer David Reese (SHS '61), in the Vietnam War. His remains have been found, and there will be a memorial and burial on April 23, 2009 in Arlington National Cemetery. "So far 40+ family are coming," Betsy writes,"as well as former Ravens (the covert reconnaissance unit he was in) and friends. Everyone is welcome." The bracketed correction in the second article below is by her.




Remains of Pilot Bring a Sense of Closure
By Sarah M. Rivette
Watertown Daily Times
September 26, 2008

CANTON — Elizabeth R. Bommer, Canton, has waited 38 1/2 years for her brother to come home. Next spring, that will be a reality.

"Initially it's a shock and you can't quite believe that it's so real," Mrs. Bommer said. "It's a wonderful sense of relief and gratefulness that somehow all of it is closed."

Mrs. Bommer's brother, Capt. Gomer David Reese III, was shot down April 24, 1970, while flying a covert operation over Xiangkhoang Province, Laos. Capt. Reese was 28 years old and was a member of The Ravens of the 56th Special Operations Wing of the Air Force.

Capt. Reese enlisted in 1966 and worked toward becoming a pilot, a career his sister said suited him because "he would have felt as free as a bird up there."

Mrs. Bommer said she remembers her brother as a fun-loving person who was always on the move. She recalled his patriotism that drove him to enlist in the armed forces, despite the turbulent times that came with the Vietnam era, and attributed that to their father, who served in World War II. She said she also understands why he would have gone on covert missions: "He would have been excited by it and felt it was something that he needed to."

Over the past four decades, Mrs. Bommer has not known what happened to her brother and did not even know he had been flying over Laos. It wasn't until a book, "The Ravens: The Men who Flew in America's Secret War in Laos" by Christopher Robbins, came out that she had an inkling of what her brother was doing.

Her brother's remains were identified by the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, which works to bring back remains of soldiers from all 20th century conflicts. There are approximately 1,200 people, including soldiers and civilians, from the Vietnam War who are still missing.

The organization, with laboratories in Hawaii and Maryland, runs DNA tests on bone fragments and teeth to determine whether the remains match a family member of a missing soldier. To do so, families must submit DNA tests for comparison, which Mrs. Bommer did — but she found out the bone fragments the scientists had were too small to be tested.

After almost four decades of waiting, Mrs. Bommer found out Sept. 8 that remains were identified as her brother's. She received the phone call from her cousin, retired Army Col. William Reese.

"He is six years younger than my brother and idolized him," she said. "I think Bill spurred things on because every couple of years that was more and more data coming back. I think my cousin was really the spark in all of this."

The remains were found in early 2007 and fully collected in 2008, according to a Department of Defense press release. Among the remains, there were also items belonging to Capt. Reese and the other pilot identified, Capt. James E. Cross of Warren, Ohio.

"They found the lens of Air Force sunglasses that matched his prescription," Mrs. Bommer said. "I think it's really remarkable."

Services for her brother will be held at Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, D.C., this spring. Mrs. Bommer said she hopes it will be on the same day that he was shot down 39 years ago.

"It's not like I felt like I lost him forever," she said. "But I never thought I would have a concrete way to honor him. The saddest part is that if he had lived he would have been a part of all this — there would have been other children and grandchildren. That's the thread that goes through your life and it's not something you dwell on, but it's like losing a whole connection that could have been there."



Gomer David Reese III




Vietnam War pilot's remains found in Laos
By HEATHER MURRAY
The Scarsdale Inquirer
October 3, 2008

Nancy Palazzo of Pelham knew just what would help her grandson Oscar get over his first day of kindergarten jitters: her brother's Air Force wings. On Sept. 8, three days after she dug through memorabilia in a family drawer and regaled her grandson with stories of Capt. Gomer David Reese III's bravery, she got a call that dramatized her brother's sacrifice and rekindled her feelings of pride and loss.

The military had found her brother's remains and would give him a proper burial at Arlington Cemetery around the anniversary of his plane crash. Scarsdale High School graduate Reese was a member of "The Ravens," a group of Vietnam War pilots who volunteered to fly covert missions. His plane was shot down over Laos on April 24, 1970, presumably killing Reese and co-pilot Capt. James E. Cross. But since their remains were not recovered immediately, the Department of Defense classified the pair as missing in action and kept them on a list of over 88,000 men missing from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Funding for all Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Affairs programs, including the personnel office, joint accounting command, Armed Forces DNA identification laboratory and Air Force life sciences equipment laboratory was approximately $86 million in 2007.

Reese's other sister Betsy Bommer, who now lives upstate in Canton, credited her cousin, retired Army Col. Bill Reese, with jumpstarting the search for Gomer Reese's remains. Bommer said her cousin was flying back from a meeting in Hawaii one day in the 1990s when he discovered the pilot of the plane was a Raven who had known her brother.

Bommer started receiving notification from the Department of Defense's POW/Missing Personnel Office every couple of years from 1994 on updating her on findings out in the field. Joint U.S. and Lao People's Democratic Republic teams conducted six separate investigations of the crash site between 1994 and the spring of 2008, and interviewed people claiming to have witnessed the crash. In 2004, a team uncovered a seat belt buckle and three years later the crash site was excavated.

Bommer said the military would fly only one family member out to the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii in April and she felt her sister was the one who should make the trip. "Nancy's really the one to go. He was a year apart from her in school and her best friend. They were really close," she said. Bommer graduated from SHS in 1958, Reese in 1961 and Palazzo in 1962.

"My first response when I got the call was, 'Oh, I wish my dad was here,' but as my son says, he'll be leading the procession that day. It's another opportunity to grieve that I didn't realize I had and a wonderful opportunity to celebrate," Bommer said.

Her father, also named Gomer David Reese, was a machine gunner during World War II who got shot while in Germany and came back with a Purple Heart. He died in 2000, three years after his wife. Her father never talked about the war and that part of his life died with him.

Not so with her brother, who she's come to learn more and more about through the military in recent years. She found out he was a Raven around 2000 and said, "It didn't surprise me. The thing about David, he was a very curious, exploratory kind of guy who cared about people, but he was also a risk taker."

Palazzo said she wasn't with her parents when they got the call that their son was missing, but she remembers her mother taking it remarkably well. "She was just grateful he made it to the pinnacle of his dream and glad he wasn't able to suffer any more struggles," she said.

Scarsdale schools had been difficult for her brother, who had dyslexia, Palazzo said. Reese was put in remedial reading. By eighth grade, he was reading on a third-grade level. He spent a year at a reading institute and came back to Scarsdale for high school. At SHS he worked hard in school and participated in sports, but he never was a standout. "He ran track and was always the second fastest. He always just almost made it," she said.

Palazzo said, "It made him very sensitive and caring of other people." Becoming a pilot meant so much to him, she said, remembering what a scare he had when he thought he might not pass the eye exam. Palazzo and her husband Mike attended gold star mothers' ceremonies in Eastchester and Tuckahoe Sunday, honoring mothers who have lost a child in the war. Other family members are also invited.

Palazzo said Sunday evening, "It was really touching. I've had a belly full of tears all afternoon. I don't even know if it was for me. There is a whole beautiful world of vets out there and hearing their stories, well, sometimes it's difficult to sit through," she said. A poem written by Eastchester Veterans of Foreign War Commander Bob Foster brought tears to her eyes, reminding her of poetry her mom wrote about her brother shortly after his death.

Scarsdale American Legion Post 52 invited Palazzo and her husband to lunch Wednesday. Gene Rogliano, chairman of Post 52's Memorial Committee, said legion members have visited Reese's gravesite in Elmsford every Memorial Day since his death. [Neither Nancy nor I are aware of this gravesite. The Arlington National Cemetery site set for April will be the only one we pay attention to.] Although the Reese family couldn't officially bury their son back in 1970, they still held a funeral at the Scarsdale Congregational Church, allowing the community to grieve the loss of a son, brother and friend.