The pain of a war loss in Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t any different from how it was nearly 46 years ago for Carol Reitmann Sumner, who lost a fighter pilot husband to a surface-to-air missile during the Vietnam War.
But all these decades later, there’s celebration, not mourning.
Air Force Capt. Thomas E. Reitmann was declared missing after his F-105D Thunderchief was hit over North Vietnam close to the Chinese border on Dec. 1, 1965.
The jet went inverted as his wingman screamed over the radio, "Tom! Eject! Eject!"
Reitmann never did.
The Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command recovered remains in 2009 from Vietnam and told Sumner in May of this year that a positive identification had been made.
The pilot, who died at age 35, will be buried Sept. 8 at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
Sumner said she and her children, who were age 6, 5, 3 and 5 months at the time of the crash and now are 52, 51, 49 and 46, will be there, along with nine grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, other family members and about 20 fellow pilots now in their 70s and 80s.
"We’re celebrating his life. We’re not mourning," said Sumner, a 74-year-old Waikiki resident who is now remarried.
The burial is important because "it’s putting the finishing touches on my beginnings with him," she said. "I started out with him, with our marriage, and we never really got to finish the whole thing and put him to rest. And I think, too, it’s good for the children — they really need this badly."
Over the years, and with the passage of time, the rough edges were smoothed over, the loss not so raw. It wasn’t always that way, of course.
The heart-stopping horror of being greeted by a chaplain and officers who gave her the news of her husband’s loss was no different from how it is now for notifications of war dead from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sumner’s encounter came as she got into her car at the officer’s club at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina on Dec. 1, 1965, the day her husband’s jet went down.
She locked the car doors. Wouldn’t let them in.
Sumner had left her car at the officer’s club to go Christmas shopping with a girlfriend.
"When we got back, she was driving her car, and we stopped in the parking lot and she just gripped the wheel and slammed on the brakes and I said, ‘What in the world?’" Sumner recalled. "She said, ‘Something’s happened to Harry.’ Her husband was over there (in the Vietnam War), also."
Sumner thought it a coincidence and got into her own car, "and sure, enough, they walked over to my car."
Outside was a chaplain, the base commander and his wife, and the wing commander.
"I wouldn’t let them in. I locked the doors because I didn’t want them to tell me anything," she remembers. "They kept pounding on the car door and windows, and I finally let them in. They had me move over and drove me home and sat with me and told me the whole thing."
In the beginning, Sumner was so busy with four young children that she didn’t have time for a "pity party," as she puts it.
"Actually, it’s been worse for him because he missed life," she said.
The family now plans to celebrate it.
Sumner remembers the husband who was a character and full of life. He laughed at the dry humor of English movies when nobody else got it, she recalled.
"We went to a movie once. I was so embarrassed because everyone was so quiet because nobody got the jokes and he got them all, and he was just practically rolling in the aisles and people were looking at him," Sumner said.
Reitmann and the children would watch cartoons every Saturday morning — and he would laugh the hardest, she said.
The Red Wing, Minn., native graduated from high school in 1948, went into the Navy for four years, attended community college, held a part-time job as a disc jockey, among others, and then went into the Air Force, Officer Candidate School and flight training.
Reitmann was classified as missing for 71⁄2 years. During that time he was promoted to the rank of major. In 1973 his status was changed to killed in action.
After her husband’s jet crashed, Sumner moved to Hawaii, where the couple wanted to retire, and she bought a house in Kahala.
The pilot’s death came full circle in 2009 when the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command was told of remains in the possession of a Vietnamese farmer while investigating another case of a missing service member in Lang Son province.
JPAC, as it’s known, investigates and recovers missing American war dead.
"Based on the historical information that we had for that specific area, they had associated the remains to Maj. Reitmann or another loss from the same area," said Liz Feeney, a JPAC spokeswoman.
Mitochondrial DNA was used in tests, and Reitmann was identified May 2, Feeney said.
Sumner was so grateful, she made out 425 thank-you cards for everyone at JPAC.
The Rev. Thomas Gallenbach, a chaplain with Reitmann’s squadron, wrote to Sumner in 1965, days after his death.
"Tom would always have a kind word, a friendly wave or a smile, even when I know his mind was filled with the many duties that lay ahead," Gallenbach wrote.
Nearly 46 years after his death, the pilot, husband and father will be remembered — fondly — in a Sept. 8 burial with full military honors, family said.
The 344th Tactical Fighter Squadron, his old unit, is expected to provide a flyover salute, Sumner said.
"I’ve had so many people tell me he just lit up their life," she said. "He made everyone smile. He always had a kind word."
