The story of a Liberty Center man who lost his life during the Vietnam -War — and those who will always cherish his memory
By MARK MILLER
Prologue
What is the meaning of Memorial Day?
Of course, we know that: It is to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice serving their country. For most of us, however, that can be somewhat abstract. We understand it, we have at least some degree of appreciation, we may even think about attending a Memorial Day ceremony. But if we have not lost a close friend or a member of our family, it is a less than tangible loss.
That is certainly not true for the Harris family, originally from the Liberty Center area but now scattered across the country.
Chapter One
“It was a really special way to grow up,” says Don Harris, now 78, who has spent most of his adult life in Virginia just outside the capital Beltway.
Claude Harris and his brother Clyde married sisters — Ruba Jane and Mary Elizabeth Garrett — in a double ceremony in August 1942. Each couple had five children, the first four of which being close to the same age.
The two families initially lived in the same house. The two living quarters were separated by a single door but there was only one bathroom. “Saturday night baths were quite the challenge,” Don remembers.
The two brothers would be lifetime partners, farming about 600 acres northwest of Liberty Center, although Claude would also serve as the maintenance supervisor at the Wells Community Hospital. While they would eventually move into separate homes, the two families — with the 10 double-first-cousins — remained close knit. They all went to the same church, Liberty Center Baptist, and, of course, to the same school.
Don, the eldest of Claude and Jane’s children, has the typical memories of growing up on a farm — up at 6 a.m. every day to get his chores done, learning to drive a tractor at a very young age. He also has the typical memories of growing up with a brother just two years younger.
“Jim and I fought a lot, of course,” he shares. “And we got into our share of trouble together, too.”
Sister Patty Harris Thornburgh, now living in Howell, Mich., is more than four years younger. She remembers her older brother Jim’s love of “everything outdoors” and sports — basketball, baseball and track. “We went to all of his games, and he did the pole vault in track,” she recalls, “but fishing was his passion.”
When Jim was old enough to get his drivers license, he would drive her up to their orthodontist appointments in Fort Wayne. “He was so quiet,” she says. “There was one trip that I’m sure he didn’t say more than 10 words.”
Cindy, the oldest of the three girls, whose career took her to Kentucky and Kansas and eventually brought her back to Fort Wayne, agrees that while he was quiet, he was “also so doggone smart, I don’t think he ever studied or did homework.” She remembers being almost angry about that.
“All the girls at school and at church, they just wanted to be around the Harris boys,” she continues. She is referring to not just her two older brothers but their cousins Bob and Dick who were about the same ages as Don and Jim, as well as her close-to-the-same-age double-first-cousin Mike. “I was popular with the girls because they wanted to be close to the boys,” she fondly recalls.
In their recollections, all three siblings agree: Jim’s double-first-cousin Dick was closer to him than anyone. Born just two months apart in 1946, they literally grew up together, including their first five years in the same house.
“There was a time that people thought we might be twins,” Dick recalls. “We did everything together. If one of us was involved in something the other one was there as well.” The two spent many summer days at a nearby gravel pit fishing. Patty recalls that the owner would only let these two do that.
“Jim would often bring supper home,” Patty says.
“There were several times that we’d take some fish to his house or ours,” Dick recalls, “and mom or Aunt Jane would fix them for us for lunch.”
With just 12 students in their graduating class at Liberty Center High School, most of the boys played all the sports. Dick and Jim were senior members of the Liberty Center basketball team that played in the record-setting nine-overtime regional semi-final game against Swayzee in 1964.
After graduation, the two would part for the first time — Dick to Manchester College and Jim to Franklin College.
“The plan was that (after graduation) we would then join the Air Force on the buddy plan,” Dick continues. “We wanted to fly fighter jets.” It was not to be. Dick, listed as 6-foot, 5-inches in the high school rosters, was too tall.
Chapter Two
Don Harris had also gone to Franklin College, the first of the Harris clan to get a college degree. When his younger brother followed him, “that was another special time,” he says. “He joined the same fraternity. I think he was president of the fraternity the same year I was president of the student council.”
After graduating from Franklin in 1966, Don went on to graduate school at Indiana University where he met his future wife. With the draft looming, he was able to get a direct officer’s commission into the Army and was stationed at Fort Sam Houston when Jim was assigned to nearby Laughlin Air Base in San Antonio for his Officers Training School.
“I was allowed to go over and pin his second lieutenant insignias on him,” he says. “That was pretty neat.” That was December 1968. They drove home together on a Christmas leave; afterwards Jim would go to flight training school in Texas and Don went first to Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis for additional training and then on to Fort Leonard Wood for his first assignment.
The family would be together again for Christmas 1969, at which time a family portrait was taken. Cindy and her high school classmate, Steve Haflich, were married shortly after they’d graduated from college on May 29, 1970. It would be the last time they would see their brother and double-first cousin James Craig Harris. His records state his “Start of Tour” date in Vietnam as June 9, 1970. Don was assigned to South Korea about two months later.
From the Harris Family album…
The two brothers stayed in close contact, often using what was called the “autovon phone” — a military communication network meant only for emergencies which often cut the calls short. Their last conversation was a brief one, on an afternoon sometime in late January 1971.
“He told me he was flying night missions and that’s why he was in his hooch and able to take my call,” Don says.
Chapter Three
Reports in The News-Banner, written by Jim Barbieri, state that his parents received a visitor, a lieutenant colonel from what was then Grissom Air Force Base near Peru on the afternoon of Monday, Feb. 1, 1971. No one survives who was part of that visit but they were informed that their son was officially listed as “missing in action” while flying a combat mission over Cambodia. The same officer would return the next day with a “plain manila envelope” and the official notification: “We regret to inform you …”
In the mail that same day was a letter from their son, dated Jan. 29. It would later be shared and printed in the News-Banner.
As the adjutant officer of the 6th Medical Depot in South Korea, now-Capt. Don Harris’ responsibilities included processing all communications on the base.
“If there was a message for a soldier that someone at home was sick, that would go through me,” he explains. Those communications usually came over the phone or via a written message or telegram. On that first morning of February 1971, “they asked me to come over to the communications area” to pick up a transmission in person. It was the MIA notice. Before he had a chance to call his parents, another telegram arrived, confirming that they’d recovered his brother’s body.
“That was a very difficult call. Dad couldn’t even come to the phone. He couldn’t talk.”
By now, Cindy had graduated from Manchester and was serving an internship as a clinical dietician at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lexington; she and Steve were living in Wilmore, Ky. It was the pastor of Liberty Center’s United Methodist Church (she cannot recall his name), who happened to be in Wilmore that evening, who came by the couple’s small trailer-home to deliver the news that her brother was missing.
“I got up and went to work the next morning,” she shares. “What else could I do? But I spent a lot of time in the bathroom, trying to keep myself together. It was a very emotional day.”
Her training at that particular time was focused in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, which hosted “quite a few casualties from Vietnam” she says. “Very serious injuries.”
She was caring for one young soldier at the time she got the phone call from her mother that her brother’s death had been confirmed — Jim’s body had been recovered.
“This young man — I remember he was married but I don’t know if he had any kids — half of his brain had been just blown away,” she shares. “He was on a feeding tube, he couldn’t see or speak and his family couldn’t come to visit. As devastated as I was, I think God put me in that place at that time to help me realize that it could have been much worse.”
Patty was a student at Ball State, spending the evening in her dormitory room studying. At that time, whenever a male would visit a women’s dorm, he was to announce his presence by shouting “Man on the floor!”
“I was studying and a little voice said ‘Pray for your brother,’” she shares. “My first reaction was ‘Which one?’ and then in an instant I heard this ‘man on the floor’ and I recognized it as (double-first-cousin) Mike,” also a student at Ball State. He had come to deliver the news that Jim was missing.
“You know, I just don’t remember how long it was until I got the message that he’d died or who called to tell me.”
After being rejected for pilot training, Dick Harris was drafted into the Army. He was not sent to Vietnam but rather served his time in Hawaii. By February 1971, he’d been discharged and was utilizing his degree in biology to teach at Huntington High School while also serving as the assistant basketball coach at his alma mater, Manchester College.
“I don’t remember who called me, or exactly what I was doing at the time,” he says from his home in San Diego. “It was probably Dad; I just don’t know for sure.” He only knows “it will remain the saddest day of my life.”
It was never determined exactly why Lt. Harris’ A-37 fighter jet crashed. What is known is that he was on a night mission in the early-morning hours over Cambodia, flying from his unit’s base near a village named Bien Hoa. Their mission was to disrupt the military supply lines along the major highways leading into Phnom Penh.
“As I recall,” Cindy Harris Morphett shares, “we were told that the fighters worked in groups of two. His partner had made his bombing run and then Jim followed. The other pilot reported that he lost communication with Jim and then witnessed a large explosion and flames. I think it was in very foggy conditions.”
“We were told that there was enemy fire in the area,” Don says, “but it was never confirmed that his plane was shot down.”
“He didn’t eject, or didn’t have the time to,” Cindy speculates. “Maybe he got disoriented in the fog.”
Chapter Four
Army Capt. Don Harris immediately began the process of requesting permission or be the official escort to return his brother’s body home to Wells County. He soon had orders cut to fly to Japan, then to San Francisco where he had originally thought Jim’s body would be delivered. However, since their home was east of the Mississippi River, Dover Air Force Base in Delaware would be his next designation. It would be an “agonizing” three or four days there, waiting for his brother’s body to arrive.
“It was painful,” he shares. “I wanted to be home with my family.”
When the casket finally came, it was accompanied with a caution: The family should have a doctor present if they want to view the body.
“Every bone in his body had been broken,” Don says he was told. The casket was never opened.
There are a number of small details of that trip home from Delaware to Fort Wayne that remain in Don’s memory, including a stopover in Chicago where he watched the casket being transferred from one plane to another. They arrived home on Thursday, Feb. 11. Service arrangements had been made — calling that afternoon and evening and services the next day. Friday, Feb. 12. Another date etched into the minds of the three siblings and his closest friend.
“I think that the schools let out for the day,” Patty recalls. “But it was standing-room-only in the church. And outside the church — it has a long sidewalk — people were lined up. And it was an awful day. A blizzard. But people were lined up.” She is certain that “every single one” of her Liberty Center classmates were there.
Dick Harris mentions the “crummy weather,” that the snowplows had to clear the roads form the church in Liberty Center to the cemetery in Bluffton. The emotions? “Of course. The church was jam-packed.”
Cindy remembers the long week between getting back home from Kentucky and the funeral. “We just waited” for Don and Jim’s body to get there, she recalls. She has specific memories of the graveside ceremonies: “The 21-gun salute, the flag folding and then they gave it to dad.” A long pause. “Very emotional.”
Don would speak on behalf of the family at the funeral, and chose to share a passage from John’s Gospel: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” And then added, “Jim died that we can sit here in safety.”
Also in attendance that day “was a young woman not known to many in Wells County,” Jim Barbieri wrote in his News-Banner account. “A resident of Hialeah, Fla., she and Lt. Harris had planned to marry next summer.”
“That was Jeri,” Cindy shares. “A very pretty girl. She stayed in touch with mom and dad for quite a while.”
Chapter Five
Jim’s three surviving siblings and his double-first-cousin/best-friend have memories of growing up they are glad to share. The trouble Don and his brother got into together — the lickings and the lessons, one might say. Patty has a story about Jim and some sparrows. There is another about popsicles and a runaway tractor. Cindy remembers how he nearly burnt down the garage experimenting with his chemistry set. She particularly treasures two Valentine’s Day cards Jim had sent her while she was in college — one she received in 1968 and one in 1969.
Where are they now …
Dick recalls two somewhat traumatic incidents “in which Jim was the culprit.” One summer day at the gravel pit, Jim was casting his cane pole and the hook caught Dick’s lip. “Fortunately, his mom was a nurse.” While warming up for a high school baseball game, Dick’s attention was averted just as Jim threw a ball to him. It caught him square on the nose; the injury put Dick in the hospital for several days before they could stop the bleeding.
“That was a traumatic event for the whole family,” Cindy adds. She also relates how “the six of us” — the three oldest from each family branch — used to mow the yard at the church every week. “They paid us $5. It was kind of hard to split that six ways.”
They also talk about what might have been. Jim excelled in school, garnering National Honor Society status and earned his degree in physics at Franklin. His leadership was evident in serving as the state president of the Baptist Youth Fellowship and as president of his fraternity. He had volunteered to extend his tour of duty in Vietnam but that was turned down. He was slated to return to the states before the end of March to learn how to fly the massive B-52 bombers. He had a fiancé waiting.
Coda
So yes, Memorial Day has a special meaning to the Harris family.
Don, living so close to Washington, D.C., has often gone to the Vietnam War Memorial to view his brother’s name. Their parents were able to attend the dedication of the memorial in 1982, another day he will not forget.
While the memorial has special access for Gold Star families, “it gets a little tougher every year,” he shares. “Very crowded. But visiting the wall — it’s about equal to going to his grave.”
Patty knows that she was not as close to Jim as her older brother and sister because of the age difference.
“If we lived back in Indiana, I’d probably go (every Memorial Day),” she reflects.
Dick Harris remembers Jim every Memorial Day “and everybody else,” he adds, noting that America lost about 58,000 others in Vietnam.
“My idea of war changed when Jim was killed,” he says. “It’s just not worth it.”
Cindy pauses when asked about her Memorial Days. “Jim was fighting for this cause,” she finally says, “and with everything that’s going on, this political atmosphere …”
She fears that the country just simply does not remember and has taken her brother’s sacrifice for granted.
Have we?
miller@news-banner.com
