During the flight to the aircraft carrier on station in the Gulf of Tonkin, both Dunn and his wingman drifted north of their proposed flight route and wound up off the east coast of Hainan Island, China. The Chinese, having tracked the aircraft on radar, sent MiG 17 aircraft to turn the intruders away. Fire from one of them struck Dunn's aircraft.
The pilot of the second plane, along with three other crewmen, saw Dunn descend with a fully opened parachute and heard the manual UHF emergency beeper sound for two to three minutes, but then they were forced evade the attacking MiG aircraft and flew toward the security of South Vietnam. The wingman immediately reported the shootdown and U.S. aircraft responded within minutes of the call. Unfortunately, due to the wingman's perception that he was off the coast of North Vietnam and not China, the U.S. aircraft searched the wrong area for hours. Upon his landing in South Vietnam, the mistake was discovered and other aircraft were correctly deployed, but without success.
Eight hours after the shootdown, an electronic surveillance plane picked up a beeper signal for 20 minutes from the vicinity of Hainan Island. It is believed that Dunn would take approximately 8 hours to reach the island in his emergency life raft. There were a number of junks in the region which might have picked him up. Had he drowned, his body would have reached the island and probably have been seen by villagers.
The Chinese reported the shootdown in their radio broadcasts. Numerous newspapers related the incident, and U.S. State Department efforts were initiated to try to get more information. Despite the evidence that Dunn could have been captured, the Chinese will say nothing about his fate. American envoys to China have raised the question of Dunn's fate to no avail.
Dunn's wife and son have been very active since he disappeared in the effort to secure information on the men still missing in Indochina. They know that Joe Dunn would want them to press for answers. Joe himself was very concerned about friends who had been shot down, and for the crew of the ill-fated Pueblo illegallly siezed by North Korea in 1968. They continually work to remind the American public and the government of the United States that the fate of those nearly 2500 Americans remains unresolved and is of utmost importance.
Joseph P. Dunn was promoted to the rank of Commander during the period he was maintained missing.
Added on October 1, 1998 In 1997, Monika Jensen-Stevensen wrote "SPITE HOUSE" and in it notes she spoke to Maureen Dunn. The author writes "Ms. Dunn also obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act that VERIFY that the decision to ABANDON her husband, and other pilots who were shot down near Hainan Island, were made at the highest levels....high-level group had made the decison to abort her husband's rescue in the same way.....[as the] abandoning of the pilot in October of the same year. She asked McNamara for an apology....He told her, "I'm not just sorry, I'm horrified..."

 

[see page 199-200 of Spite House]
=================================

07/04/2006
The Search for Canasta 404: Love, Loss, and the POW/MIA Movement,  a new
book by Melissa B. Robinson and Maureen Dunn.

Information about The Search for Canasta 404 (hardback at $24.95) is
available at http://www.upne.com/1-58465-486-4.html.

The Search for Canasta 404: Love, Loss, and the POW/MIA Movement
The true story of a personal tragedy that helped spark the POW/MIA movement

The whirlwind romance of Joe and Maureen Dunn began in the spring of 1963.
Each the youngest child of a working-class Irish Boston family, they quickly
fell in love and were married soon after they met. Joe subsequently enlisted
in the Navy, attended flight school, and volunteered for Vietnam. On
Valentine's Day 1968--eleven days after his first tour of duty was
extended--Joe was ferrying an unarmed plane, call sign "Canasta 404," when
he drifted into Chinese airspace and was shot down.

That tragedy helped to ignite one of the most important social movements of
recent decades. Eyewitness accounts suggested Joe might have survived the
initial attack, but Maureen, determined to prove her husband was still
alive, met with resistance rather than answers from a stonewalling U.S.
government. In response, she organized the "Where is Lt. Joe Dunn?"
committee, one of the first POW/MIA activist organizations in the country.

Part love story, part inside account of the growth of a movement, The Search
for Canasta 404 is a deeply personal narrative of private tragedy and public
activism.

--------------

September 25, 2006

A missing pilot and lasting love
By GWENN FRISS
STAFF WRITER
HYANNIS - Behind the bar at The Island Merchant is a photograph of Navy Lt.
Joseph P. Dunn, of Hull, whose unarmed plane was shot down off the coast of
China on Feb. 14, 1968.

 Joseph P. Dunn II and his mother, Maureen Dunn, hold a photo of Navy Lt.
 Joseph P. Dunn, who went missing in China when his son was 19 months old.
 (Staff photo by Paul Blackmore)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When visitors ask, restaurant owner Joseph P. Dunn II - known to most as
Joe-D - tells them the pilot in the photo is his father.

Lieutenant Dunn is one of 1,798 Americans unaccounted for after the Vietnam
War. He is one of only seven lost in Chinese territorial waters.

His son was 19 months old when he disappeared. The only father Dunn has ever
known is the one in this photograph and others like it, the one his mother,
Maureen Dunn, has brought to life for him with her stories.

''There was no disconnect. The hard part was for my mom, having to listen to
me talk about my dad all the time,'' Dunn says, sitting in the Ocean Street

restaurant with his mother, who drove from her Randolph home.

Dunn grew up surrounded by his mother's unrelenting efforts on behalf of her
husband and other Vietnam troops listed as missing in action or prisoners of
war. He did his first press interview at age 6. His mother brought Joe-D
along to parades and protests, hearings and speaking engagements. He did his
homework at one end of the table while she prepared mailings to Pentagon
officers and elected officials at the other.

''When you've been doing it since you were a little kid, you just think of
it as normal,'' Dunn says.

Maureen Dunn's quest to gain humanitarian treatment for POW/MIA soldiers and
rights for their families has put her in the spotlight so often - she
estimates 550 to 600 interviews - that it's difficult to find a question she
hasn't answered a dozen times over.

''She's known from Boston to Washington to the West Coast. When it wasn't
fashionable, she was a trouper and stuck in there and her great
determination kept the MIA movement alive,'' says Sidney L. Chase, a Vietnam
veteran and regional veterans agent for 13 Cape towns and Wareham.

Chase adds, ''If you go back and look at any MIA event or issue, you'll
probably find Maureen Dunn involved at some level.''

While networking with some of the scores of people she's come to know,
Maureen met Associated Press reporter Melissa B. Robinson in 2002 outside a
Washington, D.C., hearing. Listening to Maureen sketch out her involvement
in the National League of POW/MIA Families - working on everything from
POW/MIA bracelets with college students to pushing legislation to improve
benefits for POW/MIA families - Robinson saw the possibility of a book.

In July, ''The Search for Canasta 404: Love, Loss and the POW/MIA Movement''
was published by Northeastern University Press.

Maureen's years of political activism brought her into contact with many
well-known personalities. Blurbs touting the book came from Henry Kissinger,
Sen. John Kerry and Boston TV news reporter Dan Rea.

Although the book is named for the last radio call sign Lieutenant Dunn used
in 1968, it begins eight years earlier, when Maureen met Joe, a friend's
younger brother, at the Park Street subway station in Boston. Their first
date lasted until 2:30 a.m. and earned her a monthlong grounding from her
strict Irish-Catholic mother. Despite her mother's misgivings, Maureen went
to Joe's college prom with him after her punishment was over. In a matter of
weeks, she knew she loved him.

Maureen insisted the book include their love story. It was the basis of the
decades-long quest she's undertaken to make the government see lost soldiers
not as casualties but as individuals whose absence tore holes in the people
they left back at home.

''I will never let another wife go through what I went through,'' Maureen
says. ''A lot of the young wives, they're handed the flag at the cemetery
and then they (the military) walk away when she needs them the most.''

Although Maureen lived off-base with family, she was outraged by the rule
giving the family of a soldier killed in action just three weeks to vacate
military housing. Through Maureen's work with the National League of
Families, bereaved spouses now have a year to find new housing.

''Even though we can't get everybody home, we can help those who are here,''
Maureen says.

In the early days, Maureen focused on finding her own husband, forming a
''Where is Lt. Joe Dunn?'' committee and pressuring the military and elected
officials to look for him and his downed plane. Another pilot who escaped
the Valentine's Day 1968 attack by Chinese fighter jets off the island of
Hainan reported seeing a parachute descend from the debris of Lieutenant
Dunn's jet.

For more than a year, Maureen wrote to Joe faithfully, sending her love and
catching him up on Joe-D's antics. She mailed the letters, hoping he was
alive someplace and would know how much she missed him. As years passed with
no word, Maureen turned her efforts to finding Joe's remains for a proper
burial. After President Richard M. Nixon normalized relations with China,
she applied for permission to go herself.

In the meantime, she continued working with the National League of Families
and raised her son. Robbed of the chance to give her only child the nine or
10 siblings she'd hoped he would have, Maureen raised Joe-D in a cocoon of
cousins, aunts and uncles from her own and her husband's big Irish-Catholic
families.

''I have 89 grandnieces and -nephews and one great-grandnephew,'' Maureen
says. ''Joe thought he was the 10th Gallagher,'' she says of her sister's
nine children.

One of those cousins, Dan Gallagher, did two Navy stints and wrote his
master's thesis by reconstructing the case of his uncle.

''As an intelligence officer, getting a master's degree at Defense
Intelligence College, I had access to the classified documents,'' says
Gallagher, now retired from the Navy and serving as Cape Cod Community
College's chief information officer. ''By being able to rummage through
archives, I was able to find a lot of classified documents and get them
declassified.''

Statistics showed that 75 percent of Vietnam-era pilots who ejected suffered
a major injury, like a broken back. The survival time for a healthy person
would be, maximum, 12 hours. Gallagher concluded his uncle was dead before
officials even decided whether to risk a rescue in Chinese waters.
Pinpointing weather conditions for Feb. 14, 1968, let Gallagher make an
educated guess on where Lieutenant Dunn's body might have washed ashore.

When Maureen finally received permission to visit China in 1991, her son
worried the trip would be too taxing for her because she was recovering from
a rare cancer. She thought Dunn deserved the chance to find any remnant of
his father that he could. Gallagher, an expert on the case who also spoke
Mandarin Chinese, was a logical choice to go with him.

It was a grueling trip, with Gallagher and Dunn making their way - usually
walking - from one tiny fishing village to the next. They sought out the
village's oldest residents, asking if anyone remembered the crash of an
American plane in 1968. One person talked of finding a wing, most of which
he sold but the rest he turned into two spoons and a bucket. The implements
were located and given to Dunn. Although forensic tests later showed they
were not made of airplane-grade aluminum, it still meant a lot to Maureen
and her son.

Dunn and Gallagher also met with the Chinese pilots who, for decades, had
been hailed as heroes for shooting down Lieutenant Dunn's plane. The pilots
had even written a book about their experiences, but were still unable to
shed any light on what happened afterward.

Back at home, Maureen received in the mail the minutes of a secret meeting
from February 1968 in which Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara
recommended against risking a helicopter crew by sending it into Chinese
airspace to look for Dunn.

When McNamara spoke at Harvard University 30 years later to promote a book
about his role in the war, Maureen held up the minutes and shakily told him,
''I'm that guy's wife.'' She told McNamara his recommendation that day had
set the course of her life. She asked him to apologize to her and to the
little boy - now a man - who grew up without his father. McNamara said he
didn't remember saying that, but if he did, ''I'm not only sorry, I'm
horrified.''

Maureen still hopes the U.S. will one day raise the wreck of her husband's
plane. Her car still bears a ''Where is Lt. Joe Dunn?'' bumper sticker.

Dunn says, ''They're never going to find my dad's body. But the organization
my mom put together is very important today. The government tried to squash
it, and a bunch of wives went to grocery stores and refused to stay quiet.''

Near the end of his China trip, Dunn went to a strip of beach where he felt
his father's presence strongly. Telling his dad, ''I've done all I can for
you,'' he pulled off the MIA bracelet bearing his father's name and threw it
into the sea.

The black-and-white photograph of Lt. Joseph P. Dunn remains at The Island
Merchant.

''There's an unwritten Irish tradition,'' Dunn says, ''If your da is dead,
you put his picture on the bar. That hits home on so many different
levels.''

Gwenn Friss can be reached at gfriss@capecodonline.com.

(Published: September 25, 2006)