GRELLA, DONALD CARROLL
Name: Donald Carroll Grella
Rank/Branch: E5/US 7th Army Special Forces Group
Unit: Aviation Company, (Assault Helicopter) 299th Attack Helicopter
Battalion, assigned to 1st Cavalry Division
Aviation Company, 7th SFGA was withdrawn from the 7th SFGA and redesignated
as one of the four companies (A-D) of the 229th Aviation Battalion.
It would have been designated, for example, Co A, 229th Avn Bn (Aslt Hel). 
It was not uncommon for units and personnel to unofficially insist
on using their old designation when they were absorbed into another
unit and redsignated.  That appears to be the case here.
Date of Birth: 01 December 1940 (Coleridge NE)
Home City of Record: Laurel NE
Date of Loss: 28 December 1965
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 135702N 1084955E (BR570450)
Status (in 1973): Killed/Body Not Recovered
Category: 4
Acft/Vehicle/Ground: UH1D
Refno: 0224
Other Personnel In Incident: Jesse D. Phelps; Thomas Rice Jr.; Kenneth L.
Stancil (all missing)
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 15 October 1990 from one or more
of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources,
correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews.
Updated by the P.O.W. NETWORK 2009.
REMARKS: OVERDUE ON 10-15 MIN FLIGHT - J
SYNOPSIS: The large influx of American combat and support battalions
arriving in Vietnam in the mid-1960's afforded the Army Special Forces a
wealth of potential military backup and engineer support. Airmobile infantry
promised quick and decisive response to CIDG patrolling opportunities or
adverse camp situations. The availability of engineers assured required camp
construction and defensive strengthening of existing sites.
In exchange, the Special Forces provided support, regional intelligence and
area indoctrination for the arriving Army formations. In mid to late
December 1965, Special Forces Major Brewington's B-22 Detachment helped the
1st Cavalry Division to settle into the An Khe area. Assisting, was the
299th Attack Helicopter Battalion of the Aviation Company of 7th Special
Forces Group (Assault Helicopter).
On December 28, 1965 a UH1D helicopter from the Aviation Company departed An
Khe on a supply mission to a combat unit in the early hours. Radio
transmissions revealed that flight was difficult because of weather and
darkness. The pilot, WO2 Jesse Phelps, radioed for weather reports. The
other crew of the aircraft consisted of SP5 Donald Grella, crewchief; WO3
Kenneth Stancil, co-pilot; and SP4 Thomas Rice, door gunner.
When the aircraft was about 10 minutes' flying time from An Khe, radio
contact was suspended, and no further word was received from the aircraft.
When the UH1D failed to return, an intensive search was conducted, with no
sign of either the lost aircraft or its crew. The crew was believed to be
all killed.
The crew of the UH1D are among nearly 2500 Americans missing in Southeast
Asia. In the 1950's Henry Kissinger predicted that "limited political
engagements" would result in nonrecoverable prisoners of war. This
prediction was fulfilled in Korea and Vietnam, where thousands of men and
women remain missing when ample evidence exists that many of them survived
(from both wars) and are alive today. For Americans, and particularly the
families of those who are missing, this abandonment of military personnel is
unacceptable and the policy that allows it must be changed before another
generation is left behind in some future war.
---------------------------------
 Omaha World-Herald
Friday, December 29, 2000
Sister: MIA 'Deserves To Come Home' Nebraska MIAs
PAUL HAMMEL
   Don Grella loved Elvis, Harley-Davidson motorcycles and fishing in Logan
Creek.
  He hated his freckles so much that he bought gobs of freckle remover.
   And he didn't like being short. So he lifted weights, carving muscles on
his 5-foot-9 frame.
  Leafing through a picture album is an emotional journey for Grella's only
sibling, Shirley Haase.
  In a west Omaha kitchen that smelled of Christmas cookies, Haase thumbed
past photos of two kids on the muddy lane of a family farm near Laurel, Neb.
Another shows Don locked in an Elvis pose, holding a guitar he never learned
to play.
  This is about all that is left of her brother.
  Thirty-five years ago this week, Spc. 5 Donald Grella disappeared in
Vietnam.
  He and three special forces comrades climbed aboard their helicopter for
what was supposed to be a 15-minute, pre-dawn flight. Their chopper never
arrived.
  They had radioed to report that foggy conditions were making it difficult
to see the ground in a mountain pass in the Central Highlands.
  That was their last report. No calls of mechanical problems. No reports of
enemy fire. No may-days.
  Despite what the Army described as extensive searches over four days, the
crash site was never found.
  It has not been found since, despite reports two decades later from at
least two informants of a crash site in the area.
  All that is known is that somewhere, sinking into the jungle, is the
wreckage of Case No. 0224, the Army's designation for the crash.
  Grella is among 1,991 U.S. servicemen still missing and unaccounted for in
Southeast Asia. Twenty of those are from Nebraska; 32 from Iowa.
  Haase knows that time is working against the search for her brother.
  Any useful metal probably has been carried off long ago from a crash site.
Human remains may have been moved and buried decades ago, or dug up and
hauled away by locals hoping to trade them for money or passage out of the
country. Vietnam's acidic soil can eat away any trace of remains.
  Yet there is hope. The United States has stepped up its efforts to
identify remains in the past eight years, and access to crash sites has
improved, although there is still widespread belief that Vietnam has remains
and information about MIAs that it is withholding.
  Haase's resolve to find her brother's remains is stronger than ever.
  "It's the only thing left I could do for him," she said. "I think given
the choice, he'd rather be buried here. He deserves to come home." ***
  Shirley Haase was a 19-year-old nursing student on Christmas break on Dec.
28, 1965, when the town marshal went looking to deliver a telegram to her
mother, Alberta Sutton, who had remarried after her first husband died.
  "Don't phone," it instructed.
  "The secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that
your son, Specialist Donald C. Grella has been missing in Vietnam since 28
December 1965. ..."
  When her mother arrived home, she was crying.
  "I knew what it was," Haase said.
  Her brother, who had been serving in Korea, volunteered to go to Vietnam
in 1965. He heard that a distinguished combat record would be his quickest
ticket to officers training school.
  At first, the family received regular updates. Late each month, a letter
would arrive in Laurel. Regrettably, it read, there was no new information.
Faint hope that he might be alive faded.
  Then, on Dec. 30, 1966, a year and two days after he disappeared, another
telegram arrived. Don Grella's status had been changed from "missing" to
presumed dead.
  Haase said that after a year passes, the Army can do that.
  "I've always said, it's the only timely thing they've done in Don's case.
At least it seems like that." ***
  Shirley Haase is a newcomer to the peaks of hope and valleys of
frustration traveled by the families seeking the remains of loved ones.
  For years, she left the job to her mother, now 81. Haase had married and
was busy raising three daughters with her husband, Ron.
  Then, about four years ago, her mother received a request for a blood
sample for a DNA comparison for remains.
  It prompted Haase to begin looking into what was being done. She began
attending the annual meetings of the National League of Families of
POWs/MIAs, a national advocacy group. She also joined the Millard chapter of
the Vietnam Veterans of America, Chapter 279.
  Enter Sgt. 1st Class Randy Holke, 52, an instructor at the Nebraska Army
National Guard's officer candidate school at Camp Ashland. A Vietnam
veteran, his office prominently features a plaque reading, "POWs never have
a nice day."
  Holke has helped several families of MIAs and POWs, including Haase's,
sort through the government bureaucracy of finding remains.
  It is a considerable bureaucracy.
  Each branch of the service has a casualty office in Washington that
maintains files on those who are missing. There is also an office for POWs
and MIAs there.
  All searches are coordinated by the Joint Task Force for Full Accounting,
based half a world away in Hawaii. That is also where the Army's lab that
identifies remains is located. Any equipment found goes to another lab in
Texas.
  Communication between the offices is not always good, and personnel rotate
regularly out of the jobs, said Haase and Holke. Often, families need to
re-educate new contact people and usually know more than the people who are
supposed to know what's going on. Regularly, it takes several phone calls to
get a question answered.
  "Frustration is common," Holke said. "There's so many (missing). Nobody
wants to take responsibility."
  Haase said it is a perpetual waiting game for information, information
that can change without warning.
  It took 18 months to find out that her mother's DNA did not match the
remains that had been found.
  Years after it became part of Grella's file, the Army told family members
that tail numbers of a helicopter at a crash site reported by an informant
didn't match Grella's chopper after all. And they were told that the
informant, who has never been found, probably had used an alias. A
handwriting analysis indicated that.
  Haase's hopes peaked last June during an annual "family conference" with
government officials. A top member of the joint task force in Hawaii told
her that a team was flying at that very moment to Vietnam to search for her
brother's crash site and informants.
  A couple of months later, Haase discovered that it wasn't true. Her
brother's case wasn't even on the list of sites to explore.
  "You begin to feel like they tell you whatever you want to hear to get you
out of the room," she said. "That's what it starts to feel like."
  Yet, Haase is restrained in her frustration. The officials who make her
wonder about her country's resolve in finding missing service personnel are
the same ones she needs to rely on to get the job done. ***
  It does happen.
  Since U.S. fighting forces left Vietnam in 1973, remains of 592 missing
GIs have been identified, either through supervised digs at crash sites or
the release of remains kept by Vietnam.
  Nearly half of those - 231 - have been identified in the past eight years.
The U.S. effort has increased and Vietnam has offered better access to
potential crash sites. Technology has improved, namely DNA tests. About 100
sets of remains are undergoing the identification process.
  Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the Washington, D.C.- based
National League of Families of POWs/MIAs, said the number of remains being
identified will increase, though some of the missing, particularly those
lost over water, will never be found.
  The effort is getting more funding and more personnel, said Griffiths, who
has a brother who is listed as missing from a 1966 air mission over North
Vietnam.
  Yet, she said, more pressure must be exerted on the Vietnamese government.
She believes that Vietnam is withholding records - and remains - of up to
240 MIAs.
  "The Clinton administration's agenda has been to normalize relations, not
press for disclosure," she said. "Hopefully that will change now." ***
  Haase said she has learned to ask more questions and to insist on an
answer. She said that people like Holke have helped her to know which
questions to ask and whom to call.
  On her kitchen table, she lays out two notebooks as thick as Omaha phone
books of records, letters and pictures.
  Haase makes frequent phone calls to Washington and Hawaii. She wants to
know if officials are looking for a new informant revealed during a Vietnam
trip in August. She asks if her brother's crash site is on the agenda for
the next visit by U.S. search teams.
  Donald Grella would have turned 60 on Dec. 1. His gravestone sits in the
Laurel cemetery.
  Someday, maybe, his remains can be buried there, although Haase wonders if
she is too late.
  "I went through years, having my family, not having the time," she said.
"Then, after the fact, after your own life calms down, you really start
digging into this and find out what could have been done and what should be
done."
  While she believes her brother is dead, Haase does not discount reports
that some POWs might still be living in Vietnam.
  At this point, she said, she isn't after closure - just what would be
right for her brother and his fellow crewmen.
  "Obviously, there's still a crash site over there that hasn't been found,"
Haase said. "There's always that chance. ... I wouldn't be calling if I
didn't have hope.

Mystery of missing US helicopter in Vietnam solved

They pledged to leave no man behind, so for 43 years the mystery of what happened to Huey 808 has tortured veterans of the First Air Cavalry.

Telegraph (London) 
28 May 2009
 
Donald Grella who died in the crash
The helicopter and its four-man crew failed to return from a routine mission in December 1965, soon after braving enemy fire at the battle of Ia Drang, America's first great clash of arms in Vietnam.
Pilots spent months scouring the jungle looking for traces of a crash site, and for years afterwards, comrades of the lost crew made trips to the steamy hill villages of the Central Highlands looking for clues to what happened.
Four decades on, their prayers have finally been answered. 
A specialist US military unit has returned to Vietnam to excavate a jungle crash site. It found the missing aircraft, and will return the remains of its crew for burial in Arlington National Cemetery, alongside thousands of other servicemen who perished in America's longest war.
Shirley Haase, 63, brother of Donald Grella who was 25 when he died, said: "This is fantastic news after all these years of being tormented by not knowing what happened to them.
"The loss of my brother has been with me for every day of 43 years. At last we have a chance of knowing what really happened."
The crew were heroes in one of America's bloodiest battles, which started when 450 infantrymen landed by helicopter in jungle clearings only to discover they were surrounded by an entire North Vietnamese division of 2,000 men. 
It was the bravery of the helicopter crews, who at terrible risk flew supplies and reinforcements in and casualties out, that kept the soldiers alive.
The battle was immortalised by Hollywood in 2002 in a film called We Were Soldiers Once... And Young starring Mel Gibson as infantry commander Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore.
One of the centrepieces of the film is a speech by Lt Col Moore to his men as they prepare to leave for Vietnam in which he promises to "leave no man behind".
By the time the battle was over, thousands of Vietnamese troops and more than 300 Americans were dead. Soon afterwards, Huey 808 disappeared on a routine resupply mission. Its crew – mechanic Donald Grella, pilot Jesse Phelps, co-pilot Kenneth Stancil, and gunner Thomas Rice – were the only servicemen to take part in the battle who could not be brought home.
When Vietnam re-established diplomatic relations with the United States in the 1990s, family members of the lost crew and fellow veterans started lobbying for a search.
Bruce Crandall and Ed "Too Tall to Fly" Freeman – whose nickname came from his unusual height for a pilot flying in a cramped helicopter – were a major and captain respectively in 1965.
They returned to Vietnam in 1993 to try to find out what had happened to the crew they had commanded, sometimes enlisting the help of their former North Vietnamese enemies.
Joseph Galloway, a journalist who covered the battle and afterwards wrote the book that We Were Soldiers was based on, said: "They were especially troubled by the loss and the mystery of what happened, and concerned by the families waiting for some kind of resolution for over four decades.
"I went on a trip to Vietnam and the battlefield with Bruce Crandall and Hal Moore in 1993, and they asked every North Vietnamese general and officer we met for help finding the missing bird.
"Some of the Vietnamese veterans were helpful; they talked to local officials at all our stops in the Central Highlands and on the battlefields."
Hopes were raised in 1999 when a refugee reported seeing a crashed helicopter in the jungle with a horse painted on the tail fin, which sounded like Huey 808.
In 2006, a mission from the American military's Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command, found a villager who had shot down a helicopter in late 1965 and described where it was.
JPAC's excavations resemble archaeological digs, with teams sifting through jungle soil in a search for dog tags and personal effects as well as bones. After decades in the acidic soil of the jungle, the only human remains found at the 808 crash site were teeth which have been sent to JPAC's forensic laboratory in Hawaii for identification.
Mrs Haase said that the tiny town of Laurel in Nebraska, population 1,000, where she grew up with her brother, had never forgotten him.
She said: "It was ironic that they died after surviving that terrible battle. I have reread his letters from the time and they describe the horror of war, but he believed in that mission.
"My mother spent her whole life praying that they would bring Don home during her lifetime, but she died in 2006 so she never got her wish.
"I am so happy that they have found the crash site, but we will still have to wait a few months for a positive forensic identification. For years I have wondered if my brother was taken prisoner or whether he tried to escape into the jungle. Knowing how he died and attending his burial in the United States would give us some closure." 
The burial is expected later this year. 
Published Tuesday July 28, 2009

MIA war casualty coming home

By Paul Hammel
WORLD-HERALD BUREAU

LINCOLN — In the government lingo of soldiers missing in action, the case of Spc. Don Grella was “off the scope.”

There were no known eyewitnesses to the downing of the helicopter that carried Grella and three other Army Special Forces comrades over the jungle-choked central highlands of Vietnam on Dec. 28, 1965.

There were no radio transmissions to provide a hint of where to look. No idea if it was bad weather or enemy fire that brought them down.

So a decade ago, when Grella's only sibling, Shirley Haase of Omaha, began urging U.S. search teams to take another look at her brother's “presumed dead from non-hostile causes” MIA case, there was scant optimism.

“I had hope, but the odds were against us,” Haase said. “But we kept plugging away.”

The persistence has paid off.

At an emotional, private meeting last week in Washington, Defense Department officials gave Haase the official report on what was found during an excavation this spring on a misty hillside in Vietnam.

Dental records had confirmed that the remains of Grella and his three mates were found at the crash site. Officials confirmed that the scant wreckage was from his helicopter.

They also had something else: the still-discernible dog tags of her brother.

“It's bent a little bit, but it's very legible ... the blood type and religion,” Haase said.

“Isn't that incredible, after all these years?”

Haase, 63, devoted a decade to the search for her brother, taking over the task from her elderly mother. Had he lived, Don Grella would be 68.

Haase and her husband, Ron, also a Vietnam veteran, made 11 trips to Washington for the annual meeting between the National League of POW/MIA Families and defense officials.

There were countless trips to government archives and meetings of veterans groups, and thousands of hours on the computer, searching the Internet and networking with families of others on her brother's helicopter and families of other MIAs.

Her brother's case proves that if you push hard enough and long enough, you might find closure, Haase said.

“If you're there pushing, they have to answer to somebody.”

After the identification of the four-man crew is formally confirmed, the number of MIAs still unaccounted for in Southeast Asia will drop to 1,733, said Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the POW/MIA league.

“It's extremely good news,” Griffiths said of the identification. “This is what we fight for.”

The identification of Grella was indeed fortunate, she said, because it's not easy to find DNA in such old cases.

The case took on a higher priority, she said, because of newspaper stories and a movie produced in 2002, “We Were Soldiers,” about the battle in which Grella died.

Publicity helps “reinforce the effort,” Griffiths said.

That effort began in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan ordered an earnest search effort for MIAs in Southeast Asia. As a result, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii now has 600 personnel, up from two before 1981, Griffiths said.

At Haase's urging, searchers in 2006 finally checked out a 21-year-old tip that a villager had seen an American helicopter shot down in 1965 or 1966.

That led to more tips, to an excavation in March in which some teeth and a set of dog tags were found, and finally to the official identification last week.

Haase said she and her husband are making plans to accompany her brother's remains back from Hawaii for burial next to his parents in their hometown of Laurel, Neb.

And the couple plan to attend the burial at Arlington National Cemetery of remains found at the crash site that couldn't be linked with any of the four soldiers.

Purple Heart medals also are being sought for the four, based on a villager's account that he shot down a chopper in 1965.

It's difficult, Haase said, to sum up her emotions. She feels sadness mixed with excitement — and the frustration felt by all MIA families.

Although her brother's remains have been found, some of the other 1,733 might never be.

But she urged the other families to persevere.

“Don't ever give up,” she said. “If you don't stay in there, it's probably not going to happen.”

Contact the writer:

402-473-9584, paul.hammel@owh.com
 
Spec DON Grella, MIA – KIA Vietnam Central Highlands 1965


The Patriot Guard Riders are honored to be asked by the family to provide an escort for Spec Don Grella, Army Special Forces, MIA/KIA, 28 DEC 1965, in the Central highlands of Vietnam. Spec Grella would have been 68 years old now.

Spec Grella will be returning to Nebraska accompanied by his only sibling, Shirley Haase and her husband Ron on Saturday, September 26, 2009. The flight is scheduled to arrive at Eppley Airfield in Omaha at 1:05pm. Ron Haase is a Vietnam Veteran.

The PGR will lead the coach carrying Spec Grella with a 5 man “Missing Man” formation leaving Eppley Airfield at 1:45pm with a scheduled arrival in Laurel at 4:30pm. Other Patriot Guard Riders will follow the coach as Spec Grella makes his final journey home more than 40 years after his Huey went down reportedly based on a villager’s account that he shot down a chopper in 1965.