Daughter of MIA mounts her own search, finds answers

From Military Affairs Correspondent Jamie McIntyre

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- "I remember the first time I saw the White House was with the 'President Carter, where's my Daddy?' picket sign in my hand," said Colleen Shine. (60K/5 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

Shine, who was 8 years old when her father disappeared over North Vietnam, found the answer to that question 24 years later. The answer came not from the White House, but through her own personal struggle.

Air Force Lt. Col. Anthony Shine's A-7 was downed without a trace on December 2, 1972, and for 14 years his family heard nothing.

Finally, in 1987, there were leads. Reports of a crash site, witnesses and a helmet started filtering back to the United States. The government discounted the new information, ignoring the helmet because the Pentagon said it had no identifiable markings.

Shine grasped the leads as the only link to her missing father.

In 1993, she went to Vietnam to conduct her own personal investigation. She rented a Russian jeep, hired a Vietnamese guide and set off toward the crash site.

After being told by the government that the site had been looted, Shine did not expect to find many clues about her father.

"I learned from our government that the crash site had been heavily scavenged by villagers and that there was nothing else to find there. As I started looking at the ground I started finding pieces of my father's aircraft," Shine recalled. (128K/11 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

She later found the man who had her father's helmet, which had her father's name hand-written on the inside.

Shine's findings gave the investigation new information, said James Wold, deputy assistant secretary for POW/MIA affairs.

A fuller probe of the site and a nearby grave yielded plane parts with serial numbers, a dog tag and remains with matching DNA.

Because of his daughter's efforts, Lt. Col. Shine was buried in October with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

While his daughter is glad to know his fate, she believes her father could have been found much sooner.

Wold says the case illustrates the agency's willingness to follow cases on a long-term basis, but Shine said the efforts to find her father were inadequate.

"I don't know that I would say that there was a responsible, efficient effort to learn my father's fate, on the part of the government," Shine said.

Wold admits there may have been bureaucratic mistakes, but he insists that every attempt is made to correct glitches. (111K/9 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

For her part, Shine says she is more concerned with letting go of the bitterness and anger toward the government that accompanied her search. (187K/17 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

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