When Jeanie Hasenbeck first heard the news about the outbreak of war in Vietnam, she was 17. She had no idea that, four years later, she would be stationed at a Field Hospital in Long Binh, Vietnam, as a member of the American Red Cross.
But Hasenbeck, who had never left Central Missouri, didn’t go for herself. Instead, she went to look for her younger brother Paul, who was last seen with three other American soldiers traveling along a river near the Quang Ngai Province on April 21, 1967. DOD investigation documents say the platoon leader last saw the Americans when they were being led by Vietnamese locals.
“When he joined the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, they had a life expectancy of 90 days. He made it 89 days. Then when he became missing, I couldn’t understand how on earth our country could lose my brother, my goodness, how do you do that? So, just being totally unaware of war, how things are during war, in a war zone, I figured they don’t have time to find him, they're busy fighting, I’ll go there and I’ll look for him,” Jeanie Hasenbeck said.
At her home, Jeanie still has her name tag, nurse patch, a handful of Vietnamese currency and other memorabilia from her time at the evacuation hospitals. Her job was to notify American families about the health and welfare of loved ones receiving care in the hospitals.
She says she would show a high school picture of Paul to former prisoners of war she met, but they often had a dispiriting message, saying they probably wouldn’t have been able to recognize him under the conditions of war.
The Hasenbeck siblings say they forever remember Paul as a 19 year-old kid. The brother-sister duo still attend this same church in Freeburg that they all attended as siblings . They say they haven’t missed a single Sunday in the last 60 years.
Paul’s older brother, Larry Hasenbeck, spent six years in the Air Force while Paul was in grade school in the 1950s. He says that after church one sunday in 1967, his father came home followed by an army officer and a priest. The officer said it had been 2 days since Paul went missing in Vietnam..
“Two days has gone onto 57 years, we really don’t know much more than what they told us that first day,” Larry Hasenbeck said.
Since the war ended, the Hasenbecks say the government has only made things more confusing by retracting claims about Paul’s fate. The possibility that Paul was captured arose when pieces of Paul’s identification showed up at a military museum in Hanoi. The Hasenbecks have only ever received copies.
“They had all these artifacts, could coordinate it to the day he went missing, the unit he belonged to, everything except - oh, we don’t know what we did with the body - you know, bull**** like that - excuse me, but you just don’t and expect us to swallow that?” Jeanie Hasenbeck said.
But today, the artifacts are no longer on display at the museum.
“He wrote that to me in a letter that he was trying to save money so that when he got home he could put indoor plumbing into his parents house,” said
Gary Kremer, director of the State Historical Society of Missouri. He says he and Paul knew each other in high school but became much closer friends after working together for the Missouri Division of Health.
Like Paul, Kremer is from a small town in Osage County and is of predominantly German Catholic descent. Kremer remembers attending church picnics with Paul the summer before he left for Vietnam.
“My dad was a WW2 veteran who had been in some really nasty fighting, and he was a strong Vietnam war supporter - most people I knew were. But for me it began to change when Paul disappeared. I was angry. I guess I still am,” Kremer said.
Out of the eight Hasenbeck siblings, there are four left. Larry is 85 and Jeanie is 78. While they have retired from their professional lives, they say they will never retire from hoping to find Paul.