Home of the Brave 
Alone With a Ghost
Carol Collins’ one true love was killed Vietnam—or so she thought. Twenty years later, a mysterious photograph has turned her life upside down.
Dennis says: My name is Dennis Bossinger I was a cousin of "Butch." I followed him in school by a few years. My mom’s brother Bob Dillon married Butches mother. We went to different high schools. I graduated from Bishop Noll he graduated East Chicago Roosevelt . He was my hero . He was a catcher I was a catcher he was a middle line backer I was a linebacker . I have been trying to find out about Butch when I came upon this story. If you have any info on Butch after high school please contact me . DenyB53@aol.com (June 2nd, 2009 at 9:39am)
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In Vietnam, Don was a Special Forces A-team commander, training the indigenous Montagnard hill tribes to break up infiltration routes from the North. At her apartment complex back in San Antonio, Carol would get together with the other Army wives and watch the evening news. Some of the women would talk about their husbands and worry when they heard that a particular site had come under attack. But because Carol knew little about what Don was doing, she felt she had nothing to say.
Even before Don’s yearlong tour of duty had ended, he had extended it six more months. It was 1967. Soon after, Carol made plans to meet him for a week of R&R in Hawaii—but Don wrote to say he wanted to join his enlisted men in Australia instead. “It absolutely broke my heart,” she says, “and then I was madder than hell.” She threatened to leave him if he did not meet her, and he gave in. It had been ten months since they had been together, but there was no joyful reunion, no tears on the tarmac. The war had changed Don. He was withdrawn and introspective. At their room in the Ilikai Hotel, he would take a drink out on the lanai and stare at the ocean. “He said there wasn’t anything he could tell me about Vietnam,” Carol recalls, “but it was unlike anything I could imagine.”
After his first tour, Don came back to Fort Benning to attend nine months of training at the Advanced Officers School. Again, he didn’t want Carol and Donny to join him, but again, she insisted. By then, however, their marriage was in shambles. Don was drinking heavily, sometimes staying out all night. He was detached from his family. When Carol got sick and underwent emergency surgery, he didn’t even visit her in the hospital. Later, Carol tried to talk him into counseling, but he refused. She was furious. She believed he had betrayed not only their marriage vows but also the responsibilities he had assumed by adopting a son. As he left for his second tour in Vietnam, Carol said she wanted to end the marriage. He begged her to stay with him, but she was adamant. They were divorced the following April.
Seven months later, Carol married Joel Collins, the owner of a heating and air conditioning company in Houston. He was the opposite of Don: warm, bighearted, demonstrative. And he gave Carol the attention that Don hadn’t. “He wanted to put me in his pocket and take me everywhere with him,” Carol says. Even though Joel wanted to be a father to Donny, Carol wouldn’t let him adopt the boy. That Christmas, when Don came to Houston to visit Donny, Carol says, “I took one look at him and knew I’d made the most horrible mistake in my life.” In a flash, it became clear how much she still loved him. While Don took Donny to the Galleria, Carol spent the day in tears.
In July 1971, Carol received the telegram saying Don’s plane had disappeared. She was sent a few photos of herself and Donny that had been on Don’s wall, his fatigues and T-shirts, a box of medals and insignias, and his torn and sweaty green beret. Carol was in torment—grieving for Don, yet on some level still so angry at him that she half-believed he might have accepted a secret long-term assignment for the CIA, deliberately dropping out of sight and abandoning his family.
The next few years were an enormous struggle, but in time, Carol became assured in a way she could never have anticipated. She made money in San Antonio real estate, opened a chain of gift stores, and raised her son. She reconciled herself to the fact that Don was dead. When Donny began having trouble in school, a child psychiatrist told Carol the problem was possibly related to the unresolved status of his father. So in March 1976, Carol wrote to the Army and asked that Don be declared killed in action. After reviewing Don’s file, the Army issued a presumptive finding of death—the best it could do since no body had been recovered. At last, Carol thought, she had put her life back together.
A month later, on a business trip to Beaumont, Joel Collins choked to death in a restaurant.
“THIS IS NOT DON CARR,” CAROL Collins told the man who had just handed her a snapshot. “There is no way in the world. Don was handsome. He was an athlete. He was well built.” It was May 1991. Carol was sitting in the lobby of a San Antonio hotel with Lorne Lemieux, a Delaware businessman and POW activist. The man in the photo, Lemieux had told her, was possibly her former husband. Pictured was a white male in his early fifties, wearing a teal-colored knit shirt. His face was tanned and wrinkled; his hair was thinning. There was a whitish scar running from the top of his forehead down to his right eyebrow. In the background was a series of black vertical metal bars—not a cage necessarily, but perhaps some type of stockade or enclosure. The man did not resemble Don, Carol observed, but he did look an awful lot like Don’s father.
From Lemieux, Carol heard for the first time about Jack Bailey, a highly decorated fighter pilot who had retired from the Air Force in 1969. Bailey had become one of the most controversial POW trackers in the world, praised for his devotion to the cause but criticized for his unorthodox methods. On one of his recent trips to Southeast Asia, Lemieux reported, Bailey had met with “Mr. X,” a Pathet Lao official who was disenchanted with the communist regime. Through Mr. X, Bailey had acquired the alleged photo of Donald Carr.
Lemieux asked Carol for pictures of her former husband for a forensic analysis. Carol went home and pulled out all her old photographs. “When I looked at the wedding pictures, then I could see it,” she says. She crawled into bed with the photographs and cried. For the next month, she kept the photo hidden. But in early June, she began to show it to family members. One by one, they all insisted the man looked just like Don. As each person affirmed the resemblance, she allowed herself to believe a little more. By mid-June, she wanted more information.
As Bailey would later tell Carol, Mr. X had agreed to use his status to enter a prison camp in Laos, about sixty miles from the spot where Donald’s plane disappeared. Mr. X took along a few items that Bailey had given him: an inexpensive watch, a blue-green T-shirt, some tennis shoes, and a camera. Mr. X came back from the village with a roll of film still in the camera. When Bailey developed the film, he found the photo that Lemieux gave to Carol Collins in May and a second one that she later received, showing the same man in a crouched position.
Bailey said Mr. X had spoken to this man, who was an American. The man told Mr. X his name was Gar. Mr. X said the man was simpleminded—“dinky dow,”in Laotian, meaning mentally impaired—but he did not know whether the man had been in an accident or tortured and beaten. The man was living as the camp’s “pet pig.” According to Mr. X, the man had pleaded, “Someone help me.”
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