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.

by Dana Rubin

March 1992

(Page 3 of 3)

The story transformed Carol Collins’ life. If the man in the photo could be Don Carr, how could she not devote herself to finding out for sure? It was as if she was traversing some kind of emotional barrier. When she reached the other side, however, there would be no turning back. She could no longer ignore the feelings that had haunted her for decades, the questions about what had gone wrong in her marriage. What emerged was a profound sense of guilt, as though she had somehow caused Don’s death. Now it seemed to Carol that she had not been as sympathetic to his wartime experiences as she should have been. Maybe he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He needed help, she thought, and instead she divorced him. Then, when his plane disappeared, she turned her back on him. She asked for him to be declared KIA when perhaps he was languishing in a prison camp. For Carol, rescuing Don became a way to undo the past, to make everything right.

Suddenly, she had to find the man in the photo. She began writing to every federal agency that might possibly have information on Don.  Many documents that had previously been classified were now available. She began to learn about Don’s status, about his mission, about the search for his plane. Meanwhile, the photos of Don were sent to three forensic labs. One determined that the men were the same; the other two couldn’t reach a conclusion. In July, the photos were released to the press and immediately championed by the MIA/POW movement as proof that the government was involved in a cover-up about missing servicemen. That same week the Senate established its committee.

IN LATE AUGUST, CAROL COLLINS flew to Bangkok with Bailey and Lemieux. Lemieux paid her way. The plan was for Bailey to contact Mr. X and establish communication with Gar. Carol had fantasies of trekking through the jungle to a remote prison camp and flinging her arms around her former husband. “I knew nothing,” she says. “I was blind, in a fog. I was going to try and get Don back.” But Bailey could not make contact with Mr. X—he had dropped out of sight. Bailey did take her to meet U.S. officials and a Laotian general, but they had no specific information about Don. The six-day trip was a fiasco.

In mid-September, a U.S.-Laotian team traveled to southern Laos. But it was monsoon season; the roads were muddy and impassable. According to a government report, the Americans met with an official in the provincial capital of Muang Mai who convinced them that travel outside the capital was unfeasible. To U.S. officials intent on normalizing relations with Southeast Asian countries, the trip was a diplomatic breakthrough. To Carol it was a sham: “They went over there to bullshit with Lao officials and thank them for their help.”

In October, a Department of Defense team traveled to Thailand, this time accompanied by Bailey. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney later testified before Congress that after a week in Bangkok, Bailey failed to produce his informant and could not lead the U.S. team to the prison camp. In his own subsequent testimony, Bailey accused the Defense Department team of setting an impossibly tight deadline, then lounging in the Imperial Hotel while he and his associate dashed around trying to set up contacts.

Who was Carol to trust—the U.S. government or Jack Bailey? Neither was turning out to be reliable. In late November, Robert Sheetz, the chief of the Pentagon’s special office for POWs and MIAs, announced before a gathering of cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that the government was on the verge of discrediting the purported Carr photograph. “We found this individual,” he told the cadets. “It is not Don Carr, unfortunately.” At home in San Antonio, Carol had heard about his comments and waited for a phone call from the government with the bad news, but it never came. After two weeks, she contacted Sheetz’s deputy and was assured that the Pentagon had no reason to doubt the photo’s authenticity. Then two weeks later, Carol was called by another DOD official who said the Pentagon’s “reliable sources” believed the man in the photo was not Donald Carr but a citizen of a third country living in Bangkok.

By now Carol was in despair. The government had flip-flopped so many times that she had lost all confidence in what it was telling her. Bailey, too, was changing his story. Now he was saying that the photos weren’t actually taken by Mr. X but by Mr. X’s nephew, who had access to the prison camp. And although he had at first said there was only one roll of film, he was now saying there were two. “I just wanted to punch all of them in the face,” Carol says.

By January, Carol Collins had not learned much more from Pentagon officials. They revealed only that the photos were supposedly taken just outside Bangkok in a facility used by traders for zoo and circus animals. They will not identify their sources because that could endanger their investigation.

IT IS ENTIRELY PLAUSIBLE THAT Donald Gene Carr is being held somewhere in Southeast Asia. The existence of road repair crews and enemy troops in the area where he disappeared makes capture a possibility. On the one hand, Carol isn’t inclined to accept the Pentagon’s latest proclamation based on its “reliable sources.” On the other hand, she is skeptical of Bailey’s claims. Lately he seems more like Don Quixote than a POW savior. In her heart Carol believes that her ex-husband is alive. Donny Carr, now 25, also believes the man in the photo is his father, though he has warned his mother about becoming obsessed.

Yet obsessed is what Carol has become. In early January, eight months after she first saw the photo, she drove out to Randolph Air Force Base northeast of San Antonio with a stack of indecipherable government papers. On her arm was a metal POW bracelet etched with her ex-husband’s name and likeness.

 At the base, Carol was introduced to two men—one who works with missing persons and another from the casualty office. The men were polite and solicitous. They spent an hour going over documents with Carol, discussing the details of Don’s mission in Laos, and trying to pin down the exact spot on the map where his plane vanished.

Finally Carol asked a question that had been gnawing at her for weeks. In early December she had received a document, dated September 1975, with a reference to “Bright Light”—the U.S. government’s data base for POWs—and a notation about a possible POW sighting that might have been connected to Carr’s case. To Carol, the memo spoke volumes. “Six months later Don was declared dead,” she angrily told the Air Force officials. “At no time did anyone tell me there was any chance, one chance in a billion, that he might be still alive.” For Carol this had become a sensitive point, perhaps the most painful in this entire anguished affair. Had she known there was even the slightest chance Don Carr was alive, she told herself, she would never have abandoned the search.

George Atkinson, the chief of the Air Force Missing Persons Division, shifted in his chair. He had no answer for her. The board that had presumed Donald Carr dead considered all the relevant information, he said. “I can’t quote you their mental feelings, but they looked at several classified documents, and they said it did not greatly affect their decision.” It was precisely the kind of answer that drives Carol crazy: sympathetic, vague, and ultimately useless.

Driving away from the base, she began to cry. If Donald Carr was actually still alive and brain-damaged, she’s not sure what she would be bringing him home to. Where would he live? How would she take care of him? But at least she would have the chance to make it all up to him. “The Don I’d like to find would be twenty-three and handsome again,” she said. “I wish I could go back and be twenty again.”

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