When Navy Reserve Commander Charles Bernard Goodwin climbed into the cockpit of a single-seat RF-8A Crusader, no one would have predicted that he would vanish only to reappear 54 years later. It was the early morning of Sept. 8, 1965. After takeoff, the plane ran into trouble in the air, and Goodwin disappeared without a trace.
More than 50 years after going missing at sea, the Vietnam veteran was finally returned to his family on home terrain and laid to rest in a public burial with full military honors.
Goodwin entered the Navy in December 1958. He graduated from preflight school after three years of study at the naval air station in Pensacola, Florida, in October 1961. The young pilot was drafted into the aviation unit Light Photographic Squadron 63.
Goodwin was just 25 years old when he flew his single-seat airplane off the USS Coral Sea for a combat photo mission over Vietnam. Just 15 short minutes after launching, Goodwin reported encountering thunderstorms en route to his destination. The brief SOS was his final transmission.
Goodwin was recorded “missing in action” on the day of his disappearance. Naval authorities conducted searches at sea and on land, scouring for clues of the missing pilot’s whereabouts. No aircraft wreckage or human remains were found.
According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), between April 1993 and December 2016, multiple attempts were made by the Vietnamese Office for Seeking Missing Persons and Joint U.S./Socialist Republic of Vietnam teams to locate Goodwin’s crash site.
Their attempts, much like the initial Naval authorities’ attempts, were unsuccessful.
The case of Goodwin’s disappearance, however, remained open. In 1988, a Vietnamese refugee came forward with information on potential remains, reigniting the search for the missing commander.
In late 2016, officials came into the possession of remains that had been held by a Vietnamese national. They were sent to the DPAA laboratory in Hawaii in order to undergo expert analysis. The results laid to rest over half a century of searching and wondering.
Through dental and anthropological analysis of the remains, Goodwin was officially identified on May 18, 2017, and was then dutifully returned to his family in West Texas.
The DPAA made it known that the support from the government of Vietnam was vital to the success of the recovery.
Goodwin was buried with full military honors at Texas State Veterans Cemetery in Abilene on Oct. 12, 2018. A rosette was placed next to his name to indicate that he had finally been accounted for, and the veteran is now memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii.
A two-plane flyover and a bugle call of Taps added a respectful solemnity to the proceedings. Goodwin’s attendant family members were also presented with the United States flag that draped Goodwin’s casket.
West Texas guard member Stan Owens, who served 20 years in the U.S. Air Force himself, was touched by the proceedings. “We got him home,” he said.
Owens did not know Goodwin or his family but felt an affiliation with the young Vietnam veteran because of his own service in Vietnam during 1969 and 1970.
Goodwin’s story had an unexpected epilogue after he was laid to rest. As news of the Navy pilot’s funeral hit local and national news headlines, a man named Marc Newman of Irving came forward.
Newman had purchased a keepsake bracelet from Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets at the University of North Texas in the early 1980s. Newman had once considered a naval aviation career of his own until a knee injury put paid to his aspiration. The bracelet he purchased was a POW/MIA bracelet inscribed with a name. The name was Lt. Commander Charles B. Goodwin.
Newman offered to return the bracelet to Goodwin’s surviving family.
The DPAA records 1,594 American servicemen and civilians still unaccounted for after the Vietnam War. Goodwin’s recovery represents a national triumph, a familial consolation, and completion of a puzzle piece that was missing for over half a century.
