Ep 4-Two And Half Minutes

June 15th, 1972. Twenty-nine thousand feet. Lunch coming down the aisle.

It wasn’t quick. The plane came apart and it fell. And most of them were alive for what came next.

It took two and a half minutes to reach the ground.

Two uncles fly to Saigon. Six caskets come home in July. And in Holy Angels Cemetery, a twenty-two-year-old man stands at the graves of his entire family.

This is Episode 4. Two and a Half Minutes.

If this story is part of your story too — I'd love to hear from you. hazyyellowfeeling@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

I don't know exactly why I'm doing this. If my cousins and my aunts and uncles are listening, and I hope some of you are, that's my honest answer. I just feel like someone should tell this story. And maybe you feel the same way. Maybe that's why nobody has. Because we're all standing at the same edge, wondering who goes first. Well, I guess it's me. This is a true story about a family from a small town in Wisconsin, about a bomb on a plane in 1972, about six people who never came home, and about everyone who was left behind to figure out how to keep living like normal people. A small town grieved and moved on. We did too. Or maybe we just went quiet. I'm Andy Kane, one of the cousins. As I said, I'm not exactly sure why I'm telling this story, but I hope I find out along the way. June 15th, 1972. Central Vietnam. 29,000 feet. An ordinary hour on an ordinary flight. Lunch was coming down the aisle, no panic, no warning. And then the bomb did what he built it to do. I struggled with what to say next. I rode around it time and again, and then again. I didn't want to upset anybody, mostly the Kennies themselves and their memories. But this is part of the story. It might be the worst part. So here it is. When something like this happens, we tell ourselves it was quick. One flash. Gone before they knew. We say it about plane crashes, car wrecks, all of it. They didn't feel a thing. We say it because it's the only way to stand it. And most of the time, I think we say it because we need it to be true. But it wasn't quick. The plane didn't disappear in a fireball. It came apart and it fell. The flight attendants were still in the aisle serving lunch. People were standing up waiting for the bathroom. There was no brace position, no warning. Just one moment they were on a plane, and the next moment the plane was coming apart around them in the open air. And most of them were alive for what came next. It took two and a half minutes to reach the ground. Two and a half minutes. I've timed it more than once. I'll be sitting in my car and I'll look at the clock and I'll just wait it out. Two and a half minutes. Don't move, don't touch the radio, don't do anything. It's an eternity. I'm not gonna make you sit through all of it. I just want you to know how long it was, and that they were in it. Shock and terror and free fall. I hope, and this is just a hope, I have no way to know, but I hope at some point in there there was peace for each of them. Somehow. I don't know how that would work, but I hope. One of them was Santaya. Her father had put her in seat 10F. When the bomb went off, she was sucked out of the side of the plane, still trapped in her seat. Her body hit the tail and broke off the stabilizer. That's what made the plane fall. Her body was never found. The bomb was in a cosmetics case under the seat in front of some wong. They think she was bending forward to open it when it went off. Her legs were blown off below the knee. Her face and hands were gone. And there was a cable, Cathay Pacific to the head office in London. No names in it, just five words. Definitely nil. Repeat. Nil survivors. The Vietnam War was still on. By June of 1972, it had been going on so long that for most of America it had become background noise. Somebody else's son on somebody else's TV. But it was still a war. People were dying in it every day. American kids, Vietnamese kids, anyone who happened to be where the bombs went. The Kenny Plane came down on a hilltop in central Vietnam, about 42 kilometers southeast of a city called Play Kuh. Seven days before that, an as yet unknown photographer was standing on a road 300 miles south of there. In a single shutter click, he burned the entire war into one frame. Maybe you've seen it. It's the kind of picture that leaves a shadow on your brain. Brutal. A nine-year-old girl, naked, running, screaming, her skin coming off her body. They called her the girl in the picture. Some knew her as Napalm Girl. She was taken to a hospital in Saigon, and she survived. My mother is the one who took the phone call in our house. She picked up the red phone on the wall in the kitchen, a cheerful hello, and then she folded to the floor. Go paint the fence now. They needed us gone. My parents had to walk down the hill and tell my grandmother that her son was dead, his wife, all four of her grandchildren, all at once. So my brother and I picked up our brushes. We'd painted that fence just a week or two before, almost the whole length of Kenny Drive. But it didn't matter. We painted it again. Our phone wasn't the only one ringing that day. The Pick family got their version of the call. Their son Andy was on that plane too. And across West Bend, word started moving the way it moved in 1972. Not a news alert, not a notification. Parents heard it and told other parents, and the kids found out from each other. Some were teenagers, some were just crossing into their twenties. Some got on bikes, some got in cars, and some walked. Somehow, without anyone organizing it, without anyone making it an event, a group of them ended up at the softball diamonds at Regner Park, just sitting there, shell-shocked, trying to make sense out of something that didn't make any sense. Somebody had to go. That's how it works. Somebody has to fly where it happened and look at what's there and say, yes, that's them. That's my brother. That's his wife. Those are their children. Somebody has to do that as the rest of the world moves on. Uncle Pat was at a house in New Jersey when a police car pulled up out front. Not a phone call. A squad car at the door. That's how the world showed up to tell him his family was gone. He was in the air within hours. A flight to Chicago, Uncle Randy was waiting. They were in Saigon inside 36 hours. Uncle Pat was Tom's brother, Career Army, West Point, as warm and steady a man as you could find. Uncle Randy was a world-class plastic surgeon out of Chicago, Rush University Medical Center. Not a big man, quiet, stern. If something in the world bothered him, he didn't show it the way other people did. Whatever was going on inside him stayed there. What those three or four days were like, I can't say. Some things belonged to the people who carried them. Danny was identified by the metal in his leg, the same metal he carried out of a car accident three years before. Colleen was found still strapped in her seat, with her sister Mary beside her. And the rings were gone. Uncle Tom's Naval Academy ring, the one welded to his wedding band, and Robbie's the silver miniature of the same Annapolis ring he'd had made for her. Somebody clawed through that wreckage and stripped them off their fingers. Khaki died along with her family. That's all I have. Pat woke up on the second or third morning and Randy was gone. He had gone to Chelon Children's Hospital. He was a surgeon and there were children there who needed one. He fixed cleft pallets, he worked on burns, he did what surgeons do when they're given a table and a patient. Nobody asked him to, he just went. Randy came back that evening. Pat didn't ask where he'd been, and Randy didn't say. Back home, the family waited. The army wouldn't release the bodies until every person on that flight had been identified. All eighty-one. So you wait. You sit at the lake where everything used to be fine, and you wait. It's June and then it's July, and the summer is doing what summer does. The trees are out, the water's warm, the pier is right there, and none of it means anything. They held a memorial service about two weeks after the crash. There were no bodies, just a church full of people grieving six members of a family who were still on the other side of the world. The bodies came back to West Bend in late July. There was a mass at the family home on Evergreen Street, and then they went to Holy Angel Cemetery. It was private, just the Kenny survivors. We may have different last names, but to this day we consider ourselves part of the Kenny family. So my grandmother, the aunts and uncles, the cousins, and the last surviving sibling, John, stood silent in that cemetery. Six gaskets, all at once, full military honors. The older cousins were allowed to go up with their parents. The younger ones stayed back. There was a scream at the first shot of a 21-gun salute. One of the girls, one of the cousins, and a stoic mother snapping her back to attention with an angry, shut up. Andy Pick was on that plane too, funny as hell, charming, milk through your nose at the lunch table, funny. And like most 19-year-old red-blooded American guys back then, he was into cars and girls and beer. He was Danny's best friend, and he was on that trip as the family's guest. There were 75 others on that flight, and every one of them was a somebody. Every one of them missed. I'm telling the Kenny story because it's mine to tell, but there are other stories on that plane. And I'd like to think somebody somewhere is telling them too. Tom and Robbie Kenny, Khaki, Danny, Mary Jane, Colleen. Six new graves dug next to Tommy Jr., the oldest son who had died in a car accident three years before. Tom and Robbie were buried next to the boy they'd already lost. John Kenney was there, the only one in his family still alive. He had lost his father, his mother, his brothers, and his three sisters. He was twenty two years old, and he was an orphan. One more thing. Uncle Randy went to a hospital that morning because he needed something to do with his hands. I told you back in episode three that I don't believe in coincidences. Fate isn't the same thing. Fate does what it does without asking our permission. And what happened in that hospital in Saigon only strengthens my belief in that. But that's a story for next time. This podcast is built from a newspaper article by Andrew McGregor Marshall, family letters and emails, conversations with the people who were there, and my own memory of what I was told. I've done my best to get it right. If you knew someone on that flight, or you have something to add or correct, I want to hear from you!