Volume six number four, two thousand ten | winter

Is Montana Ready for Wind Energy?

Witnessing Yellowstone with

Photographer Tom Murphy

Nearly Four Decades After his Death,

a Soldier Finally Comes Home

Fiction by Rick Bass

Wild Bandits of the Wild West

 Nearly four decades after his death,
a town gathers to honor a pilot and ponder
the memories of a bitter war

F
A
SOLDIER
COMES
HOME IRST LIEUTENANT PAUL MAGERS
WAS A GOOD SOLDIER.
BY SCOTT McMILLION
His job was to fly a Cobra helicopter, a gunship of fury. And on June 1, 1971,
the order came to escort and protect a bigger Huey helicopter evacuating a group of
Army Rangers from a battle that was going south fast in Quang Tri Province.
The Rangers — the army elite — were under such intense heat that they
didn’t even load their armaments into the Huey with them. They left Claymore
mines and ammunition in the landing zone.
Magers’ headset crackled with an order: Destroy the abandoned weaponry
before the North Vietnamese could grab it. Magers (pronounced “majors”) was
flying at 1,500 feet with crew chief Donald Wann, a warrant officer, when the order
came. Moving through intense fire, he swooped down to about 40 feet and before he
could begin firing, flak tore open the ship’s belly and tail section. Magers climbed
to about 150 feet, then began to spiral down, in flames, toward a forested mountain-
side the Army called Hill 105.
Six radio calls went out to the ship. No answer came back and the Cobra hit
hard, igniting its own armaments. There was no chance, witnesses said later, of
anybody walking away, and the gunfire was too hot for a body extraction. The fight-
ing continued for months. Abutting the demilitarized zone, Quang Tri Province
was, according to one observer, “the worst place in the world in 1971.”

An Army Honor Guard carries the remains of First Lt. Paul Magers at Billings Logan Airport on
AP PHOTO/ BILLINGS GAZETTE, LARRY MAYER

Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2010, in Billings.

M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 31
 Magers had been in Vietnam for less than two weeks. He left
behind five brothers and sisters, his parents, and a new bride. He
was 27 years old. Wann, 34 and on his second tour in Vietnam,
left a wife and children.
Their bodies remained at the crash site for 39 years. This
summer, they came home.
T H E L ONG JOU R N E Y
F ROM V I E T N A M TO BI L L I NG S
“Overwhelmed,” said Paul Magers’ mother, Cecilia, who goes
by Cecil. “That’s the only word I can come up with.”
She was talking about Paul’s memorial service, an event that
stretched from Hawaii to Denver to Billings, Paul’s home town.
The funeral procession was two miles long. Honor guards arrived
at every stop, traveling from all over the country. Military. Police.
Civilians. Before the funeral, the Frenchtown Fire Department
stood vigil over his casket, all night long, in a funeral home in
Billings. The governor arrived. So did a general. School children
lined the streets, holding flags. During the drive from Billings to
the veterans cemetery at Laurel, oncoming drivers on Interstate
90 pulled over and stood with hands over their hearts. Military
and civilian helicopters circled over the funeral.
The state gave a collective salute, a hero’s welcome.
In Oklahoma, the same thing happened when Wann’s
remains arrived a week earlier.
“It brought out a lot of patriotism in people,” Cecil said.
If either man had come home alive, there’s a chance some-
body might have spit on him.
In June of 1971, the Vietnam War was tearing the country
apart. The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers.
An international inquiry pushed to investigate what it called
American war crimes in Indochina. Veterans were protesting
for and against the war. Hippies marched for peace. Hardhats
thumped hippies. President Richard Nixon declared war on
drugs. But soldiers like Paul Magers just did their jobs, grim as
their work may have been.
Magers had been a good student, an avid reader, smart and
good-looking and athletic, a staunch Catholic, yet mischievous
and competitive.
“Paul the Pill,” is how his sister Vada Kuhlman described
him as a teenager.
He could have avoided the war. After graduating from
Regis University, a Jesuit college in Denver, Paul was accepted
In June of 1971, the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart. The New York Times
published the Pentagon Papers. An international inquiry pushed to investigate what it called
American war crimes in Indochina. Veterans were protesting for and against the war. Hippies
marched for peace. Hardhats thumped hippies. President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs.
But soldiers like Paul Magers just did their jobs, grim as their work may have been.
in a still raging battlefield, just what had happened.
That didn’t happen until August. In the meantime,
the family was left to fret and grieve in private.
Cecil was a volunteer at Holy Rosary School,
where she always shared Paul’s letters, which he
addressed to “everybody.” Cecil said that when she
stopped bringing letters, people could sense that
something was wrong, that loss was in the air.
But the family stayed mum until the Army sifted
through the eyewitness reports and came to a definitive
finding: Nobody could have survived such a crash.
And a memorial was held. The grief could flow.
Lives could go on, though the pain remained. It was
particularly sharp for Paul’s father, Lester.
“I worked with Dad for 20 years, and we never
had a two-minute conversation about Paul,” recalled

to Creighton University medical school in Omaha, Neb. That
would have extended his draft deferment, maybe until the war
ended, but he decided to enlist in the Army instead, a decision
his family didn’t like.
“People tried to talk him into going to Canada, going skiing
and breaking his leg, something,” to avoid the draft, remembered
Vada.
“He just said, ‘Mom, I owe it to my country,’” Cecil recalled.
He excelled at boot camp, then entered officer’s candidate
school, then flight school, where only 10 percent of the gradu-
ates earned a coveted seat in the high-adrenaline cockpit of a
Cobra, a heavily armed, two-man linchpin of American strat-
egy in the war. But the job came with all sorts of dangers. Of
1,100 Cobras shipped to Vietnam, 300 went down in combat or
accidents.
Two weeks after he arrived in Vietnam, Paul’s ship became
one of those casualties. A few days later, soldiers in dress
uniforms showed up at his mother’s door, and those men do not
bear good news for the mother of a fighting man.
This time, the soldiers delivered an uncertain message and a
difficult request. Paul had been shot down, they said, but no body
had been recovered. They asked Cecil and the rest of the family
to keep the news to themselves until somebody could sort through
COURTESY OF MAGERS FAMILY
WAYNE T WIEHAUS
Fred Magers, the oldest of the six kids in the family.
“For him, it was a closed subject.”
CLOSUR E
Lester Magers died long ago, but Cecil, at 92, remains vigor-
ous, spry and enthusiastic, though camera shy.
“She’s our Energizer Rabbit,” said Vada.
After Paul’s remains had been positively identified through
comparison to her DNA, she declared that the funeral be a
matter of celebration, a homecoming as much as a burial. She
told everybody to wear bright clothes and bring happy stories of
Paul’s life.
“Sorry happened 39 years ago,” Fred said. “Happy is today.”
They complied, mostly, though some tears fell, too.
They still come. Fred Magers had to wipe his eyes when he
talked about the experiences of his son, Nathan, chosen to be a
special escort, flying from a military lab in Hawaii with Paul’s
remains, which, after nearly 40 years buried in the highly acidic
jungle soil, consisted of one shinbone. Delayed by the vicissi-
tudes of Vietnamese politics, international diplomacy, foul
weather and the incredible amount of live ordnance that remains
First Lt. Paul Magers was flying a Cobra helicopter in Vietnam similar to
the one pictured here when he was shot down over Quang Tri Province
in 1971.
The bone was wrapped in a blanket, then placed in a casket
under Paul’s uniform and sent home to Billings.
“That bone of Paul’s, no matter how small, was still Paul,”
Fred said.
Though small, it was real, and it ranked the respect denied
to so many other Vietnam veterans, both living and dead. The
reality of the family’s loss was just one part of a painful era in the
nation’s history.
“We had, as a family, just a small part of the story of that
whole Vietnam era,” Fred said. He believes the turnout for Paul’s
funeral, the outpouring of emotion, was, in a way, a delayed
welcome for the Vietnam veterans who came back bruised and
scarred to be greeted with hostility and derision.
“It was the honor that they never received,” Fred said.
“There was a release of feelings that had been held back and
pent in for years.”

the battlefield reports, somehow figure out with some certainty,
First Lt. Paul Magers, sketched here in uniform, was one of only 10 percent
of fight school graduates entrusted to fly a Cobra helicopter in Vietnam.
in Quang Tri Province, the recovery spot was finally pinpointed Paul Magers was a good soldier, a man who died following
by a former North Vietnamese soldier who had helped bring orders, charging into a situation most people would flee. He’s
down the Cobra. The excavation was a precise operation. “Like home now, in an honored space in the Montana earth.
archeology,” Fred said. Welcomed, at last.

32 M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 33