It has been 46 years since her father was shot down over Vietnam in 1967 but Tara O’Grady is still waiting for her father to come home.
O’Grady launched a campaign in 2012 to bring home the remains of John O’Grady, a U.S. Air Force colonel was grew up in New Hyde Park, that includes a Web Site and a Facebook page.
“I want to say goodbye to my dad. He should be buried in the country he fought for,” Tara O’Grady said in an interview last week.
But thus far Tara has had little success, continuing more than 40 years of frustration and uncertainty for Tara and her six siblings.
Tara, who now lives in Las Vegas, said her family was notified in 1967 that John O’Grady, 37, had been shot down over Vietnam, but had parachuted from his disabled jet.
For the next 10 years, members of the family awaited word on John O’Grady’s fate until 1977 when the Air Force declared him dead, offering no details of his death.
In 1970, Tara said, Reader’s Digest and Look magazine did stories about the plight of her mother, Diana, and the seven siblings of the O’Grady family.
O’Grady said Ross Perot saw the stories and paid for her family to fly to France to ask members of the North Vietnamese delegation at the peace talks with the United States about John O’Grady’s fate. They were told to find out from their own government, she said.
In the wake of her father being shot down, she said her family gradually disintegrated as her mother “fell apart” with physical and emotional problems. She reached a point where she couldn’t cope with caring for her children, Tara said.
One of her sisters was in college and another older sister and two older brothers were left on their own to finish high school, she said. Tara, her younger brother Danny and an older sister, Diana, were sent to an orphanage.
“It was an abusive orphanage. I know I suffered physical and verbal abuse,” she said.
At age 11, when U.S. prisoners of war were being returned to the U.S., she recalled sneaking into a TV room at the orphanage with her sister, hoping to catch a glimpse of their father coming home.
But, Tara said, it wasn’t until two years ago, in 2011, that two former North Vietnamese soldiers told representatives of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, volunteers who work to account for all soldiers missing in action, that they had captured O’Grady after his plane crashed, finding him with a broken leg and a small scalp wound after his parachute got entangled in a tree.
The soldiers, according to their account, tried to bring a dehydrated John O’Grady to a field hospital by stretcher but he died before they could reach the hospital.
One soldier, Tara said, recalled O’Grady clinging to a photo of his wife and family and remembered a picture of two young daughters. The soldiers also remembered O’Grady’s reluctance to let go of the photo, Tara said.
The soldiers, according to their account, buried O’Grady with his dog tags under a star fruit tree that they hoped to use as a point of reference so O’Grady’s body could eventually be returned to his family.
Based on the soldiers’ accounts, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command began around Memorial Day 2012 to excavate the site where the soldiers said O’Grady’s remains were buried.
But, Tara said, the volunteers stopped their work shortly after her eldest sister Patty went to the site and interfered with the excavation.
“They promised to preserve the site and go back. We’ve waited 45 years and here I am still waiting,” O’Grady said. “We never had a service. It’s been a roller coaster of emotions.”
O’Grady said she began the Web site campaign shortly after learning the excavation of her father’s remains had been abandoned. She’s also launched a blog site (https://johnogradymia.blogspot.com) relating her father’s story and her own story.
O’Grady said three days after two soldiers arrived at her family’s home in Las Vegas to report that John O’Grady’s plane had been shot down and he was missing, she received a letter from her father – the last one he wrote before taking off on his final mission.
“Daddy is flying a lot and the more he flies the sooner he will be home for good and that’s what he wants more than anything else in the world, so he can give out great big hugs and kisses to everyone, but especially to little girls in the first grade who won’t be in the first grade much longer,” he wrote.
Tara, who was six years old when she received the letter, said she’d had a close relationship with her father before he left for Vietnam in January 1967 and keeps the letter to close to her.
“I don’t know how many times I reread it,” she said.
She has written that she remembers her father as a good-humored man who would dress up as the Great Pumpkin on Halloween and would lead his seven children in singing “The Little Drummer Boy” each Christmas.
At an early age, he had nicknamed her “Love” and she said every moment she spent with him, even if he just drove her to school, was a special one.
“He was my hero and I looked up to him,” she said. “Getting to see my dad for me was like going to Disneyland.”
O’Grady said her father was devoted to his family and his military career. He had attended La Salle High School, a private Military Academy in New York, attaining the top rank in his graduating class. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy before his service in Vietnam.
Before the war, she said, John O’Grady earned a masters degree in engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He had specialized training and expertise in the anti-ballistic weapons systems on the F-4 aircraft that he helped to design. He also worked on the Saturn and Jupiter rocket booster system at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., that put the first monkeys into space.
As a pilot, she said, he earned the Silver Star, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, two Bronze Star Medals, and a Purple Heart.
O’Grady recounts his background on another Web site, https://taraogrady.hubpages.com/hub/Colonel-John-F-OGrady, where she wrote. “He lived his life with honor, passion and integrity. He had an amazing zest for life and learning and instilled that fervor for life in his children.”
New Hyde Park resident Mary Ann O’Grady, John O’Grady’s cousin, attended Memorial Day ceremonies in New Hyde Park earlier this year to honor the airman’s memory.
“For a long time I believed he was alive,” she said, adding, “I’m very sad about it.”
Tara O’Grady said she simply wants to lay her father to rest with honor.
“Now I’m very frustrated. I feel like I’m hopeless again,” she said. “I’m angry that they’re just leaving him there. We went through hell. My dad gave his life for his country.”
