50 years later, MLB keeps promise to late Sanford POW’s family | Commentary
Sadly, we too often become numb to sports teams and leagues who honor our troops in a variety of ways, whether it’s discounted admission on Military Appreciation Night or an invitation for veterans to stand and be recognized by the crowd or, of course, the traditional military flyover that often comes at the end of the national anthem.
On this Memorial Day weekend, let us all take a moment to remember another military flyover in North Vietnam more than half-a-century ago; a fatal mission in a failed war that left a local woman without her husband and two young children without their father.
And let us also remember there are names and faces and men and women behind these military tributes at sporting events. We’re talking about brave men like Capt. E.A. Stamm, a Navy pilot who left his Sanford home in 1967 and never returned.
The reason I know about Capt. Stamm is because his daughter — Katrina Stamm-Shoemaker — contacted me early last year about a long, lost card issued by Major League Baseball in 1973 at the end of the Vietnam War. The card was a lifetime pass to MLB games for those Vietnam prisoners of war, their spouses and their children. It was baseball’s way of showing gratitude to the hundreds who were captured and then tortured in North Vietnamese POW camps.
When I received Katrina’s original email about her lost card, I made a perfunctory effort to contact Major League Baseball and never heard back. I let the issue die, but Katrina never did. She kept emailing me and asking me to help and I was always too busy. Finally, after her umpteenth email, I tried again and made contact with MLB Chief Communications Officer Pat Courtney, who came to the rescue. Courtney and his staff confirmed Katrina’s story and issued a beautiful new “gold” card to Katrina — a grown woman with nothing but little-girl memories of her courageous father.
She remembers being in the fifth grade at Sanford’s Southside Elementary School on the day before Thanksgiving break when her teacher, Mrs. Carlton, called her to the front of the class an hour before school was to let out.
“Your mom wants you home immediately,” the teacher said. “Get on your bike right now, ride straight home and don’t you stop.”
“As a little kid, I was oblivious, and I just assumed it was something good my mom wanted to tell me,” Katrina says. “To this day, I can zap myself back to that moment as a little girl on my bicycle riding home, the wind is whipping through my hair and I’m thinking something really, really good is about to happen.”
Instead, it was something horrifically bad. When she reached the house, her mother, Ruth Ann, was crying and being comforted by the family pastor and two Navy officials. That’s how Katrina and her little brother David learned their daddy’s plane had been shot down over North Vietnam.
According to Navy and family accounts, Stamm volunteered to replace another pilot who had fallen ill and couldn’t go on a dangerous photo reconnaissance mission along the 19th parallel in North Vietnam. It was Nov. 25, 1968, when Stamm swooped downward in his supersonic A-5 Vigilante jet so his navigator could take the photos. But at 5,500 feet, they were within range of North Vietnamese anti-aircraft artillery and their plane was hit and broke into four pieces. Stamm’s navigator didn’t make it out of the plane, but Stamm ejected from the aircraft, parachuted to the ground and was taken captive. He died at some point while in captivity, but not before the family went through years of hell wondering what had happened to him.
The family, according to Katrina, was told twice by the Navy that he was dead and told two other times that he was still alive in a POW camp. They lived for years, until the war was over in 1973, not really knowing whether or not he was coming home.
What they did know what this: If he was indeed still alive, he was being subjected to extreme torture and mistreatment in North Vietnam’s gruesome POW camps — sarcastically called the “Hanoi Hilton” by captured troops. Surviving American POWs have told stories of being in solitary confinement for weeks with no bathrooms and having to sit in their own excrement while rats and roaches crawled on their bodies. They told of brutal beatings, waterboarding and being tied up for days and hung from ropes suspended from iron meat hooks.
Many POWs died and some attempted suicide.
“For the family members of those POWs, it was like trying to go on with your life while there is still an ongoing tragedy happening every day in your mind,” Katrina says. “You’re watching yourself try to live a normal life, but in the back of your head, you know your father is in Vietnam being tortured. In many ways, it was like we were imprisoned in that POW camp with my dad.”
Even when the war was over, the uncertainty continued. Katrina says when the Navy flew home the supposed remains of her father, the family was skeptical and paid for a forensics report on the bones. The original report was conducted by a lab at the Smithsonian Institution, Katrina says, and confirmed that the remains were not her father’s. Suspiciously, a subsequent report confirmed they were here father’s.
“There’s still this big discrepancy about whether or not that it’s even my dad buried in the grave next to my mom,” Katrina says. “If it’s not my dad, I hope it’s somebody nice who my mom gets along with.”
Katrina laughs at this point, but other times she cries during our interview. Like when she describes the months before her father was deployed to Vietnam when, in those days before Disney, the young family spent the entire summer visiting old, forgotten Florida attractions like Six Gun Territory, Marineland, the mermaid show at Weeki Wachee Springs and the water-ski show at Cypress Gardens.
Or just before her father left on his final deployment and she sat on his lap and hugged him and he told her, “You’re a big girl now so you take care of your mother and your little brother David.”
Her mother passed away six years ago, but not before successfully raising Katrina and David, who both graduated from UCF and have gone on to thriving careers and fulfilling lives. But even now, more than 50 years later, they celebrate and commemorate their father.
A few weeks ago, Katrina and her husband Dean used her newly issued lifetime baseball pass to attend a game in St. Louis, where both of her parents are buried. She was thrilled that before the Cardinals played the Diamondbacks that night at Busch Stadium, the famous Budweiser Clydesdales — their hair braided with red, white and blue ribbons — took a lap around the field pulling the red beer wagon.
“It was a blast. We had such an amazing time,” Katrina says. “I think it’s wonderful that sports organizations like Major League Baseball pay tribute to our military. When I was a kid, and somebody would do something nice for the families of those who died in the military, it always made me feel that we weren’t forgotten, after all.”
Her voice cracks.
“It’s no secret that we didn’t treat our Vietnam veterans very well when they came back home,” she adds. “And for the families of those who didn’t come back home, it feels good even today to know that somebody still cares. I appreciate organizations like Major League Baseball for continuing to honor my father.”
Next time you’re at a football game or a baseball game or a NASCAR race and those fighter jets streak across the sky at the end of the national anthem, remember another military flyover in 1968.
Remember the courage of Captain Ernest Albert Stamm.
And remember the words of Elmer Davis, the great World War II-era news reporter and commentator.
“This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.”
Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and HD 101.1-2
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