Pilot's Family Tells of Frustration, Rage : MIAs: 'Robertson pride' sustained wife, daughter after he crashed in Vietnam and their skepticism of the government grew.

By DAN WEIKEL

July 21, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SANTA ANA — It did not take long after the olive drab footlocker was opened for the “Robertson pride” to break down.

With the sharp smell of mothballs permeating the air, Shelby Robertson Quast held up a starched Air Force fatigue shirt. “Robertson” was stenciled over one pocket, and the embroidered wings of a command pilot were stitched over the other. The collar tabs bore the gold oak leaf clusters of a major. It looked new.

Shelby clutched the shirt against her chest, leaned against her mother’s car, and started to cry.

“I have to try this on,” she said under her breath.

The fatigues belong to Lt. Col. John Leighton Robertson, who was reported missing on Sept. 16, 1966, after his jet fighter was shot down over North Vietnam. Quast is his 29-year-old daughter. She was 4 the last time she saw him alive.

On Friday, she and her mother, Barbara Robertson, pulled the rusty trunk from a dusty corner of the garage where it had sat for 19 years. The occasion was last week’s public disclosure of a grainy photograph they believe proves that Lt. Col. Robertson is still alive nearly 25 years after his disappearance.

With joy and sadness, they went through his military garb and ‘60s-style sport coats, then recounted almost two decades of anger, frustration, despair and faith in their effort to learn the fate of their loved one.

The quest has taken Barbara Robertson on hundreds of speaking engagements on the West Coast. Quast has even journeyed to Cambodia, where she searched in vain last year for a man who apparently sent the photo to the United States by courier. Together, mother and daughter have comforted the families of the missing and criticized the government effort to account for about 2,270 MIAs from the Vietnam War.

“We have never buried that man,” said Robertson, who has not remarried. “Although he has never come home, he is still an integral part of our family. We have never thought of him in terms of dead or alive. He is just missing.”

Last week, the family was inundated with telephone calls from print and broadcast journalists. Ever since, Robertson has been doing her best to accommodate the overwhelming international interest in the photograph and her family.

The den of her home has been turned into a photo studio for Newsweek and Time magazines. And on Friday, People magazine was at the house, taking pictures amid the constant interruption of telephone calls from relatives, friends, news reporters and the families of other MIAs from the Vietnam War.

“I have been playing host to the media for some time now,” Robertson said. “But I feel so strongly about the power of the media, and they get to more people’s ears than anyone else. It’s just amazing, the response.”

After years of silence and few clues to the pilot’s whereabouts, the Robertsons received a bolt of hope in November when they were shown a photo that had been turned over to th U.S. government. It shows three middle-aged men and a sign with the date May 25, 1990.

Relatives say they are convinced the men in the photo are Robertson, Air Force Maj. Albro Lundy Jr., and Navy Lt. Cmdr. Larry Stevens, all presumed killed in combat. Robertson’s aircraft crashed east of Hanoi. Lundy and Stevens were lost over Laos.

“It’s definitely him at 60 years old,” Robertson said. “We compared it to pictures of his father at that age.”

Also on Friday, a Defense Department spokesman acknowledged that a set of bones identified by the Vietnamese government as those of the pilot turned out to be “non-human mammal remains.”

Although military officials say they believe Robertson is dead, a technical analysis of the photograph has been unable to conclude if it is genuine or a hoax as other POW-MIA photos have proved to be over the years.

Robertson, 59, recalled that she was getting ready to go to dinner with her sister, Janet Malseed, that night in 1966 when she received word from an Air Force officer at her Edmunds, Wash., home that her husband had not returned from a mission. A few days later, a telegram confirmed that he was missing in action.

She said she told her children, Stacey, Deborah, Barney and Shelby, about their father and advised them to be tough, to show that “Robertson pride.” Then, she said, she wept alone in front of the fireplace. The family’s German shepherd sat by her side. Johnny Mathis was playing on the stereo.

Two years later, Robertson said, she began attending social events at McCord Air Force Base in Washington state for relatives of other missing pilots. She did not feel comfortable socializing in light of what happened to her husband and stopped attending.

Eventually, however, she wore an MIA bracelet with her husband’s name on it and joined various MIA-POW groups, although she was not an active member. She said she still found meeting with the families of the missing a particularly painful experience. Most of the time, she could not introduce herself at the functions without starting to cry.

“I could not even get past saying, ‘My husband is,’ ” Robertson said.

A change came in the mid-1970s, a few years after she moved to an unincorporated area near Santa Ana. Her daughter Deborah told her that she felt the U. S. government was not being entirely honest about the fate of many servicemen who were unaccounted for after the U. S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973. At about the same time, Lt. Col. Robertson’s status was changed from missing in action to killed in action.

“I resented what the government did. I didn’t think they had any proof he was killed. It was so arbitrary,” Robertson said. “As I became more privy to information on the possibility that there were still prisoners, the more angry and convinced I got that there were live POWs. . . . There was a great injustice done.”

Consequently, Robertson made hundreds of speeches at schools, civic organizations and patriotic events, such as flag-raising ceremonies. She was quoted in newspaper articles and appeared on radio and television talk shows.

“But I never received word on my husband during this time,” Robertson said. “It was discouraging. We just didn’t hear anything.”

Despite all the effort, the first clue about Robertson’s fate came in mid-1990 when the photograph of the three men was given to U. S. authorities by Cambodian sources. Since then, the Robertson family has questioned the handling of the picture by the government and whether the Department of Defense’s intelligence unit failed to notify them promptly.

Quast said the photograph was obtained by a Cambodian who sent it by courier to the United States, where it was turned over to the State Department sometime between late May and August, 1990.

But family members say they did not find out about the picture until November, 1990. Even then, they say, they learned of the photo not from the government but from the family of Lt. Cmdr. Stevens, another serviceman supposedly in the picture.

Quast and her mother contend the delay in notifying them might have hurt the effort to find the servicemen if they are still alive. They say the government has never given them an explanation for why it took so long to contact them.

“Can you imagine if we had had the picture all the way?” Robertson asked. “I am frustrated, angry and disappointed. This delay interfered with the ability to find him. The source (of the photo) had been trying to reach the family members here.”

On Nov. 10, Department of Defense officials showed the photo to Robertson’s immediate family and instructed them to keep its existence secret, even from their relatives.

“I remember I held the picture. It was like holding a life in my hands,” Quast said.

Supplied with a name and address, she quickly left for Cambodia on Nov. 12 in an attempt to find the source of the picture. However, the person had moved by the time she arrived, and her efforts to find him through his neighbors failed. After seven weeks of dead ends and rumors, she returned to the United States.

“I stayed and waited for him to come back for four weeks,” Quast said. “I put out feelers and it was common knowledge that prisoners were still there. I heard some stories, but not about my dad. It was fruitless. I really thought I was going to pick him up.”

Last week, the photo was apparently leaked to the news media and the interest has been overwhelming.

The Robertson home has virtually been turned into a memorial to the pilot’s memory. Service records and documents about her husband cover the coffee table in the living room. Military decorations, including a bronze Vietnam Service Medal with its green, yellow and red ribbon, sit on a nearby cabinet.

Next to the television is an enlarged color photograph of Lt. Col. Robertson and his radar officer, Lt. Hugh Buchanan, standing beside their camouflaged F-4C Phantom. The picture was taken a few days before they were shot down. Buchanan, who was captured after bailing out, spent the duration of the war as a POW and was later released.

Outside, a black-and-white windsock with POW-MIA insignia hangs from the eaves.

The middle of last week, Quast arrived from her home in Oakton, Va., to help her mother handle the media inquiries. They are particularly close. When Quast was married, she wore her mother’s wedding dress and ring, the one Col. Robertson had given his bride many years before.

Quast continued to wear the wedding band until a few days ago, when she returned it to her mother. “It’s where it belongs,” she said.