The remains of Army Chief Warrant Officer Larry Zich, who died in a helicopter crash in South Vietnam on April 3, 1972, were identified by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency on Oct. 25, 2022. (DPAA)
(Tribune News Service) — Fifty-one years ago today, Larry Zich flew his final mission in Vietnam — on his birthday.
On June 5, he will be laid to rest at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Lincoln, Neb. The Patriot Guard will be there, and military jets will fly over.
Tina Mueller, Larry's sister, will at last get to say goodbye to her little brother.
"He was quiet and reserved, but he could pull tricks when he wanted to," she said.
Mueller last saw her little brother in 1971, before he shipped out to Vietnam.
Zich was the middle child of five, all born in Sturgis, S.D. The family moved around a lot, migrating through several small South Dakota towns before finally crossing the Nebraska border and moving to Lincoln, where Zich would attend Lincoln High.
According to relatives, Zich was happiest with his head under the hood of a car. He loved drag racing, building engines and going fast.
On April 3, 1972, Zich was the copilot of a Huey helicopter with three other members of the 37th Signal Battalion. They were flying to Quang Tri City, Vietnam, but got lost in bad weather. After a transmission from the pilot to ground control saying that they were lost, the crew was never heard from again.
They were declared missing, and the Zich family was shocked.
"We thought, you know, that he would be found," Mueller said. "Then that turned into thinking he was a POW. That lasted a long time."
In October 2022, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified Zich's remains, thanks to a wisdom tooth that was received from a Vietnamese immigrant in 1988, according to a press release in March.
The source claimed that the remains were from an aircraft crash involving nine people.
After finding that a dental X-ray of Zich was accidentally reversed, forensic analysts confirmed that the remains belonged to Zich.
It was a relief to Mueller.
"I'm glad he wasn't a POW," she said. "It's a relief to know what actually happened."
Tina was the oldest of the Zich kids, five years between her and Larry. Lincoln has been her home since the family moved here in the 1960s. She has two daughters, Sue and Tanya. She and Sue Green opened Tina's Café more than 30 years ago, and have been serving homestyle breakfast and famous cinnamon rolls ever since.
Back in 2006, Green ran into a man at the Nebraska State Fair, and noticed he was wearing a POW bracelet just like hers.
She would be shocked to discover that the bracelet had her uncle's name on it.
Later, Mueller and her daughters would visit a memorial marker for Zich that was placed in Black Hills National Cemetery, and it was there they met seven servicemen from Zich's detachment.
"They all loved Larry," Mueller said. "It was the only aircraft they lost, so it affected them deeply."
Debbie Zich Peters, his former wife, said that one of the men in Zich's attachment abandoned his mission to search for Zich, but to no avail.
"It was just like they disappeared."
Zich married Peters on May 29, 1969.
He sold the engine out of his beloved '57 Chevy to buy her engagement ring. That's when she knew he loved her, she said.
"He loved going fast, that's why he wanted to fly," she said. "He had interest in getting his fixed-wing (license) when he got back."
Peters says that after Zich was reported missing, her "whole world stopped." The Army never gave any information about what happened, just that he had gone missing.
"How do you process it when you don't even know what happened?" she asked.
That question, among others, would lead to her joining a class-action lawsuit in the 1970s with several families of Vietnam prisoners of war.
In the years after Zich went MIA, his wife went back to school in San Diego and got her degree in social work. She worked with the National League of Families of POW/MIA, and would eventually remarry. Sometime in the 1980s, the '57 Chevy, which her brother had promised to fix up for Zich when he got back, was sold.
She moved to Florida 15 years ago, but retired and came back to Lincoln in 2021 due to health problems.
When Zich's remains were identified, Peters says she found out through the news on TV.
"That's a hard way to find out," she said. "It totally knocked the props out from under me."
Peters said that Zich was her first love. She said he was dedicated, and was always striving to make life better.
"There hasn't been one day in 51 years that this hasn't been part of my daily life," she said.
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