Grace’s story ended with neither coffin nor medal. His F-4 Phantom II was shot down over Laos on June 14, 1969, barely five months after he arrived in Southeast Asia. By all accounts, he and his partner parachuted safely to the ground. A rescue team hoisted the partner into the helicopter-and from then on, Grace’s fate is shrouded in mystery. The official report says Grace was dangling in the air when he lost his grip on the helicopter hoist and fell back into the jungle. Grace was listed as missing in action; Lillian was notified on June 15-Father’s Day.
For nine months she tried to get the details. “Our attempts to get clarification were never successful,” says Bickel, who now runs a finance company in Boulder, Colo. “So eventually we just gave up. I took the government’s version hook, line and sinker. I was a good military wife.”
But in 1972 the Defense Department asked Bickel to look through a stack of photographs of American POWs obtained by U.S. intelligence. She identified number 77 as a picture of her husband. And that, weirdly enough, was that. “They told me, ‘We can’t confirm or refute your ID, but thanks anyway’,” Bickel says. She assumed that Grace had been killed and asked that he be declared dead. She married Vern Bickel in the mid-’70s and tried to build a new life.
After moving to Colorado, Bickel became involved in Republican politics. In 1988 she gave speeches for the Bush-Quayle ticket and was surprised to find that audiences often asked about MIAs. Embarrassed that she didn’t know much about the issue, Bickel went to Washington for briefings. She was stunned by the controversy over the handling of MIA cases. Bickel asked for Jim Grace’s files. “Six months later I found documents that said he’d been in captivity and that he was a discrepancy case.”
Outraged, Bickel intensified her efforts. Using her political connections (she ran for lieutenant governor of Colorado last year), she persuaded the CIA to declassify the film that contained the picture she had identified as Grace’s. Friends confirmed his identity. The CIA responded by telling Bickel that after all those years, the date of the photograph was wrong; it was May 1969, not June 1969, so it couldn’t be Grace after all. But then another pilot signed a sworn statement saying he heard that Grace never fell to the ground; he was lowered back into a clearing because the safety strap on the helicopter hoist was loose. Bickel still believes he was captured. When she asked why the sites of the crash and her husband’s attempted rescue were 40 miles apart in the report, she says Defense Department officials changed the data. “I have 6,000 feet of reports, correspondence and maps, and I still don’t have official confirmation. These people are guilty either of duplicity or incompetence, and I don’t know how much forbearance we can give the intelligence community, even if it is just incompetence.”
Her persistence may have paid off. Defense Department investigators said they’ll research the case this fall in Laos. “I believe [he] had the highest potential to survive captivity, and that he could still be alive today,” Bickel says. “We don’t want it ever to be concluded that Jim Grace’s family doesn’t care about him.”
They do, of course. Bickel remembers him unexpectedly when she’s alone. “When I’m jogging, or on the freeway behind the wheel of my car,” she says. “It’s like a flashback. The emotions just come up to the surface and my eyes glass up. I usually say a prayer and push on.”
