Donald Dawson

Brother of the Pilot Donald Dawson

On November 6, 1964, Don Dawson, a 24-year-old Captain for Shell Oil, was on board his ship in Panama when he was informed that his older brother, Dan, a First Lieutenant in the United States Army, had been reported missing in Vietnam. His L-19 single engine spotter plane had disappeared, but there was no further information on the pilot. This happened seven years, to the day, after Dan's father, a Merchant Marine Captain, was lost at sea. Don could not accept another unmarked grave. By the end of November, Dawson had left his family in California and had illegally entered Vietnam to begin an incredible ten month search for his brother. He had to argue with and circumvent military, intelligence, and embassy bureaucracies for information regarding his brother's status and alleged crash site. They ultimately, unofficially, gave him limited support and encouragement. In a Vietnamese village, with the Viet Cong all around, he lived and ate with the peasants and home guard. He learned the language, came to know the countryside and people of Vietnam, and, through the many sympathetic journalists he met and books they gave him to read, developed an understanding of the politics and fallacies of the war in Vietnam, all the while gathering information from his own sources, which he hoped would lead him to his brother. He became known to the villagers as "The Brother of the pilot" during his relentless search.