Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 14, 1993 TAG: 9310140226
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: HAMPTON LENGTH: Medium
Two weeks ago, she discovered that 1st Lt. James D. Carey may have parachuted to safety and ended up at a prisoner-of-war camp in the former Soviet Union.
The discovery came in a news story about a leaked government report that said the State Department had confronted Russian authorities with evidence that hundreds of U.S. prisoners from the Korean War were secretly moved to the former Soviet Union, imprisoned and never returned.
"I was plenty shocked," said Whittaker, who remarried in 1972.
"I'll just be completely surprised if he was captured and taken to Russia. I think he's in the bottom of the Yalu River. That's where I've always thought he was."
Even if her husband was captured, she said, she doesn't think there's much chance that he survived this long.
"I don't see how. . . . I could be wrong, but I don't have too much hope that he'd be alive," she said.
Whittaker got the telegram on March 23, 1952, two days after the birth of son James D. Carey Jr., that her husband was missing. She was still in the hospital.
"I had no hope, right from the first," she said.
"I just didn't think it was possible, in the kind of weather they had over there. I didn't have any optimism about it. Normally, I'm an optimistic person."
Two weeks later, a letter arrived from Maj. James Martin, who was flying with Carey when the lieutenant went down.
"During a sustained attack by the enemy aircraft, we were separated," Martin wrote. "The last time I saw his airplane, it appeared to be undamaged and under control."
Martin added, "There is every possibility that he was successful in abandoning his aircraft."
But his wife didn't believe it. She said she soon started putting her husband's disappearance behind her.
That July, her baby died of congenital heart disease.
A picture of Carey still sits on Whittaker's mantle, near a photo of the baby.
She said she isn't bitter about her loss, or about the government's holding on to knowledge of U.S. prisoners of war being held in Russia.
"I just accept it, and that's it," she said. "What's the point of wailing and hollering and beating on the bandbox, when you can't change what is?"
But she has written to the Pentagon, hoping for some kind of explanation.
"That would be the polite thing to do, even if it's just a form letter," she said.
"I'm not expecting any great answers, but some form of reply."
by CNB