<p>By TOM ROEDER THE GAZETTE</p>
<p>An Air Force Academy graduate was buried at the school’s cemetery Tuesday, 35 years after he was shot down during a secret mission over Laos.</p>
<p>Maj. John Carroll was laid to rest beside his wife, Beverly, who died 12 years ago without knowing if the body of the man she married in 1962 would ever be found.</p>
<p>The funeral was attended by Carroll’s son and daughter, Mike Carroll and Julie Zouzounis, who were children when he died.</p>
<p>Other mourners included men Carroll served with — men who understood why Carroll loved skirting the treetops and dodging enemy fire in a tiny observation plane.</p>
<p>“You had to find the enemy to kill them,” explained Darrel Whitcomb, a friend who served by Carroll’s side in a shadowy Air Force unit that fought America’s secret war in Laos.</p>
<p>Carroll, a Vietnam veteran and a former B-52 bomber pilot, volunteered in October 1972 for duty with the Ravens, a group of Air Force forward air controllers whose job was to find communist forces in the jungle so they could be targeted for airstrikes and artillery fire.</p>
<p>Duty with the Ravens was just about as far away from the regular military as an Air Force officer could get, said H. Ownby, who flew with Carroll.</p>
<p>“It was a spectacular job,” Ownby said Tuesday. “It was absolute freedom.”</p>
<p>It must have been a shock for Carroll, a 1962 Air Force Academy graduate who served in the polished-shoe world of Strategic Air Command for most of his Air Force career.</p>
<p>Before going to Laos, Carroll had a reputation as a gregarious but efficient officer whose precision flying earned him a trip to the esteemed Aerospace Research Pilot School, the Air Force’s breeding ground for astronauts.</p>
<p>“He was a real class act,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Ervin Rokke, a classmate of Carroll’s at the academy.</p>
<p>After the advanced school, Carroll chose one of the service’s most dangerous missions — low-level, low-speed flying to find the enemy.</p>
<p>“We knew where they were when they shot at us,” said Jim Carlton, who flew observation missions with Carroll.</p>
<p>In Laos, airmen wore civilian clothes and were heavily armed. They flew small planes with foreign markings on missions so secretive that paperwork was almost nonexistent.</p>
<p>Whitcomb said Carroll was sent to the Ravens to provide leadership to the hellraising younger men who flew the dangerous observer missions.</p>
<p>“We were a hard-charging group,” Whitcomb said. “The controlling element was testosterone.”</p>
<p>Laos was a sideshow to the Vietnam War. It was officially a neutral country, and, on paper, the U.S. and Hanoi governments had agreed to keep their troops out.</p>
<p>But the North Vietnamese found it convenient to send troops and supplies across the undefended border, using Laotian neutrality as a defense from U.S. bombs.</p>
<p>They were hunted by a topsecret military and Central Intelligence Agency operation to thwart the North Vietnamese army, which included forward air controllers such as Carroll.</p>
<p>“On Nov. 7, 1972, Carroll was flying a forward air controller mission over Xiangkhoang Province, Laos, when his O-1G Bird Dog aircraft was hit by enemy ground fire and forced to land,” the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel office said in a news release.</p>
<p>Whitcomb said Carroll fought for his life after crash landing just 100 yards from a communist outpost. Carroll was armed for a siege and was known for the bag of grenades he always carried on his plane, Whitcomb said.</p>
<p>Rescue missions were driven back by intense groundfire from the communists. The firefight on the ground likely killed Carroll. The crew of the last helicopter sent to rescue the major spotted his body.</p>
<p>It turned out that the body had been carried away by natives and buried. More than three decades later, it was located by a Defense Department team. Carroll’s family held a memorial service at Edwards Air Force Base in California shortly after his death.</p>
<p>They never knew of the rather unorthodox rites Carroll received in Laos.</p>
<p>“The last thing I did was to call in a F-4 strike to put a 2,000-pound bomb on the wreckage,” Whitcomb said.</p>
<p>The Ravens had an agreement that they would keep their planes from the enemy. The bombing fulfilled that agreement.</p>
<p>“It was his funeral pyre,” Whitcomb said.</p>
<p>CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0240 or <a href="mailto:tom.roeder@gazette.com">tom.roeder@gazette.com</a></p>