Elaine Pate Griffin opened the package with slightly trembling hands at her home in northeast Georgia, as her brother, David Pate, looked on.  They both knew what was inside was a link to their beloved brother, Gary Pate, who had vanished during a night-time mission in Vietnam nearly fifty-seven years before – the brother David has always considered his hero, even before the brother became a national one.  The excitement over seeing a physical fraternal link set Elaine’s hands a bit a-tremble as she tore into the package.   But before we join the Pate siblings in revealing the contents of that emotional parcel of mail, let’s put a finger in the margin for a minute and go back in time to cover Gary’s tragic disappearance, which went unresolved for more than forty years.    

On Wednesday, May 22, 1968, Gary Pate, who had grown up in the Starr’s Mill community – in a house that stood until recently just uphill from the present-day Mill Pond Gardens nursery – as well as on Brooks’s athletic fields, was looking two weeks into the future toward his upcoming twenty-second birthday.   A member of the U.S. Air Force’s 41^st Tactical Airlift Squadron, Pate that evening was loadmaster aboard a C-130 Hercules with a  crew of  nine on a  nighttime  flare mission  over  northern  Salavan  Province,  Laos. 

The Hercules crashed in Vietnamese territory during the mission, killing all nine of its crew. Immediate search efforts were impossible due to heavy anti-aircraft fire in the area. Between 1989 and 2008, Laotian, Vietnamese, and American search teams conducted joint field investigations in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam, recovering aircraft wreckage and human remains. In 2010, modern forensic techniques allowed for the individual identification of the remains of the C-130’s crew, including those of  Pate.  His dog tags were recovered, as well, and presented to his mother in a ceremony for the members of Gary’s crew at Arlington.

Senior Master Sergeant Pate is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. His name is also inscribed along with all his fallen comrades on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D. C.   And in October 2019, memorial signs went up just inside the Brooks town limits declaring Highway 85 Connector as “Gary Pate Memorial Highway.”

To the best of my knowledge, I never met Gary Pate in my life;  I was only five and a half years old when he went missing.  But I know his long-unresolved status haunted the Brooks and Starr’s Mill communities for ages; a lack of closure always immensely complicates and prolongs a tragedy.   

I remember riding by his parents’ house along what was then Highway 74, but is today Highway 85 Connector, and hearing one adult in the car asking another, “Have they ever figured out what happened to Gary?”  Can you imagine how not knowing – decade after decade – must have felt to his parents, siblings, and other loved ones?  His loved ones accepted the likelihood that he must be dead, but did not know for certain for more than forty years.  I did have the opportunity to speak with his lovely mother, Joan Golden Pate Praet (1924-2016), some years before her death.  A lovely and thoughtful lady, she thankfully lived long enough to learn for certain what her son’s fate had been.  (Mrs. Praet had remarried to a man of rhyming surname with that of her first husband and children some years after Loyd Pate’s death in 1970, and she re-settled in northeast Georgia.)

Fran Crawford McElwaney of Brooks remembers when the Pates moved to Starr’s Mill about the time school started in 1957.  “Gary was a few years younger than I was, but I remember the little boy who was almost pretty – a really sweet-faced young man – getting on the school bus with us in front of his house, which was just up the hill from Mr. Sam Bailey’s house.  I guess that picture firmed-up in my mind’s eye when he disappeared a decade or more later, but I can still see that sweet-faced boy getting on and off the bus with us after all these years.”  (The home of Samuel B. and Mamie Whatley Bailey was on the site of today’s Mill Pond Gardens nursery.)

Tom Kerlin, who was Sam Bailey’s grandson, was a week younger than Gary Pate.  He, too, remembers when the Pates moved to Starr’s Mill, for both boys were going into sixth grade that fall.  “All the other boys in the community were several years older than I was, so Gary and I became buddies and ran around together for several years, till we graduated together from Fayette County High School in 1964.  He challenged me and I challenged him,” which sounds as if Kerlin is restating the old Biblical verity that iron sharpens iron.  Kerlin, who is probably the only cowboy poet Fayette County has ever produced, lived much of his life here, as had generations of his forebears, but in recent years decamped a bit further south to Barnesville.

“Gary was a lot of fun and had a great sense of humor,” Kerlin continues.  “He played the guitar, a skill he must have picked up at least in part from his father, Loyd Pate, who was from Starr’s Mill originally and could play any stringed instrument by ear.   Loyd coached our baseball teams, and Gary’s mom, Joan, who was from Hyde Park, New York, worked at South Fulton Hospital.  After Gary went missing and was presumed dead, his mother donated a sanctuary organ to Glen Grove Baptist Church in his memory.  Gary was a great guy from a terrific family.”   (Glen Grove Baptist is now New Hope South, and the organ is now in the Pate family.)

Jim Fulton, a longtime community leader and influencer whose family home was the first built in the brand-spanking-new Peachtree City at the dawn of the 1960s, was also a member of the FCHS Class of 1964.  He, too, remembers Gary Pate as a classmate, friend, and a fun person to be around.  Fulton mulls briefly over the pivot point their graduation year, 1964, proved to be – the path from the November presidential election that year to the first US troops landing in Vietnam early in ‘65 is as straight a line as the finest draftsman can draw with the truest straight-edge.  As a columnist put it with biting accuracy at the time, “I was told if I voted for Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, there would be enormous escalation of the war in Vietnam.  I did and there was.”    

Fulton continues, “So many of our contemporaries entered the jaws of the beast of war in those years, and there are so many empty chairs because of it.  I have never held Gary Pate or his family in anything but the very highest regard.”

*****

Removing the finger we put into the margin in our opening and getting back to the package the Pate siblings received that April morning in 2025, we need to begin the somewhat circuitous tale with one Diana Dewing, who lives in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, and who was a high school student during the Vietnam War.  

“During that time, for a donation to the war effort, you could receive a POW/MIA bracelet,” Ms. Dewing says.  “The one I got said ‘Sgt. Gary Pate, 5-22-68,’ and on the back side is a hole which signified he was MIA as opposed to POW.  Because I wore the bracelet day-in and day-out, it sadly broke in half.”   Ms. Dewing found an article online in The Citizen from when the Brooks highway was dedicated in Gary Pate’s name, and contacted Ellie White-Stevens, the editor, in late March 2025.  Mrs. White-Stevens e-mailed me in my capacity as mayor and unofficial but de facto historian of Brooks. I reached out to Elaine Pate Griffin, Gary’s sister.   Soon Ms. Dewing and Mrs. Griffin made contact, the result of which was that Ms. Dewing passed along the commemorative bracelet she had worn for so many years to the sister of the soldier honored thereupon.

“Opening the package and seeing the bracelet was an emotional experience, for even after all the time since we lost Gary, his story continues.  My brother David and I had talked about Gary the day before I got your message, and David was there with me when I opened the package. We talked about how much we still miss him,”  says Mrs. Griffin.  “Diana was so excited when I got in touch with her.  She let me know the bracelet was broken from wearing it for fifty years.  I love the fact that it’s broken and plan to keep it that way, displayed in a shadow box.   Diana and I have become Facebook friends and have talked about God’s hand in this story.”    

   

Stories simply don’t get much more heart-warming than this one.  But as Mrs. Griffin stated, Gary Pate’s story seems to find a way to keep renewing itself.  May it always, especially in the hearts and minds of his family and friends, as well as here in his home county of Fayette.   For in the memory-filled South, those gone before are often still very much with us, and the beautiful thing is that they will be for as long as we remember and tell their stories again and again.