MIA MYSTERY SOLVED? LAOS RETURNING PURPORTED REMAINS OF VAN NUYS PILOT, FAMILY TOLD.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

For 27 years, the family of Air Force Maj. Albro Lundy Jr. wondered and worried and hoped that he had survived being shot down in Laos while helping the CIA and Hmong guerrillas fighting communist forces.

This week, after years of raised hopes and dashed dreams, of stonewalling governments and tantalizing hopes, the family of the missing Van Nuys pilot received the call it has been dreading.

What appears to be the remains of their beloved father and husband, along with personal effects such as his dog tags and identification card, are being flown to the United States, turned over this week by the Laotian government in a surprise move.

It will take several days to ship the remains from Bangkok, Thailand, to the Defense Department forensic pathology lab in Hawaii, where testing could take anywhere from two months to two years.

``It's a mixed thing,'' said Albro L. Lundy III, a Palos Verdes Estates lawyer. ``Everybody hopes for a fairytale ending, where he walks out of the jungle alive. But we want to know with certainty what happened. We want to be able to say goodbye. We can finally lay him to rest.''

Air Force personnel were able to provide only sketchy information about the remains, which were turned over by Laotian officials Monday to the U.S. ambassador there, said Air Force Staff Sgt. John Hancock.

Lundy said Air Force personnel told him the remains also include his father's metal dog tags, laminated ID card and ``blood chit,'' a cloth document sewn into Air Force pilots' jackets offering a reward in 12 languages for a pilot's safe return. The blood chit includes the pilot's name and other unique identifying information.

Lundy's remains are believed to be among those turned over, Hancock said, but he could not confirm what the son had been told about the dog tags and other identifying materials.

Air Force officials told Lundy that positive identification would take anywhere from two months to two years. They refused to allow him to see the remains, or to bring in a private forensic pathologist to do a separate identification.

``He did say he would ask for a verification of the identifiers as soon as they would do it,'' Lundy said. ``They also would put together a report on what remains were returned, and do that as quickly as possible, without waiting for the entire packet to be completed.''

Lundy said the find raises a lot of questions.

For instance, the blood chit is made of cloth, and is unlikely to have survived relatively intact if the pilot's body had been buried in the jungle for the past 27 years.

``These remains have clearly been stored. So we have this question to ask the Lao about when did you recover these remains,'' he said. ``I was told, `The Lao are not going to be providing that information.' ''

If the remains are conclusively identified as Lundy's, ``he will be given a hero's burial in Arlington (National Cemetery, outside Washington, D.C.),'' his son said.

``For us, that would be as happy an ending as if he came walking out, because it would be a tragedy if he spent 27 years in somebody's prison hole,'' Lundy said. ``The bottom line is we want him to come home.''

Hopes dashed

This is far from the first time the Lundy family had hoped he was coming home only to be disappointed. Because of that, Lundy talks carefully about what the latest news may mean.

In 1991 Lundy's case shot into prominence after a grainy photo surfaced that appeared to show him and two other missing fliers, one of them also from the San Fernando Valley, holding a sign dated 1990.

The photo reignited longstanding accusations by MIA activists that some living servicemen had been left in enemy hands after the U.S. pullout from Southeast Asia. Pentagon analysts ultimately said the shot's authenticity was inconclusive.

The Pentagon always has denied that any of more than 2,100 unaccounted-for servicemen from the Southeast Asian conflict remained alive after the last POWs were returned in the mid-1970s.

More recently, William Lundy spent four years in Laos, setting up a business and trying to track down his father, said Albro Lundy III.

The two brothers even traveled in 1994 to the crash site in the Laotian jungle where their father's plane went down, collecting pieces of the jet's canopy but no evidence of a body.

William Lundy's hunt ended in northern Laos, where a low-level government official offered to sell him his father's dog tags and other personal effects for a very steep price. The official even provided him with a rubbing of the dog tags as proof.

``It was his dog tags,'' Albro Lundy said. ``It had information on it nobody would have known.''

But the brother turned down the offer, saying he wanted his father or his father's body.

Albro Lundy said his dad, a former two-time All-City basketball player at Van Nuys High School who went on to play at UCLA, was ``phenomenal.'' ``He was the kind of dad who would come home and play with the kids all evening.''

Then Lundy caught himself talking of his father in the past tense.

``I'm saying `was' now, which is not how I usually say it,'' Lundy said.

Barbara Robertson of Santa Ana, whose husband, John, also appeared to be in the 1991 picture, said news like that Thursday still hits her with surprising power.

``I don't think the average person has any idea what we go through,'' Robertson said.

The Vietnamese government in 1990 turned over what they said were her husband's remains, but they sent ``animal bones and a rock,'' Robertson said.

``The family members want the truth,'' Robertson said. ``That's all we ask for. This one sounds pretty substantive. If indeed it is the truth, it's nice to have it.''

Jack and Gladys Fleckenstein, the parents of the photo's third flier, Navy Lt. Larry James Stevens of Woodland Hills, said they have received reports from the Navy of 13 live sightings of their son this year alone.

``I think he's still over there,'' Jack Fleckenstein said. ``I think he's being moved around a bit, and not all of the time is he under a prison environment.''

Fleckenstein said he believes his stepson is one of at least 200 and as many as 800 U.S. servicemen still in captivity in Southeast Asia.

``I am glad for the Lundys if this can come out to give them some closure,'' Fleckenstein said. ``But it doesn't do anything to shake my faith that there are 200 live prisoners over there, including my stepson.''

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Photo

PHOTO Albro L. Lundy III keeps an enlarged photograph of his father, Albro Lundy Jr., in his Hermosa Beach office.

Evan Yee/Daily News