Formerly missing Kansas airman laid to rest in Pilsen

The funeral service for U.S. Air Force Maj. Dean Klenda on Saturday mixed laughter, polka-dancing reminiscences, funny stories and F-16 fighter jets cruising overhead. Dean was that kind of guy.

With his sister Deanna and hundreds of friends and family standing beside his grave, four F-16s flew over Dean’s burial service, with one fighter vaulting up to the heavens to represent his missing ship. The four-ship, as jet fighter pilots call that formation, flew at low altitude – and that reminded the Klenda family of yet another Dean story.

Before he was shot down during the Vietnam War, before he went missing for 49 years, Dean grew up on a farm near nearby Marion, and went to church at St. John Nepomucene Church here in Pilsen. Dean is now buried a short walk from the church he attended as a kid.

He was a good kid – everybody from Pilsen says that. But he was a smart aleck sometimes; they all say that, too. So after Dean joined the Air Force, one of his little jokes occasionally terrified farmers he knew here, said Katie Ekman Taylor, a relative.

In training, based in Kansas, she said, Dean would steer a jet fighter to his farm country boyhood haunts, to Pilsen, 60 miles northeast of Wichita. From the air, he’d look for farmers driving tractors in fields he was familiar with.

When he found one, he’d dive the jet – and buzz the farmer at low altitude.

Darn kids.

“Imagine what that did to people’s hearts,” said the Rev. Darrin May as he officiated Dean’s funeral service. May told that story from the pulpit of St. John’s on Saturday. Hundreds of people grinned.

Dean was that kind of guy.

The ‘price of freedom’

It wasn’t all laughter. Deanna Klenda worked for 50 years with the U.S. military to locate her brother’s remains and bring him home from North Vietnam, where he was shot down in 1965. She cried, and as the service began she leaned down, put her hand on Dean’s casket, and said a few private words to him.

Minutes later, from the pulpit, May pointed out to the hundreds of people sitting before him that he, and they, owed much to the 25-year-old guy who’d once sat in the pews. May stretched out his hand to Dean, lying at the front of the church.

“We see his casket here – and here we see the price of freedom.”

Dean Klenda died years before May was born. But the priest knows his community. “The Klendas have always been a very good family,” he told the gathering. “Dean loved and served his God and his country, and he did that because his family taught him to do that.”

One thousand, six hundred and eighteen American service members and civilians are still missing from the Vietnam War.

Dean is no longer one of the missing, in part because Deanna spent five decades relentlessly befriending everyone from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency that she could find to talk with.

She didn’t push on them, she said last week. “I didn’t have to. They worked hard, year after year.”

They went to Vietnam several times to search.

“Finding him was harder than finding the needle in a haystack,” said Deanna’s son, Gavin Peters. “It was all thick jungle where he went down.”

His mom got a call from one of those Defense Department friends, one day in 2014. She called Peters soon after.

“They found him!” she told Peters. And she cried.

Into the war zone

Finding her brother has prompted Deanna to tell a story she says she never told her parents, who are both gone now:

She flew into Vietnam in 1967, two years after Dean went missing, at the height of the Vietnam War. And she got shot at. She was 23.

She thought a lot about her brother, she said; so when she got a chance to fly into the war where he had gone missing, she took it.

She was a stewardess for World Airways, a charter airline flying out of Oakland, Calif., she said. The government hired the airline to fly troops into Vietnam, and she flew on one of those transport flights once. They came under fire after they landed.

She kept this from her parents because they knew by then that they had lost their son. But she went anyway, in spite of what she knew would be her parents’ objections, “because when you’re young, you do things like that.”

There was one other flight she took into Southeast Asia, she said, and for her and a friend of her brother, it was a sad one.

She flew into Thailand, into the operations base from which her brother and his squadron flew missions.

At a restaurant table there, a guy saw her stewardess name tag “Klenda” and stopped to smile.

“He asked if I was related to Dean,” she said. “I said yes. He liked Dean, so he said, ‘Well, hey, how’s he doing?’ ”

“And so I had to tell him.”

On Saturday, with Deanna and Peters and family and friends looking on, Dean joined the ranks of veterans laid to rest by those who knew and loved them.

Hundreds of people, flags

Hundreds of people came to say goodbye. Some wore business suits; some of them, neighbors to this church, wore farmers’ and ranchers’ tans, dark on the cheeks and light on the foreheads.

They sang “Amazing Grace.” They said the Lord’s Prayer. They listened to a singing of the 23rd Psalm. They listened to the jolting bang from three volleys of rifle fire from the 21-gun salute.

Hundreds of American flags curled in the pleasant breeze outside Dean Klenda’s boyhood church. Under the flags stood dozens of American Legion Riders, who left their motorcycles parked in a perfect angled line on the street.

And because this service was not all about tears, Bob Konarik lingered outside St. John’s after the burial service.

He told one more funny story about Dean.

A long swim

Bob Konarki and Dean Klenda were fellow farm kids and boyhood friends, Bob said.

As Bob remembers it, one day, before Dean joined the Air Force, he and Bob were baling hay. Hay baling is hot work, sometimes dirty, and as they were finishing that day, Dean asked Bob to go for a refreshing, cooling-off boat ride on nearby Marion Reservoir.

They borrowed a boat from a local oilman. Dean steered the boat out to the middle of the lake, far from the shore, and towed Bob, who got himself up on water skis.

“And then while I was showing off, I hit the water hard in a spectacular fall,” Bob said.

“Dean was sitting on the edge of our little boat, and he laughed so hard that he fell out. I didn’t see this happen, because I was swimming to my skis to get them. And all of a sudden I see Dean, floating out there.”

“And I said ‘What are you doing?’ And Dean just laughed.”

The two young men dog-paddled and watched their borrowed boat roar away, straight for shore. They expected this to have a bad ending, Bob said.

“But just before the shore, the boat turned, and started going in a circle, and the circles kept getting tighter and tighter. And finally, it got so tight that the gas can in the boat tipped over, and the boat ran out of gas, just like that.”

And there the two friends dog-paddled, floating in the middle of a state reservoir, with no worries now and a long swim to get home.

Not long before Bob told this story, from the pulpit inside St. John’s, Father May had summed up Dean’s later and much longer journey.

“Dean,” he said.

“Welcome home.”

This story was originally published September 17, 2016 at 11:11 AM with the headline "Formerly missing Kansas airman laid to rest in Pilsen."