First commander of US search operations and a Kansas woman played key roles in Kapaun search

Johnie Webb, that relentless searcher for lost soldiers, started his half-century of national service as a U.S. Army officer who in 1969 led fuel truck convoys resupplying troops in Vietnam.

Enemy Vietnamese one day attacked a convoy he led — fired a grenade into the lead truck, mortally wounding the driver. This could have become a massacre if the truck had remained stalled, but the dying driver did what Johnie had taught him — he drove his truck off the road, letting Johnie and the convoy escape.

In 1975 the Defense Department told Johnie to lead search teams from Thailand that were assigned to find America’s dead in the Vietnam War. “I don’t know anything about this kind of work,” he protested.

They told him to do it anyway.

“Johnie does have an incredible story,” said Kelly McKeague, director of all Defense Department search operations for our lost soldiers around the world. “As an Army lieutenant colonel he was the first commander to the new mission, (in the Pacific) setting up the Central Identification Laboratory-Hawaii.”

It was Johnie who then led the Thailand teams back to the U.S. and supervised the setting up of Pacific search operations at Pearl Harbor. In 1985 he led the first joint American-Vietnamese search teams in Vietnam. In 1989 he branched out the teams’ duties, adding Korean War and World War II missing to the overall searches. In 1996 he negotiated, with the North Koreans, the first agreement to allow American searchers to look for remains in North Korea.

Johnie made the search for Father Emil Kapaun part of his routine for decades. And it wasn’t only about Kapaun.

“I don’t know how else to say it, but to those of us who wear the cloth of the U.S. military, there’s a creed. It says we will not leave a fellow comrade behind. We follow that creed. It’s something we owe to veterans who fought but also to serving military personnel that if something happens to you, we are going to do everything humanly possible to come take you home.”

For 11 years he led the searchers in the Pacific — and when he retired from that job he continued to work for the agency as a civilian deputy director, handling public communications.

He and his fellow searchers have found and identified hundreds of formerly lost remains and sent them home. McKeague, who heads what is now called the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, regards him as a legend. Because of him the Defense Department has sent formerly lost remains of loved ones to hundreds of families.

“Besides being the longest-serving member within our organization, he has the best rapport and relationships with the families, who respect and revere him,” McKeague said.

The search for the lost had gone on in the Pacific ever since World War II but ramped up considerably after the Vietnam War, when Ann Mills-Griffiths and other family members of lost soldiers from that war began demanding that more be done to find them. One result was the creation of multiple federal agencies that searched for and identified the lost. Those groups were combined in today’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency; but throughout that agency history, Johnie was often a pivotal figure.

“I pestered that man”

Johnie met Deanna Klenda from Pilsen, Kansas, because her brother Dean had been shot down over North Vietnam in 1965 while flying an attack mission in an F-105 Thunderchief fighter jet. And at first, Deanna didn’t say anything to Johnie about Father Kapaun, though she had known his parents.

Dean Klenda was 25 at death — a mischievous farm boy who had once buzzed a jet trainer over his hometown of Pilsen. Dean and Deanna as farm kids had known Enos and Bessie Kapaun, who lived up the road from them.

Most people in the military, including Johnie, thought Dean’s remains would be impossible to find.

Dean had ejected as his plane headed down but was unable to break loose from his ejection seat; he died when he hit the trees. North Vietnamese Communists hated America as much as North Koreans, so getting him out of Vietnam would be, as Johnie told her, possibly impossible.

Deanna refused to accept that. For five decades she built little shrines to Dean in her home, with his photo at center. She drove or flew to family-member updates conducted by the Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office. She traveled multiple times to Colorado Springs, Denver, St. Louis, Omaha, Kansas City, Detroit, Chicago, Houston; she went every year to Washington D.C.

She called Johnie and his colleagues multiple times a year. She kept it polite, kidded them, showed respect. She did this while she raised children, got divorced, held down jobs, and managed the Klenda farm outside Pilsen.

She listened politely when Johnie said Dean’s remains might never be found. The Vietnamese are tough to deal with, he told her. And Dean had “fallen into a jungle.”

“I knew what he meant by that,” Deanna said. “Grow up on a farm like Dean and I did, you know what happens to bodies when they die in the woods. They get eaten.”

Deanna admired Johnie but did not spare him. “I pestered that man for 28 years.”

One day in the early 1990s, Johnie told Deanna he’d been named one of the negotiators with the North Koreans about finding lost Korean War soldiers.

Johnie’s searchers had concentrated mostly on Vietnam War missing before this, but now he would go to North Korea and talk to those difficult people.

“Well, then,” Deanna said. “You need to start looking for somebody else that I know about.”

“Who’s that?”

“Father Emil Kapaun.”

“Who’s that?”

She had known Bessie Kapaun, she told him. “He and Dean were heroes from this same little place. They both deserve to come home.”

Johnie looked up who Kapaun was.

“And after that, Deanna would call,” Johnie said. “‘Johnie, you can’t give up on my brother. You’ve got to find him, bring him home. You made promises — and don’t forget about Father Kapaun.”

A farm girl from Kansas nagging Johnie Webb about Kapaun might seem insignificant. It was not.

Johnie would eventually go to North Korea 25 times. And because of Deanna Klenda, Johnie brought up Kapaun every time he went to North Korea.

Everybody assumed, after all, that Kapaun was still there.

The work was dangerous. “Everywhere I went, I had watchers watching me,” Johnie said. “On one trip, where they let us bring in one of our search teams, they put us in a camp out in the middle of nowhere to go to work. There were North Korean guards all around us. The situation was very tense with those guards. They told us the guards were there to protect us from the locals, but the joke, as we said to each other, was ‘then why are all their rifles pointed inside the camp at us, and not pointed outside at people out there?’”

Johnie and his searchers found Deanna’s brother Dean Klenda in Vietnam after all — not much, only a tiny piece of DNA-confirming jawbone — but enough that the military conducted a funeral for Dean in 2017. Before closing Dean’s casket, Deanna took up the little packet with the bone fragment. She hugged it to her chest.

And after that she kept reminding Johnie: “Keep looking for Father Kapaun.”

And he did.

This story was originally published September 26, 2021 at 4:59 AM.