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Brother’s ring returned 40 years after crash

Four decades after his brother died in a plane crash 25 miles from the Chinese border in North Vietnam, former Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne was handed his brother’s 1963 Air Force Academy class ring by a complete stranger at a Cincinnati airport.

Maj. Patrick Wynne’s F-4 slammed into the North Vietnamese hillside on Aug. 8, 1966. His ring went through the hands of a Chinese family that tried to rescue Patrick, and finally an American businessman before his younger brother got it back. What gets Michael Wynne is that his brother was never supposed to be on that mission in the first place. Patrick Wynne stepped up after another pilot got sick.

The orders were to fly north of Hanoi on a search-and-destroy mission.

Retired Lt. Col. John Halgren, a pilot in the formation, wrote that the airmen knew how dangerous the mission was. Six pilots had been shot down in the same area the morning before.

Wynne’s F-4 was hit by anti-aircraft flak, forcing Wynne and his pilot to eject, according to Halgren, A Chinese father and son found Patrick Wynne and the pilot and brought them to their village before the Viet Cong captured the two, Michael Wynne said.

It’s unclear how long Patrick Wynne survived, but the Chinese family took his ring out of his flight suit pocket before the enemy took him away. The Chinese man held on to the ring for 28 years before his health deteriorated, and gave it to his son, asking him to give it to the airman’s family, Michael Wynne said.

But the son still feared retribution, so he held onto it a while longer. Once he summoned the courage, he got “nowhere with the American embassy” because of the language barrier, Michael Wynne said.

The ring stayed with the son another 14 years.

Insert Herb Schaffner, a veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War who moved to China to work as an information technology network manager for Consortium Cos., which makes point-of-purchase displays and has an office in Guangzhou. Schaffner married a Chinese woman, who also works for the company.

She happens to be related to the family that had Patrick Wynne’s ring. Six months ago, Schaffner and his wife attended a family reunion. There, her uncle handed her Patrick Wynne’s ring and asked her to help him find the family, Michael Wynne said.

“Being a Gulf veteran, he immediately recognized the ring and promised the uncle he would find us and get the ring back to us,” Michael Wynne said.

Schaffner traced Michael Wynne to his brother Patrick using the Internet “I guess I’m easily Googled,” Michael Wynne said.

Shaffner and Consortium’s chief finance officer, Roger Schreiber, called Wynne, who was sitting in a meeting in Washington, D.C. Schreiber “asked me if I was sitting down because ‘I have a story for you. I got a guy across the desk from me that has your brother’s class ring,’” Michael Wynne said.

Wynne initially asked Schreiber and Schaffner to mail him the ring, but Schaffner had promised his wife’s uncle that he would personally hand it to Patrick Wynne’s family. So a ceremony was set up at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, which is where Consurtium’s headquarters is located and where Schaffner was visiting from China. Wynne met them at the airport Oct. 22.

Michael Wynne would now like to use the ring to inspire other Air Force Academy cadets by permanently displaying it in the Association of Graduates building at the academy.

“This should be extremely inspirational to the academy graduates,” Wynne said. “Even if you’re over hostile terrain, there are people out there that will care for you as a human, not as a combat warrior.

“The day I signed into my first duty station was the day he was shot down. It was like the baton pass of duty from him to me.

“Now, I retire from the highest position in the Air Force, and out of the blue comes this ring,” Michael Wynne said. “Life is so circular sometimes.”