Remembering Victims of Lesser Known Wars

In 1960, only six-years after the type’s maiden flight, Lockheed’s robust, rotund, eminently reliable C-130 Hercules entered service with the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. The C-130’s rise from obscurity to indispensability within the services was rapid.

Following the deployment of ski-equipped C-130s to the Antarctic to assist Navy operations supporting Operation Deep Freeze ’60, and Marine Corps evaluations of the air-to-air tankering capabilities of two United States Air Force C-130s, Pentagon brass hastened to procure C-130s for the two services’ respective needs.

Since 1960, some 13 iterations of the venerable Hercules have served in a variety of USN and USMC roles.

That fighting aircraft the likes of the Navy’s F-14 Tomcat and F-18 Hornet, and the Marine Corps' AV-8B Harrier and F-4 Phantom II grab up the larger part of glory, headlines, and the nation’s imagination ought not occasion the misconception that operating cargo, refueling, and logistical aircraft such as the C-130 is without inherent risk.

Since 1965, eight Marine Corps C-130s and 43 Marine aircrew members have been lost—some two dozen in the 1960s alone. The pain of loss is borne stalwartly by the families and friends of the departed, individuals like John Keene, a resident of Richmond, Virginia, whose cousin, Captain Robert Wallis, perished in a 1970 C-130 training mishap.

Mr. Keene was very young at the time of his cousin’s death, but grief and the sustained, immutable emptiness of loss echoed throughout his family home, coloring Keene’s childhood in the saturnine hues of mortality prematurely realized.

In adulthood, Keene began making twice-yearly pilgrimages to his cousin’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington D.C. During one such trip, Keene noticed a grave adjacent his cousin’s was that of Major Walter Zytkewicz, one of the three other Marines killed in the accident that had claimed Captain Wallis’s life. The revelation compelled Keene to research and connect with the families and surviving members of his cousin’s unit—Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 352.

“I realized that even the squadron had kind of forgotten about the incident,” Keene reflected.

In 2019, one year prior to the fiftieth-anniversary of the accident in which his cousin had perished, Mr. Keene’s advocacy and persistence saw a memorial plaque installed in Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 352’s new home, Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California. For Keene and the families that attended the memorial’s dedication, it was a gratifying, but interim measure. More, they averred, needed to be done.

Keene was taken with the idea of commissioning a memorial honoring all of the Marines who’d lost their lives in C-130 accidents. He envisioned a granite monument surrounding the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Virginia’s Semper Fidelis Memorial Park, and got promptly about the daunting business of actualizing his notion.

In pursuing the noble if not naïve goal he’d set himself, Keene gained an ally—Matt Piliere, a former Marine Corps C-130 chief warrant officer and vice president of the Marine Corps Air Transport Association. Being of the mind that the Marine C-130 community is small and close-knit, Piliere set forth that any Hercules aircrew-member who completed more than one tour of duty was likely to cross paths with every fellow Marine who flies the Hercules.

“We never really thought that we needed to do something about all these people we lost,” Piliere conceded. “It never sort of dawned on us; we missed them all; and they were our people; and there’s a bond to them like you wouldn’t believe.”

In short order, Keene and Piliere realized the prohibitive cost, complexity, and scope of their shared aspiration. The National Museum of the Marine Corps requires proposed monuments to be fashioned of stratospherically spendy American granite. The cost of Keene’s and Piliere’s memorial was estimated at $153,500.

Undaunted, the intrepid pair resolved to raise $180,000—the extra funding to be given over to covering the travel expenses of fallen Marines’ families.

To date, Keene and Piliere have collected nearly $138,000 and hope fervently to dedicate the USMC C-130 memorial in spring 2024. The two men’s tireless fundraising and promotion of the memorial enterprise has earned the endorsement and a substantial donation from former United States Navy Secretary Gordon England, who fought to keep the USMC’s C-130 program alive during his 2006-2009 tenure.

The memorial’s proposed design comprises a tall tablet, the front of which is to bear the dates of past C-130 mishaps that resulted in loss of life, and the units involved therein. The tablet’s dimensions will be sufficiently large to accommodate updates, and its inverse will chronicle the names of lost Marine C-130 aircrew-members.

“There’s roughly a million people a year that will see this memorial, see those 43 names on the back of it. And they’ll never be forgotten now,” Keene asserted. “And that, to me, is probably the most important part of all of this. Their legacy will always be there.”

FMI: www.marines.mil