Colonel Fredric Mellor: Rhode Island’s 1^st Casualty of the Viet Nam War

I didn’t really know Fred.

But, as his brother Daniel’s widow, I became the lone caretaker for something Fred valued greatly: His Arnold Palmer “Classic” golf clubs in the distressed red leather bag. Each day, as I left for work, I’d note them in their usual position, set off in a corner of the garage, as if they were waiting for Fred’s return….waiting, as were we all, in his family.

The years passed. Many of those members of Fred’s family have passed but we still never heard about what happened to Fred. He was just one of the many Missing in Action from a cruel war that happened decades ago. In recent years, with my family’s selling of two homes, and the corresponding transfer of furniture and personal property, something happened to Fred’s golf clubs. They disappeared, too.

The Back Story: How Fredric Mellor Became an MIA

On the night of Aug. 13, 1965, while flying his high-speed F-101 Voodoo reconnaissance jet, in lead position, on a mission over North Vietnam, 30- year-old Air Force Capt. Fredric Moore Mellor encountered enemy fire. Mellor was able to radio in his position before his aircraft sustained battle damage that ultimately caused his radio to go dead and a fire to start in the nose wheel.

At that point, Mellor instructed his wingman to assume the lead position and Mellor’s plane fell back.

Mellor ejected and touched down, uninjured. He communicated with search planes shortly afterward. But when helicopters went in to retrieve him, he was gone.

According to locals, questioned later, Captain Mellor encountered the enemy, gunfire was exchanged, and the pilot was injured. They believe he was taken prisoner.

Today, Mellor is recognized as Rhode Island’s first casualty of the Vietnam War. He is one of seven Rhode Islanders who were unaccounted for.

The Making of a Pilot

Fredric Moore Mellor was born April 5, 1935, and raised in the Eden Park area of Cranston — known among locals as “Sweden Park” for the many residents who had come from that country. Blonde, towheaded babies were the rule. Though they were not Swedish, Fred and his older brother Daniel Munro fit right in. Some time later, two young girls would join the household, cousins whose parents had died.

The family of six now occupied a three-story tenement on Chestnut Avenue.

As a young man, Fred was strikingly handsome. He was also attracted to risk.

Following high-school graduation, Fred’s older brother Dan joined the Air Force. True to form, Fred followed in his footsteps, two years later, joining the same branch of service. There, the bright young man who always loved planes took a test that qualified him for flight school, and he realized his dream: Fred became a pilot.

Jean Moore Mellor was Daniel and Fredric’s mother and my mother-in-law, but I saw her on only a few occasions.

She was the woman who sent small packages, packed in bits of old newspapers, to my younger child, her fifth grandchild: a pair of children’s red Chinese slippers; black, lacquered chopsticks; a lady’s colorful paper fan. Items from Chinatown in San Francisco, where she lived — stuff that was lightweight, inexpensive and didn’t require much postage. Jean was conscious of cost. It’s how she got on in the world.

“Did the wee one get what I sent?” she asked, in her thick Scottish brogue.

At age 72, she left her husband to join her brother Sam, a writer, in San Francisco. That was 1975, years before I married her older son, and 10 years after her younger son, Fred, was shot down. 

She left because she wanted a few good years before she lost any chance at happiness in life. Her marriage had not been all she’d hoped.

As a young woman, in the early 1900s, she’d come from Scotland and gotten a job as a maid in Hell’s Kitchen in New York. In future years, she helped bring her many siblings from Scotland to America.

She met her husband, Daniel G. Mellor, in a pub. Tall, slim and taciturn, the house painter who fancied himself “jack of all trades” doubtless beguiled the young woman.

After marriage, the young couple came to Rhode Island, bought a shingled triple-decker, moved in and rented out the other two floors. Dan painted aircraft at Quonset and took odd jobs, playing the fiddle at bars and clubs, while Jean stayed home, raising their two rambunctious, flaxen-haired boys.

To offset daily tedium, their mother held political meetings in her home, meetings which bore fruit later, when son Daniel pursued a career in politics.

The children grew up and left. Daniel (“Munro” as the family called him) married, served in Korea and got his college degree afterward. He, too, took on odd jobs, as he rose in the political world.

During one of his jobs, at a local radio station, he stopped announcing in midstream. Coming across the wire was the news of the soldier who had become Rhode Island’s first “Missing in Action” from the Vietnam War. It was his brother, Fred. Fate had been cruel indeed.

The years passed. News footage suggested American soldiers who’d been taken alive were paraded, in cages, through the streets of Hanoi, subject to jeers and taunts. Others, like future Sen. John McCain, were kept for years as “guests” of Hỏa Lò Prison — the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.

All the while, the United States boiled in divisiveness. Many protested America’s involvement in this war, and those who served weren’t necessarily viewed as heroes — a fact that grated all the more on those who did.

During those years, Jean Mellor waged her own private war with the U.S. State Department, demanding that it find out what happened to her son — who had been promoted to lieutenant colonel after his disappearance — and other Missing-in-Action/Prisoners of War.

In the 1970s, she appeared on “The Merv Griffin Show” as a member of the Gray Panthers, to proclaim her disgust, before a national audience, with a country she believed had done little to bring home its soldiers.

Jean Moore Mellor would never learn what happened to her younger son. She died Dec. 9, 1984, at age 81.

Colonel Fredric Moore Mellor: No Longer Missing in Action

Every year thousands of Americans visit “the Wall,” the monument established in Washington, D.C., honoring soldiers killed or unaccounted for in the Vietnam War. Nearby, volunteer organizations sell bracelets bearing the names of the missing.

They are among those who never met Mellor, but wear a bracelet inscribed with his name.

On Sept. 28, 2018, the remains of Colonel Fredric Mellor were identified and returned to Rhode Island, a mere month after Colleen Kelly Mellor’s story ran and was picked up by military publications worldwide. Some believe it was this national attention that got the mystery resolved…that got Col. Mellor’s remains moved up in the queue of those still awaiting identification in the forensic unit in Hawaii.

Lt. Col. Fredric Moore Mellor is thus honored, by the many Americans who appreciate his service, as one of many who gave the ultimate sacrifice.

A Military Man with a Connection to Colonel Fredric Mellor

Recently Kentucky Air Force Col. Mark E. Baran retired from the United States Air Force. He’d worn a Prisoner of War/Missing in Action (POW/MIA) wristband for 18 years, etched with the name of my brother-in-law, Col. Fredrick Mellor, a POW and Rhode Island’s first casualty of the Viet Nam war. My account about Fred being shot down and taken prisoner appeared as front page story in our state newspaper, the Providence Journal, on Memorial Day, in 2018.

One month after my story ran, Fred’s remains were officially identified– 50+ years after he’d been shot down. Coincidence? Or was it, as some military folks suggested to me: “Your story probably put attention on him and moved him up in the ID queue.”

Colonel Baran read my story about Fred, contacted me and told me of his wish to provide me with his wristband (honoring Fred), since I’d “kept Fred in the public’s attention.”

So I wrote my second military story honoring Colonel Mark Baran…a man who flew 5300 combat hours in Iraq and Afghanistan…a pilot who’d flown to 50 countries with two of those missions transporting vice-presidents– one even to the Karzai Palace in Afghanistan—a man who felt Fred Mellor “flew with him on those missions.”

The brave men and women who serve will ever be a focus for me, as writer.

If you have your own hero you’d like me to consider, send me details at colleenkellymellor@gmail.com. He or she might just be the next Front Page story.