Son’s search for his father’s Vietnam pilots brings old photographs to life

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WNKY) – More than five decades after his father returned home from Vietnam, Chris Carmichael is still learning about the men his father left behind.

Carmichael’s father, Lt. Col. John C. Carmichael, returned home just before Christmas in 1971 after spending a year in Vietnam. His family was excited to have him home, but Chris remembers seeing something else in his father.

“He was obviously very happy to be back in the bosom of his family, but he told me in no uncertain terms that he worried very much for the men that he had left behind,” Chris said.

Those men were South Vietnamese Air Force pilots his father had trained.

John Carmichael had developed a deep interest in instrument flying after losing a close friend, Marion “Smo” Smotherman, in Korea. Smotherman became disoriented in bad weather and crashed.

That experience stayed with Carmichael throughout his Air Force career. In Vietnam, he helped establish an instrument pilot instructor school, teaching South Vietnamese pilots how to rely on their instruments when weather made visual flying difficult.

Chris said his father understood what was at stake.

“If he could give even one of those people the knowledge he needed to avoid getting trapped in weather and to make it home, then his year would have all been worthwhile,” he said.

Carmichael said his father’s relationships with the Vietnamese pilots went beyond the classroom. Some had previously visited the Carmichael family’s home in the United States, and his father was later welcomed into their homes in Vietnam.

Years later, Chris began looking more closely at the photographs his father had brought home.

“I wanted to see if anyone, perhaps remembered my dad,” he said. “I think it was just a human need to want to try to connect with people that he knew on a more profound level than I could ever understand.”

His search eventually led him to Xuan Pham, a former South Vietnamese Air Force pilot who had been connected to one of the squadrons Carmichael helped train.

Pham helped Chris identify pilots in the photographs and remembered his father decades after the war.

“He said, ‘Your dad is a gentleman I’ll never forget,’” Chris said.

The search has given Chris a deeper understanding of the father he knew growing up.

“I definitely feel like I have a more profound window into the man, who I knew as my dad,” he said. “The pictures came to life when the stories from the people who knew him best.”

John Carmichael died in 2002.

His legacy, however, remains on display at Aviation Heritage Park, where an exhibit tells the story of his military career and the pilots he trained.

For Chris, the stories from those pilots have answered a question that lingered for years: whether the work his father cared so deeply about had made a difference.

“I would like my dad to know that everything that he did mattered in the manner that he had hoped, maybe even more so,” Chris said.