By Paul Vartan Sookiasian
Residents of Nerkin Sasnashen in Armenia’s Aragatsotn region gathered on a rocky hill this month, as they have every September since the fall of the Soviet Union, to remember lives lost from a once-enemy nation. On a late summer afternoon in 1958, their small village at the foot of Mt. Aragats became the unlikely scene of a devastating incident.
During a routine surveillance mission, an unarmed American Hercules C-130 transport plane with 17 servicemen aboard strayed into Soviet airspace for reasons that are still unclear. It tried to backtrack to Turkish airspace but was swarmed by four Soviet MiG fighter jets that shot off one of its wings, resulting in a crash. For decades, the witnesses and the families of those who died in the crash grappled with unanswered questions about what happened. As geopolitical relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union thawed, an incredible story of friendship, assistance, and cooperation grew out of the tragedy.
Martin Kakosian was on the bus headed from his native town of Gyumri to Yerevan for his first day of university when he saw an unbelievable sight. A 100-foot long American plane with two engines on each wing was attempting to escape a swarm of Soviet jets.
“He would be nearly in tears as he described watching the plane get shot and burst into flames,” Martin’s wife, Dr. Maksena Arutyunyan, told CivilNet.
Meanwhile in Nerkin Sasnashen, 17-year-old Melik Areyan was spending time with his friends when they witnessed the shootdown.
“As the plane was approaching, making huge circles in the air, we were scared… somebody yelled ‘it is coming towards us, what is happening?!’ I ran home and found my mother making butter oil. I told her ‘Mom, quick, leave it! Let’s get out of here so that nothing happens to you! We ran, and then there was a huge explosion, smoke and fire,” he related to CivilNet.
Areyan said residents of Sasnashen and the surrounding villages descended on the crash site. Any potential rescue attempts were thwarted by the intensity of the fire. According to Areyan, a man later drove up in a car to investigate. The villagers believed him to be the MiG pilot who shot down the plane. Soviet soldiers would guard the crash site for the next few months as it continued to smolder. On that day the Cold War briefly became hot.
Many of the servicemen on board were in their early 20s. One was 22-year-old Robert Oshinskie of Shamokin, Pennsylvania. As his sister Rose Tominovich recalled to CivilNet, “he was a great baseball player and fun-loving guy- tall and good looking.”
Oshinskie overcame a long and arduous recovery from polio as a young child, and joined the Air Force out of high school. He continued playing baseball on a team at his base in Germany, and in the last months of his service, it was due to his baseball schedule that he had to switch from his regularly planned mission onto this one.
“I was 11 at the time. I came home from the first day of school, and there was a telegram on my mother’s table. She was sitting there with our priest crying,” his sister recounted. Their families were told that the plane had gone missing, but no other information was known at the time.
A week later, the Soviets announced the plane had crashed on their territory and six bodies had been recovered, and four were later identified. They denied knowledge of any other victims. In the weeks to come, the State Department presented evidence that the plane had actually been shot down, but the Soviets refused to admit it or give further details.
Months after the crash, during what was billed as an official ‘friendship’ tour of the United States, Soviet First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan was said to have shrugged off a question about the fate of the missing men when bluntly asked by Vice President Richard Nixon. Family members did all they could to track down information, such as publishing newspaper articles and making trips to U.S. government agencies and the Soviet embassy in DC, but they were met with secretiveness and frustration at every turn.
Oshinskie’s mother even met presidential candidate Senator John F. Kennedy during the 1960 campaign and asked him to get more information from the Soviets. He promised he would, but U.S.-Soviet relations further worsened during his term and nothing came of it. In the Soviet Union, the public story held that the plane had gotten lost in fog and crashed into Mt. Aragats. Only top officials and the eyewitness residents of Sasnashen knew the truth.
The families endured decades not knowing what happened to their loved ones, whether the missing were dead or were held captive.
Answers finally began to emerge on both sides only after the fall of the USSR in 1991. Kakosian, the village resident who had made his name as a sculptor, resumed a search of the crash site he had attempted years before but had been told to stop by Soviet authorities. He eventually found the location and placed a memorial khachkar (stone cross) at the site in memory of those who lost their lives.
President George H. W. Bush and President Boris Yeltsin had established the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POWs/MIAs in 1992 to shed light on what really happened. Upon learning of the crash site, the sister of one of the lost airmen made her way from Louisiana to Sasnashen, defying the ongoing Karabakh War and nationwide shortages to discover the truth of what happened to her brother. “According to an account of the day, while the sister was exploring the site, she focused on a spot and somebody stuck their hand into the dirt. To everyone’s shock, they pulled up a piece of metal, an American military ID tag with the inscription “A2C Archie T. Bourg”- her brother.”
Soon after, she was met at the site by a team from the United States which fully excavated the crash site. It recovered fragmented remains of the other airmen, finally settling the question of what had happened to them.
In the years that followed, Sasnashen organized annual remembrance days and became a place of pilgrimage for family members of the lost, U.S. Air Force veterans, including some who were supposed to have been on the plane, and diplomats from both the United States and Armenia.
The U.S. Army renovated Sasnashen’s kindergarten as a show of appreciation for the villagers’ commemoration of the airmen. An identical monument to the one in Sasnashen, also carved by Kakosian, was placed at the National U.S. Air Force Museum in Ohio. On the fortieth anniversary of the crash, the additional remains found at Sasnashen were buried at Arlington National Cemetery, bringing a measure of closure to the families who had waited so long for it.
In 2011, Airman Oshinskie’s family received a call that a man in Sasnashen who was dying had come forward with a secret. In 1960 while grazing his sheep, he had come across something shining on a hillside, and with nowhere to turn, kept it to himself all these years. Upon examination, it was revealed to be Oshinskie’s high school ring and was finally returned to his family. According to his sister Rose, “everything they found at the site was charred, but the ring is unharmed, so it must have been thrown during impact away from the fire.”
This led Rose and one of her brothers to make their own journey to the Sasnashen, Armenia to meet the family who had safeguarded their brother’s ring for half a century. They participated in the annual memorial alongside U.S. Ambassador John Heffern.
“They didn’t know those who perished on the plane, but knew the flyers had died in a tragic way, far away from home, serving their country… It was really wonderful to go there and get closure on our brother Bob. It was such a unique experience, and we are forever grateful that we got to do it,” Rose said.
In recent years, an after-school center for the youth of Sasnashen was opened in their memory by an American Air Force veterans group. Though they were lost 66 years ago, the airmen’s story still continues with eyes to a better future.
Martin Kakosian was on the bus headed from his native town of Gyumri to Yerevan for his first day of university when he saw an unbelievable sight. A 100-foot long American plane with two engines on each wing was attempting to escape a swarm of Soviet jets.
The families endured decades not knowing what happened to their loved ones, whether the missing were dead or were held captive.
“They didn’t know those who perished on the plane, but knew the flyers had died in a tragic way, far away from home, serving their country… It was really wonderful to go there and get closure on our brother Bob. It was such a unique experience, and we are forever grateful that we got to do it,” Rose said.
