Parker Cristman’s voice is matter of fact.

He’s repeated those words so many times. To his parents. To his children. To himself. Aloud and silently. So many times they come almost automatically, like “I pledge allegiance ... ” or “Our Father, who art in ... ”

But not automatically because they don’t matter. Automatically because they matter so much. Because he’s thought them so often.

“They lost all their helicopters that day,” he says. “All of them.”

He didn’t ask how many helicopters were lost or how many pilots died or how many got out and lived to come home again. To laugh and love again. And talk about that day.

He just listened to Freddie’s friend tell him about watching his brother’s helicopter blow up on his last mission — the day before he was scheduled to leave Vietnam.

That was in the late ’80s, long after the war in Vietnam was over. Long after Freddie — Chief Warrant Officer Frederick Lewis Christman — had been declared missing in action on March 19, 1971, when his helicopter gunship was shot down over Laos. Long after the United States Army declared him “presumptive dead” in 1978.

So hearing that story ...

“It was better in some ways,” Parker says. “At that point in time, it was ... ”

He still has to consciously take control of his voice. So he’s silent for a moment and then starts again.

“Because he had been missing ... ” he says.

“Yeah, it was better,” and his voice is firmer now. “Your hope is that he died on impact. Not as a prisoner at some juncture ... ”

Better.

In some ways.

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“We still get letters all the time from the National League of Families,” says Freddie’s dad, Fred Cristman Sr., retired now from the VA Medical Center.

“They’re still looking for bodies. And they meet. But I don’t go to them. It just tears you up.”

He’d rather remember how much his son enjoyed flying.

Dr. Philip Smith, a veterinarian in Georgia, who was over there with Freddie, still comes to see the Cristmans and calls them regularly.

“He said that whenever they wanted a volunteer, Freddie’s hand went up first,” Fred Cristman says. “He figures Freddie’s hand probably went up that day, volunteering to go.”

Freddie had written that he was flying into Laos every day, and he was tired. Weeks later, they got a letter he’d written the day before his helicopter went down. One last mission, he wrote, and he’d be on his way home.

It was his last mission, but he didn’t come home.

Instead an officer came to the door and Rowena Cristman, who died last November, never forgot that moment.

She said the officer didn’t have to say anything. She knew.

Standing there looking at him, she felt as though everything in her body had drained to the bottom of her feet and left ... nothing.

No feeling. Just emptiness. And silence.

For a long time his family believed Freddie was still alive, a prisoner somewhere and that, some day, he’d be back.

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Freddie Cristman graduated from Boyden High School in 1968 and entered Catawba that fall.

By the end of the first semester, his mother teased that he had graduated “in bridge in the lounge,” but he hadn’t done much with the books. So he could see the draft around the corner. And he wanted to fly.

To fly planes, he had to be a college graduate. Join the Army and fly a helicopter, a recruiter told him, and he went.

They missed him terribly. He was the happy kid in the family, the one who brought joy and laughter into the house. But he loved flying that helicopter and talked about making it a career and came home on leave with his orders to Vietnam in his pocket and wouldn’t let them talk about the war.

Instead, he made sure they laughed.

After he left, letters kept coming and he made a relay radio call to wish his mother a happy birthday — and then that officer came on that Sunday afternoon.

Parker was a few years older and registered for the draft.

“But I was working at the VA hospital, so they weren’t asking for me, which was fine. I remember in graduate school, the dean asked me, ‘If you were drafted, would you go?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ There was no choice. Today? If they drafted me, I’d pack up my stuff and go. If you live in a free country, you’ve got no choice. You’ve got to do what the country asks you to do.

“We live in a country that’s free because we have people in the service who fight for it, so we have to be willing to fight for that.

“And I know that’s how Freddie felt because we talked about it.”

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The Army listed Chief Warrant Officer Frederick Lewis Cristman “missing in action” from 1971 to 1978 when it declared him “presumptive dead.” His parents held a memorial service on his 29th birthday.

“I don’t know that it ever changed anything,” his brother says. “We never had any closure. Never a body. We never knew exactly what happened.”

Until he got that call from Cris Brincefield. She’d been Cris Dandison when she and Freddie graduated in the class of ‘68 at Boyden High, but married Johnny Brincefield, a salesman for Power Curbers. That night, she and Johnny were having dinner at the Holiday Inn with a businessman visiting Power Curbers.

The businessman had a pilot with him named Freddie Few. Few asked if they had known a Salisburian named Freddie Cristman.

Oh, yes, Cris told him. They’d been on a YMCA swim team together when they were small and gone to school together.

Was any family left?

Yes, she said, and called Parker.

“So I got dressed — it was 9 or 9:30 — and went,” he says. “And we sat in the lobby of the Holiday Inn and talked — I know it was two hours. Later he sent me some pictures of them together.”

Several pilots who flew with Freddie got in touch with his parents later. One from Alabama wrote a book, “Into Laos,” which is the story of going into that country in 1971. The book confirms what Freddie Few told Parker that night about the day they lost all their helicopters.

“Apparently they were evacuating the South Vietnamese out of Laos, trying to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and, for the lack of a better term, getting their butts kicked, and they sent American helicopters to try to get them.

“Freddie Few’s helicopter got hit, but he got away far enough to drop into the river, and he and his crew were in the river for about a week before they got picked up.

“Both Freddies were flying gunships equipped with door guns and front machine guns. They were really covers for the troop transports, and one of the troop transports got hit. Freddie moved his helicopter in between the fire and the troop transport.”

He stops to get control of his voice and then goes on.

“When he moved his helicopter between them, he got hit and started losing hydraulic power. He tried to put it down in the LZ — the landing zone — and he got it down. The door gunner got out. And right after he exited the plane, the plane got hit by a mortar.

“We found out that, even if they knew, the Army doesn’t share that with you. That’s their process. A body was never recovered. Nobody ever saw anything. In that sort of situation there’s volumes of smoke, volumes of dirt, debris in the air, other planes going in, coming out, trying to pick up whatever they could. In that kind of helter-skelter, you don’t know what happened to a crew. Nobody could say for sure he was dead.”

But now, by the late 1980s, the Cristmans knew they didn’t need to be worried that he was lying out on the ground.

“He died when the mortar hit the airplane. There was too much smoke and action to be able to identify for sure what happened to anybody in that aircraft.”

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Cris and Johnny Brincefield went home, and the businessman went to bed. Parker Cristman and his brother’s friend talked a long time in the Holiday Inn lobby.

“He told me a lot of stories about himself and Freddie,” Parker says. “Amusing things they’d done, about some good times they’d had, along with the bad.”

Later, Freddie Few sent him a few snapshots.

“We talked a couple of times on the phone,” Parker says. “I think it was painful for him.”

He told his parents about it, of course.

“It was a certain amount of closure for them, a certain amount of relief to hear that he obviously didn’t suffer. In all probability, he died right then and there.

“But always, even after hearing that story, there was always some hope that he was going to show up on the doorstep some day. You always wonder how things would have been if he had come home ... ”

And if their baby sister, Martha, hadn’t disappeared, so he lost a brother and a sister. She got disconnected, Parker says, when Freddie got shot down.

“The world was getting disconnected, too. I think in lots of ways our anti-war demonstrations focussed on the wrong people. A lot of soldiers coming home were treated to anti-war sentiment, and they took it the only way they could — personally.

“But the demonstrators had the wrong target. Certainly our fighting men were not the right target — 99.9 percent of them had done exactly what they needed to do and should have been welcomed home with open arms and thanked, instead of being looked upon as war criminals.”

“... A lot of people criticize Nixon, but Nixon was the one who got our butts out of there. Kennedy and Johnson were the ones who got us up to our hips in Vietnam.”

“And one of the reasons it was so frustrating for the people over there — not only from my experience with Freddie, but with hundreds of Vietnam vets I’ve worked with, is that they never accomplished what they went to accomplish.

“They took the same land, day after day after day, and then they moved back, and then they took it again. That was very frustrating for someone who was there to reach an end, and there’s no end to a war like that. There’s no end to a war when you’re not willing to sweep the enemy ahead of you until they’re gone. No end to a war that you don’t do whatever you need to do to win. You either do that or come home, one or the other.

“I lost a brother. That was a big loss for me. The country lost 58,000 of our best youth — for politics and economics.”

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His dad, who’d been an electrician on B-52s during World War II, developed the manual arts program at the VA Medical Center when it opened here in 1953 and was still its chief on that Sunday afternoon when the officer came to their door. He retired shortly thereafter.

After Freddie was shot down and Martha disappeared, Parker decided to stay in Salisbury even though he knew that the way to opportunity in the Veterans Administration is usually to move, and he was a social worker at the VA Medical Center. But without moving, he became chief of social work here and is now running a program called the transitional living unit.

He wanted to be near his parents.

“My children were a lot of joy to them. Stacy came along and gave mother somebody to teach to read. They were a happy pair when they had their books. And Bobby came along and was a little athlete, and they both enjoyed watching them in their matches. It was a diversion from the other problems.

“Certain things in our lives we can’t control,” he says, “and certain things we can control. We have to work hard to make the things we can control turn out as well as we can.”