With red-white-and-blue decor and model airplanes as party props, Chuck Mosley’s friends and family on Saturday celebrated the 35th anniversary of his rescue from North Vietnam.

“Anniversaries are important around here — anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, Christmas,” said Mosley’s daughter, Jennifer Neher.

Mosley’s F-4 Phantom jet was shot down 15 miles from the Gulf of Tonkin early on the evening of July 8, 1968. The next morning, a 15-aircraft rescue team pulled Mosley to safety, and an article in the July 10, 1968, edition of the Journal-World described the rescue.

“It’s not something I really give a lot of thought to anymore,” said Mosley, 61, who today is a chemistry teacher and assistant football coach at Free State High School. “It gave me a much greater appreciation for life and how fragile it can be.”

Two missions left

Today, Chuck Mosley lives with his wife, Sondra, an orchestra teacher for the school district, off of 15th Street in the Alvamar area.

But at the time of the rescue, Sondra lived in an apartment in the 2400 block of Redbud Lane with Jennifer, who was 15 months old.

The Mosleys had graduated from Kansas University in 1965 — she with a bachelor’s degree of fine arts in piano performance, he with a degree in chemical engineering.

He participated in Air Force ROTC, was commissioned as an officer shortly after graduation, and then stationed in South Asia.

Charles Mosley reads a framed article as his granddaughter, Jacqueline, stands nearby. The Mosley family threw a surprise party Saturday for Charles, who was rescued in North Vietnam 35 years ago.

He had two more missions to complete before the end of his tour of duty when he left his base on July 8.

Shot down

While on a reconnaissance mission, he spotted a convoy of North Vietnamese troops just northwest of Dong Hoi, Vietnam. He prepared to attack the troops when anti-aircraft fire hit his plane.

He ejected his co-pilot, 1st Lt. Don Hallenbeck, first. When Mosley ejected, he was so low to the ground that his parachute had not opened all the way.

He waited through the night to be rescued. For some of the time, he hid in the above-ground roots of a tree without moving, and at one point, he sensed someone standing behind him.

He said that shortly after his rescue, U.S. forces returned to the village from which the anti-aircraft fire had come and destroyed it.

When word of the rescue reached Lawrence, not everyone was supportive.

“Sondra would get anonymous calls — ‘It’s too bad your husband got out. He should have been tortured to death.'” he said. “It was a very divisive time in this country. There’s no other way to describe it. It was tearing the country apart.”

‘It happened’

Neher, of Pleasant Hill, Mo., began planning the surprise party after she grew curious about her father’s past and wanted to find a way to honor him.

She went online and began contacting people who knew her father through a group called River Rats, a group of pilots who flew in the Red River Delta during Vietnam.

She eventually made contact with George Marrett, a pilot who flew on the rescue mission to retrieve her father. Marrett recently wrote a book called “Cheating Death,” which describes the rescue mission and refers to Mosley by his radio name: “Roman 2-A.”

Neher asked her brother, Kenneth, a therapist in Lee’s Summit, Mo., whether he thought a surprise party would be too much for their dad to handle.

“I felt probably he’d made his peace with it a while back,” Kenneth said.

One reason was that, as head of the Kansas University Air Force ROTC in the early 1980s, his father played audio tapes from his crash for students and answered questions.

“He was trying to disabuse them of the idea they could go over and play hero and not pay the price for it,” Sondra Mosley said.

During the party Saturday, the family presented Mosley with a copy of “Cheating Death,” as well as e-mails from some of the people Neher contacted through the Internet.

Mosley said he was “a little overwhelmed” by the attention but didn’t mind talking about his rescue.

“It happened,” he said. “Happily, I made it. For others, they didn’t.”