Mercer Woman Returns POW Bracelet From 1971 To Family

Bluefield Daily Telegraph - Bluefield, WV, USA

Mercer woman returns POW bracelet from 1971 to family

By BILL ARCHER
Bluefield Daily Telegraph

HIAWATHA — Sue Graham was looking through a cedar chest last Sunday when she came across a relic from her past that had never really left her thoughts — a Prisoner of War bracelet she bought in 1971 from one of her Matoaka High School teachers.

Sue and her husband, Roy Graham, recently moved to a new home in Hiawatha, and she was looking through the old cedar chest when she came across the POW bracelet and a newspaper clipping from a March 1973 edition of the Bluefield Daily Telegraph containing a story about the release of the officer whose name was on her bracelet — Major Glenn Wilson, a native of St. Albans, who was captured on Aug. 7, 1967.

“My boyfriend was in the service and had just gone to boot camp at Fort Jackson to get ready to go to Vietnam, so the war was very much in my mind when Ms. (Lillian) Blankenship took orders for the bracelets,” Sue Graham, 52, said. Her husband, Roy served in Vietnam in 1972-’73. They were married when he returned home, in the same month that she learned of Major Wilson’s release. Since she didn’t know how to contact him to return the bracelet, she put it in the box along with the newspaper clipping.

“We moved recently and I came across the bracelet when I was looking through the cedar chest,” Graham said. “My husband and I thought that maybe we could find Major Glenn now that we have the Internet so we started a search.”

Within a matter of moments, they found that Glenn, who was living in Texas when he was in the military, had died in 1988. “There were a lot of Glenn Wilson’s listed in Texas,” Graham said of the search for his family, but she remembered that Wilson’s widow had a unique spelling for her first name, and the Grahams were able to find her contact information and actually spoke with her on Sunday.

“When I asked her if she had ever been to St. Albans, she said she had been there two years ago when his high school had a memorial service for him,” Graham said. “She said that some of her friends had received a bracelet with her late husband’s name on it. We decided to send it to her on Monday and maybe it would get to her in time for Thanksgiving so she would have it when her family came over.”

Graham said that Wilson’s widow said that during the last month before his release, her husband was held in the same facility where the North Vietnamese were holding U.S. Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., the unsuccessful 2008 Republican Party presidential candidate.

The Voices In Vital America, a Los Angeles, Calif.,-based student organization launched the POW/MIA bracelet campaign on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 1970, and asked student buyers to contribute $2.50 per nickel-plated bracelet, and $3 from adults for each copper bracelet. The bracelets became very popular, with VIVA receiving as many as 12,000 requests for bracelets per day, according to the Defense POW/Missing Persons Office web site.

VIVA closed its offices in 1976. “By then the American public was tired of hearing about Vietnam and showed no interest in the POW/MIA issue,” according to the article about the bracelets written by Carol Bates Brown, one of the founders of the initiative.

Interested persons can contact the Defense POW/Missing Persons Office Attn: Public Affairs 2400 Defense, Pentagon, Washington, D.C. 20301-2400, through the mail or on line at (http://www.pow-miafamilies.org/).

— Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com