Published: December 16, 2008 09:45 pm
By Victor Miller
Dalton Daily Citizen
It was the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Surrounded by family, Jo Anne Shirley knew it was time to turn off the television, turn off the football games and put the younger children to bed.
It was time to confront a piece of her brother’s past, a brother who had been missing for 36 years that very day.
“We kind of had a little family gathering and opened it together with mother there, which was great for her because it’s kind of a nice support,” Shirley said.
“It” was a package containing a blood chit, a military identification marker with a number specific to her brother, which had been found by a team evaluating the site where a plane that was perhaps her brother’s had been excavated 11 years ago.
Maj. Bobby M. Jones, a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon, had been missing in action since Nov. 28, 1972, when the jet he was in disappeared from radar near Danang in South Vietnam.
Now, 36 years later, Shirley, a Dalton resident and chairman of the board of directors of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, was about to open a package from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) that contained the blood chit — the first definitive proof the family had of what had happened to their loved one — with Shirley’s and Jones’ 91-year-old mother Christine Jones present.
Shirley had asked JPAC for the blood chit.
“I’d been talking about something I didn’t know what it really looked like or what condition it was in or anything, but it was so key to us knowing that was Bobby’s site,” she said. “I asked them if I could have it and they said yes.”
A representative of Mortuary Affairs told her he could send it on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, and that she should receive it the next day. When she said that would be Thanksgiving, he told her she should then receive it on Friday,
“Well, it kind of stopped me in my tracks, because that was the day that my brother had been missing for 36 years,” Shirley said. “And I told him that. I said, ‘I’m sure you have no clue what Friday is as far as my family is concerned.”
A friend from Warner Robins who used to work on the B-1 bomber sent her a current blood chit used by the military, so she had a basis for comparison.
“It’s changed a little bit,” she said. “We opened it up. It is fabric, but having been in the jungle for 36 years it almost looks like ancient parchment, and it was folded down to where it was probably about three by four inches. And so we unfolded it and it’s very fragile, it’s very brittle, and I didn’t want to keep folding it and unfolding it,”
Shirley took the blood chit to Michael’s Fine Arts and Framing to see how it could best be preserved.
“You could still see the number on it,” she said. “The number on the one that was at Bobby’s site was very small, very red, but very small numbers. The ones now are a half inch by two inches, big black numbers, so it’s kind of interesting to compare what they’ve learned, I guess. and are doing better, what they’re doing now compared to what they had back then.
“We decided we’re going to seal it in Mylar and frame it and try to put it where the temperature change and humidity in our air doesn’t have any kind of negative impact on it.”
Shirley and her family continue to try to raise funds to repair the bell at Riverside Methodist Church in Macon, where the Jones family were charter members. The sanctuary was built shortly after Maj. Jones went missing. The bell and the tower that houses it are engraved in his memory. Shirley envisions that if remains of her brother are found the bell could sound in a service at the church. If remains are not found, the bell will chime each week as a reminder of the price of freedom.
“We’ve gotten some response,” she said.
She has concerns about the future of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, given the state of the economy and a new administration taking power in Washington next month.
Asked how President-elect Barack Obama views her cause, Shirley responded, “I don’t really have a feel for it, but you know I think this issue is very quickly dying and I think that’s a shame. I think hundreds of people aren’t going to get their answer if the League closes. We’ve been the ones that really kept the push on, and with the economy and the wars and all the things that are going on, this is not going to be a high priority, not for him.
“It certainly was not for the Clinton administration, and he’s bringing a lot of people from the Clinton administration into his administration. I don’t have a feeling one way or the other but we’re low down on the totem pole and by the time they get around to us it will be too late.”
The site where Maj. Jones’ plane went down is not on the 2009 schedule to be re-excavated, Shirley said.
“I know they’re going to go back in, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be any time in the near future,” she said. “My mother with her age — and the administration and funding and all that — no telling what that time frame will pan out to be, but I know the guys, they know mother, we’ve been real involved, and I think they’ll try to get us back in there as quickly as they can.
“We’ll have to leave it with them and hope for the best. We’re hanging in there.”
POW/MIA accountability
Shirley said that this month six sets of remains have been recovered, bringing the number of those still unaccounted for from the Vietnam War to 1,744, with 839 recovered and identified.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment