If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
RIP: John C. "Buzz" Ellison
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...092001663.html
Father and Son, Separated by War, Crash and Disappearance, United By Candace Rondeaux Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, September 21, 2006; B03 James E. Plowman Jr. was just a boy when he first visited Arlington National Cemetery all those years ago. It was a different time, and the country had just finished fighting a different war. He didn't know then how much he would miss a father he had never met -- or that he'd be back 35 years later to say goodbye, again. But there he stood yesterday, teary-eyed, searching the blue early autumn sky as four Navy jets streaked overhead. He and his family had waited years for this moment: Navy Lt. James E. Plowman Sr. was home at last. His burial at Arlington yesterday took place 39 years after he and his pilot, Capt. John C. "Buzz" Ellison, were shot down in their A-6A Intruder near the Vietnam-China border. The two were declared missing in action after their plane disappeared from radar March 24, 1967. Their plane went down near a village in Ha Bac Province in North Vietnam. James E. Plowman Jr. was born five months later. For years, Plowman's family held out hope that the 23-year-old Navy flier would someday return. Plowman's relatives wrote letters to members of Congress. They sent care packages to Vietnam. All that returned was silence from Hanoi. When the young Plowman began to call his grandfather "Dad," his mother, Kathy Super, decided it was time to let go. She asked the Navy to declare James Plowman Sr. killed in action in 1973, and a ceremony was held at Arlington shortly afterward. Up until about two years ago, James Plowman Sr. was counted among the more than 1,800 Americans still missing in Vietnam. But his remains were found after a team of U.S. and Vietnamese researchers traveled to Vietnam's Ha Bac Province in 1993 to look for the Intruder's crash site. Many false leads and many years later, the team found charred fragments of human bone scattered at the crash site. Tests on the remains showed a DNA match with Plowman, but there was no conclusive match for Ellison, according to the Defense Department. The news was a relief for the Plowman family but it also reopened old wounds. When the Navy offered this year to hold a second funeral ceremony at Arlington, Plowman, now with a family of his own in Leesburg and a job as Loudoun County's chief prosecutor, initially was not sure. But yesterday, as a Navy band played a few feet from his father's flag-draped coffin, he was more certain. "Every time I hear things about him, I miss what we could have had," Plowman said. "I know we would have had a good time together." Many of the more than 60 people who stood by his side remembered the good times they had with his dad. Some remembered with a smile the young Navy pilot's love of a good joke and fast cars. Some recalled the day a Navy chaplain and an officer strode solemnly to the door to deliver the news about Plowman's downed fighter jet. As sailors in ceremonial white uniforms fired a three-gun salute yesterday, still others thought of the long years of waiting for news it seemed would never come. Many also remembered how the younger Plowman had been at his mother's side when the Navy honored his father at Arlington the first time. They called the boy "Little Jimmy" and said he was probably too young to remember much about that long-ago ceremony. This time, he said, he'll remember every minute. |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Boeing Boondoggle | Larry Dighera | Military Aviation | 77 | September 15th 04 02:39 AM |