Our Mission:
My first husband, Capt. Jerry Zimmer, was an F4B Phantom jet pilot, whose aircraft was shot down on August 29, 1969, approximately 20 miles South of Da Nang, Vietnam, after six months in country. Neither Jerry nor his navigator, 1st Lt. Al Graf, was able to eject, before the aircraft crashed into the Que Son Mountains. Initially Jerry and Al were classified as Killed in Action/No Body Recovered (KIA/NBR). Years later, both Marines were listed as MIA, along with other service members whose bodies were never recovered.
Jerry has been gone nearly a half century, and hope for recovering his remains had run out a long time ago. However, in recent years our family became involved with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), now merged with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), and learned that Jerry’s and Al’s remains might, in fact, be recoverable, so we are doing everything possible to support their efforts to make this happen and bring our guys home where they belong.
NOTE: BLOG POSTS ARE NOT UPDATED, SO INFORMATION MAY HAVE CHANGED OVER TIME.
Posts Tagged ‘Lt Gen Thomas Conant’
REMEMBERING OUR FALLEN HEROES ON MEMORIAL DAY
On August 20, 2009, my first husband, Capt. Jerry Zimmer, USMC, was honored with a full military memorial service, performed by the Marine Corps at Arlington National Cemetery. Jerry’s son, Craig, is shown here accepting the American Flag, as his father’s primary next of kin. Forty years after his death, Jerry received a headstone in a special section of Arlington for missing-in-action service members and others with similar circumstances.
Many Americans will celebrate Memorial Day on Monday, May 26, 2014, in honor of the brave men and women who lost their lives while serving our country with the Armed Forces. This day offers an opportunity to remember them in a special way, as is often the case among families with wartime losses and active duty military and veterans who lost buddies while serving our nation.
A lot of Americans fly the American flag, attend a Memorial Day ceremony or visit a loved one’s gravesite, giving meaning to a phrase that says it all – you are not forgotten. While in Washington, D.C. in late April, I visited Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place for so many of our young battlefield heroes. I am always left with a sense of pride and sorrow, and this visit was no exception.
Death Too Soon
My first visit to Arlington was during the Vietnam War, when Capt. Charlie Pigott, USMC, died in a horrific F-4, midair collision over Da Nang in May 1969. Most of the people who attended his funeral were wives or girlfriends of pilots, still in country and unable to come home for the service. I remember feeling so small and insignificant, surrounded by a seemingly endless mass of white headstones, yet thinking that it wouldn’t happen to Jerry. We all loved Charlie and were heartbroken about his death and the other casualties involved in the collision. Three months later Jerry was gone, too. Unlike Charlie, his remains did not come home, so Jerry did not have a funeral in Arlington, where I thought at the time all war casualties were buried, if not in their hometown.
As a young military wife whose experience with death was very limited, I was unprepared at first for a funeral without a body, but reality kicked in when I learned that Jerry was unable to eject from his F-4 — a supersonic jet. I knew how much Jerry loved the farming community of Maine, NY, where he was raised and adored by the town’s people. I arranged to have a service at the family farm, knowing that it would mean a lot to his parents. That day was surreal for me then and still remains a blur in many ways.
Rewriting History
Fast forward 40 years. Our family learned that Arlington has a special memorial section for service members missing in action; remains not recovered or identified; remains buried at sea; remains donated to science; or remains cremated with ashes scattered but no portion interred, as described on Arlington’s website.
On August 20, 2009, Jerry was honored at Arlington with a full Marine Corps memorial service. A headstone was placed adjacent to one for 1st Lt Al Graf, the navigator who also perished when their aircraft went down. Jerry’s memorial event was extraordinarily touching with family members present, including his son, Craig, who accepted the American Flag, with his wife and children nearby, along with many of his dad’s friends and military buddies who came from great distances to pay their respects.
If Jerry’s remains are found, they will be interred in the burial section of Arlington. For more information about memorial services at Arlington, families should contact the casualty officer for their loved one’s branch of service.
A Beautiful Sight
Marking its 150th anniversary this year, Arlington will be dressed for Monday’s event, as is the case every Memorial Day. The Old Guard recently completed their annual tribute to America’s fallen military heroes with its Flags-in ceremony, setting a small American flag at each of the 220,000 headstones in the cemetery. This tradition dates back to 1948, and belongs to the Army’s 3rd United States Infantry Regiment – a very unique unit that has my deepest respect for their patriotism and continued efforts to remember our nation’s heroes. Thank you for what you do.
A special thanks this Memorial Day to all the men and women of DPMO and JPAC who continue to search for the remains of loved ones still unaccounted for from past wars. Your efforts make it possible for many families to believe that one day their loved ones might be moved from the battlefields of long ago to the sacred grounds of Arlington or another special place of honor.
MIA RECOVERIES: U.S. MILITARY RAMPS UP HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS
This flag is a reminder of why the MIA accounting community is so important. Their mission is to bring home our MIAs from former battlefields around the world, to the extent possible — a promise worth keeping.
As the former wife of an MIA, still unaccounted for in Vietnam, I have spent much of my life trying to figure out if I could have done something more for my first husband, Capt. Jerry Zimmer, for whom this blog is dedicated. Unlike many wives who worried about their husband’s aircraft being shot down, I never thought for a minute that Jerry would not come home. He was invincible in my eyes, and I was totally unprepared when the unthinkable happened on August 29, 1969.
I’ve come to accept the realization that guilt follows most MIA family members for one reason or another, and I am no exception.
For many of us, the ability to transfer some of the burden to the accounting community, consisting of several groups, including the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) and Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), has been a blessing; but for some, it has become a transference of blame to someone else.
BOOTS ON THE GROUND
Those who follow efforts to recover our service members from past wars, now classified as MIAs, know that our active duty military plays an important role. And with the evolution of the recovery program, focused these days on a much larger mission, involving MIAs in the many thousands, our military’s humanitarian outreach is expected to become even more critical and quadruple over time. In my opinion, the program cannot survive without members of our military.
Most active duty members I’ve met during my many visits to Vietnam have also served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have been a long-time advocate of our military, but never to the extent that I am today. These young men and women, who work behind the scenes and receive little-to-no recognition, are my heroes. They truly understand the mission, perhaps better than most, since they have been there, done that and made it out alive.
What many MIA followers do not realize is that military members, assigned to JPAC field operations, know of the negative media publicity that has surfaced in recent months, often focused on JPAC. Working in unbelievable conditions, trying to bring home our loved ones, our military take these hits personally.
THE LEARNING CURVE
I did not know of JPAC until recent years. As the military command, headquartered at Hickam AFB in Honolulu, HI, that searches former battlefields throughout the globe, JPAC is the operational wing within the accounting community that conducts field investigations and excavations, hoping their efforts will lead to recoveries and identifications of MIAs through material evidence, DNA and other forensic techniques. JPACs Central Identification Laboratory (CIL), also located at Hickam, has the final say in all identifications, as it seeks to reunite families with their loved ones for burial in the United States, the country for which they paid the ultimate price.
When I began writing about our family’s quest to bring home Jerry’s remains, I had finally found a way to help Jerry and hopefully a few others involved in the process. Although I knew little about JPACs mission, I was accustomed to traveling throughout the world and thanks to my husband, Ron, a Marine veteran who has given me all his FF mileage and much more, I landed at the door of JPACs Detachment 2 in Hanoi again and again. Today, MIA family members are no longer afraid to visit Vietnam, and in most cases, they also end up at the detachment. Armed with a lot of luck and solid research, many of us have become quasi participants in our loved one’s case.
LOOKING AHEAD
What the future holds for our MIAs is anyone’s guess. With the mandate in the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) requiring that the CIL produce 200 identifications annually by 2015 and thereafter, the bar has been set incredibly high.
JPAC and DPMO were expected to come up with a plan, outlining their vision for an overhaul of the accounting community for Senate sub-committee hearings this fall; however, Sen. Clair McCaskill (D-MO), chair of the committee, just announced that she is writing legislation to extend the deadline by one year — presumably Congress has a busy schedule with healthcare and election issues until then. This will offer JPAC more time to get its house in order, and DPMO is likely to be making some internal upgrades, as well.
Meanwhile our military is still on the job, performing this enormous humanitarian mission to bring home our loved ones –an effort that makes America different and to one Vietnamese cabbie, a place he thinks of as “heaven.”
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