Bracelets Help Remember MIA’s

Jo Anne Shirley’s black silicon bracelet reads “you are not forgotten.”

Shirley wears the bracelet on the same wrist as her red metal bracelet enscribed with the name of her brother, “Maj. Bobby Marvin Jones, M.D.”

Shirley’s black bracelet isn’t only a reminder of her brother, who went missing in action (MIA) in Vietnam in 1972. The bracelet is also a memento of all who went missing during war.

“It’s not just about us,” said Shirley, a 59-year-old Dalton resident, who heads the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.

She hopes to improve relations with government officials in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam so recovery efforts can continue in those countries and more families can find out what happened to missing loved ones. That’s Shirley’s main purpose for a two-week family delegation beginning March 16 to those countries.

Four people with loved ones still missing will visit the countries and excavation sites where soldiers were thought to have disappeared — usually sites of plane crashes. Shirley is the only one from Georgia planning the trip. The four will visit new excavation sites, and not the sites of their loved ones, Shirley said.

This will be Shirley’s fourth trip to Vietnam, but each time she has tried to distance herself from her brother’s case.

“I try not to personalize it,” she said. “I’m not going for Bobby. I’m not going for our case, but as an appeal.”

In 1972, Jones was a flight surgeon on a F4D Fighter Bomber in route to DaNang, Vietnam, when it dissappeared from a radar, Shirley said. Jones was thought to have crashed at a site on a mountain, but after the site was excavated in the late 1990s, no human remains were found, she said.

American officials discovered two Vietnamese men scavaged the site several years prior and buried the human remains from the crash. The bone fragments were tested to see if they belonged to Jones or the pilot.

Shirley said she quit being optimistic about finding out what happened to her brother when the remains were not Jones’ or the pilot’s.

“It probably leaves us with never getting to resolve Bobby’s case,” she said. “The chances of getting a resolution are not good so we (she and her mother Christine Jones) changed our involvement. I know there are hundreds of missing cases that can be resolved and haven’t been.

“From then on out this issue has not just been about us. It’s about how to keep American families from not having to do this” for 34 years.

Rest of the story is here.