Re: Fighter Pilot Laid to Rest

Date: March 21, 2004

"FIGHTER PILOT LAID TO REST
WIFE FOUGHT FOR YEARS TO FIND HUSBAND LOST IN VIETNAM WAR

By Brandon Bailey and Betty Barnacle
Mercury News

For years after Air Force Col. Louis F. Jones was shot down in the Vietnam War, his wife and family poured their hopes into an often-controversial campaign to bring him home from the jungles of Laos.

Marian Jones and her children finally ended their campaign Friday at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno. As a uniformed trumpeter played taps on a sunny spring afternoon, a small amount of remains from Col. Jones' 1967 crash site were solemnly laid to rest.

The funeral was held nearly two years after the fragments of bones and a tooth were discovered on a site near the old Ho Chi Minh Trail, and only after family members reconciled their mixed feelings about the right thing to do.

``This is for my children,'' said Marian Jones, now 77 and a retired Los Gatos real estate broker, whose search for her husband drew headlines in the 1970s. ``We decided to make it a closure.''

A military wife who came to distrust the government's every pronouncement about the war, Marian Jones said she still questions the official identification of the remains. But she finally accepted her son Jonathan's desire to have a Christian burial for his father, a Texas native who was an ordained Baptist minister as well as a decorated fighter pilot.

``We have conflicting opinions,'' acknowledged Jonathan Jones, a soft-spoken, 46-year-old Fremont businessman, who was just 9 when his father's plane was shot down.

His mother and older sister, Rhonda Jane Jones of Monterey, had reservations. But Jonathan Jones said talking with a military pathologist and reading the government's scientific report had convinced him the remains are his father's.

In nearly four decades since her husband's F4C Phantom fighter went down, Marian Jones never remarried.

``I never felt it would be fair to my children,'' she said in a firm voice that still carries a trace of her native Texas. ``I felt they might think I had given up.''

And even though it's been years since she publicly criticized the war, Marian Jones said she still considers her husband's story to be a warning about the costs of ``nation-building'' and ill-conceived military campaigns -- to which she would include the war in Iraq.

Her husband joined the Army Air Forces in World War II and fought in Korea, she said, but he did not particularly support the Vietnam War. Still, he did his duty.

Louis Farr Jones was a handsome young man from San Angelo, Texas, who met his wife when they were students at Texas Tech University. Though he trained for the ministry, he was more drawn to flying -- perhaps by the same mischievous streak that made him love horses and fast motorcycles.

He once took his children to see the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene in full bloom. ``He liked it,'' his wife said. ``His attitude was: `Thank God this is America and we have the freedom.' ''

When his plane went down over Laos, Jones was a 41-year-old colonel, not a kid. When an Air Force chaplain and another officer knocked on her door late one night, Marian Jones knew they brought bad news.

But there was hope. He was officially listed as missing -- there were signs he might have ejected before the plane crashed -- and he had come home safely from another crash during Korea, from behind enemy lines.

But over the years, the Air Force concluded Jones probably had not been able to eject. Along with other missing pilots, he was reclassified as killed in action, then listed as missing again after critics complained the government's decision was premature.

As the war dragged on, Marian Jones took up her own campaign. In 1969, she traveled to Laos with another missing officer's wife. Although she reported then that communist leaders gave her no information, she now says that one Laotian official showed her a list of POWs that included her husband -- but the Pentagon instructed her not to make that public.

Jones moved her children from California to Washington, D.C., where she lobbied Congress and openly complained that the Nixon administration was using POWs as pawns to prolong an unjustified war. While many POW families stood by the administration, Jones and others argued that ending the fighting was the only way to bring captured soldiers home.

It was daunting, she said in a 1972 interview, but she vowed to expose what she considered lies by then-President Nixon and other top officials.

She tried to be honest with her son and daughter: ``I took those children to the halls of Congress with me,'' she recalled this week. ``This was our life.''

The kids grew up, of course, and embarked on their own lives. Years later, the discovery of remains at Col. Jones' crash site provoked a new debate.

The bone fragments and tooth did not provide a lot of evidence. The government compared dental records but did not perform a DNA test. Marian Jones felt it was all too circumstantial.

Her son disagreed. Jonathan Jones said he also felt, ``if there was the remotest possibility that this was my father, that he deserves a Christian burial. And regardless of whose remains they are, they deserve to be buried and not sit on a shelf in the morgue.''

On Friday, as an honor guard folded the flag, a squadron of fighter jets flew overhead, leaving room in the formation for one missing plane. Marian Jones hugged relatives and friends, smiling as she held a yellow rose that matched the one she laid on her husband's casket -- a yellow rose for Texas, she said, and for love.

© 2004 Mercury News and wire service sources"