Harriet Davis, above, examines a POW/MIA bracelet she purchased in 1972. She learned last week the Army had identified the remains of the soldier whose name is engraved on the commemorative jewelry. (News-Courier/Tashia Lovell)
By Phil Willis, phil@athensnews-courier.com
The war in Vietnam topped the news almost every night back in 1972, when Harriet Davis was an impressionable college student. Her friends at the University of Alabama talked constantly of the war -- some even answered the call to fight it. And some became lost there.
"Those were turbulent times," Davis recalled.
It seemed only natural to young Harriet, when she and her sister took a vacation trip to Pensacola, Fla., that summer, to buy one of the POW/MIA bracelets she saw being sold along the sandy beach. After all, proceeds from the sale of the bracelets helped to track the fate of those missing members of her generation.
Time passed and memories of Vietnam faded. Harriet eventually put the bracelet away in a drawer. She knew little about the man whose named had been engraved on the sliver of metal. Randy Ard. She knew only that Ard left sunny Pensacola for the killing fields of Southeast Asia and never returned.
Flash forward a third of a century. As Harriet watches the nightly news on television, she suddenly hears a familiar name. Randy Ard. His remains had been recovered and identified.
"I was shocked," she said. "But the minute I heard the name I knew exactly who it was. I knew I had put the bracelet in a drawer in my bedroom. I went straight to it."
The helicopter on which Ard served as a crew member went down over Laos on March 7, 1971. He was 20 at the time -- the same age as Davis when she bought his POW/MIA bracelet a year later. Ard died in battle in that distant jungle.
According to Ard's brother, John, Randy was piloting an OH-58 Kiowa helicopter with two passengers aboard when the chopper went down near the village of Ban Kahn, just across the Vietnamese border. Randy suffered two broken legs and a fractured pelvis, but was pulled to safety by his flight mates. Enemy soldiers soon found the site of the crash. Ard, badly injured was unable to flee and perished in the ensuing firefight.
An Army lab in Hawaii identified his remains last December and notified the Ard family of the findings in January. The discovery caught the eye of the local news media because the Ards had moved to nearby Albertville in the intervening years.
"When I heard that, my first thought was to get the bracelet to his family," Davis said. "I have a son that age now, so I knew what it would mean to his mother. I was ready to drive to Albertville and deliver it myself."
With the help of a television news reporter who covers the Albertville area for a Huntsville station, Davis tracked down an address for the Ard family, including Randy's 84-year-old mother, Emmie. Wednesday, she mailed the bracelet to Emmie Ard. The Ard matriarch, she said, told her she plans to bury the trinket along with the recovered remains of her long-lost son.
"It's been fascinating," Davis said of her experience with the memorabilia from that long-ago war. "A message that came with the bracelet said you were supposed to return it to the family if the missing soldier ever returned. But what are the odds of that happening? What are the odds against that happening more than 30 years later?"
© 2005, The News-Courier, a division of CNHI, Inc., AL