BY JOE GERAGHTY - BRISTOL HERALD COURIER
BRISTOL, Tenn. Ð After 60 years, Private Earnest Brown returned home last weekend, wrapped in the same type of Army blanket that kept him warm through two European winters during World War II.
Every time Brown's remains have been moved since 1992, he's been carefully shrouded in a blanket, the folds held together with clothespins.
Until that year, the bones were undiscovered, lying in an abandoned foxhole in a Belgian forest. Brown, who grew up in Clintwood, died in 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge, the last great fight in the European Theater of World War II. He was 31.
The Army wrote him off as missing in action and unrecoverable. Over the years, his parents, wife, siblings and three children all died of natural causes until there was only one family member, younger brother Paul Brown, left.
He said he still thought about his brother, but had given up all hope of a proper funeral.
Indeed, Earnest Brown's remains would never have been recovered if not for a remarkable confluence of coincidence and dedication.
His identification took the combined efforts of a team of Belgian diggers who knew what to do with the remains of a U.S. soldier and a group of veterans and advocates who refused to allow Brown to be remembered coldly as CIL-1992-167-I-02.
In 2002, as a result of those efforts, Paul Brown got a call from the Army. A woman with a lot of questions was on the line.
What is your name? Who were your parents? What are the names of your siblings? Did you have an older brother named Earnest? Was he killed in World War II?
At first, Paul Brown of Bristol said he was suspicious.
"It had just been so long and I hadn't heard a thing," he said.
But as the questions Ð and later, answers Ð continued, he came to understand what the call meant.
What was left of his brotherÕs body had been found and identified. HeÕll be buried Wednesday, wrapped in that same green blanket and something more.
Paul Brown has planned tonight's funeral service, scheduled for 8 p.m. at Weaver Funeral Home. He arranged for the burial at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Sharrett Cemetery in Bristol Virginia, in the same plot where BrownÕs mother and father rest.
OFF TO WAR
Paul Brown watched as Earnest left home for the last time in 1943 to head to Europe.
"We knew when people go to war and fight, why, there's people going to get killed on both sides," Paul Brown said. "We didn't expect it, though."
He was there the day there was a knock at the door and his mother spoke with an Army official who told her Earnest Brown was missing in action.
The young soldier had been on a reconnaissance patrol, checking out German positions as an Allied counteroffensive began and the final chapter of the European war was being written.
The patrol came under heavy fire, according to Army documents, and Brown was shot in the head. Sgt. John T. Puckett died at almost the same moment and the rest of the patrol pulled back to regroup.
The fighting continued for weeks in and around the spot where the two men died. The intensity of the battle left no time for Americans to pause and bury their dead.
By the time the front moved toward Berlin, Brown and Puckett were lost and presumed dead.
In 1951, the Army announced that concentrated efforts to recover the remains of some 78,000 missing Americans had been called off, replaced by sporadic searches that led to occasional successes.
THE DISCOVERY
In Europe, the military generally relies on those who live and work near former battlefields to turn up soldiers' remains.
In Brown's case, it was a lumberjack who happened on human remains and decided to deliver them to a pauper's cemetery for burial. Before he removed the bones, however, a call was placed to two men known for their efforts to recover missing American GIs.
Jean-Philippe Speder and Jean-Louis Seel immediately saw clues missed by the lumberjack, old buttons, faded Army patches and belt buckles, that revealed that these were no ordinary remains.
Speder and Seel carefully excavated the bones and turned them over to the Army. The Belgians then got in touch with a group of Americans they worked with in their search for missing soldiers.
Bill Warnock, the group's researcher, started the effort to identify the bones.
Through interviews with veterans who saw Puckett and Brown die and an exhaustive review of Army records, Warnock determined the identity of the bodies.
The effort took less than a year. When Warnock was done, he put together a 100-page report detailing all the clues that led him to believe the bones were those of Brown and Puckett.
The report was submitted to the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, where remains of all missing servicemen are sent.
For a decade, nothing happened. The bones joined a queue of about 1,100 remains Ð some dating to the Civil War Ð that had not been identified.
The lab at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii identifies the remains of about 75 soldiers ever year, spokeswoman Maj. Nelson Green said.
A number of factors led to the long delay in identifying Earnest Brown. His bones arrived without dog tags, making official identification much more difficult, Green said. Also, in 1992 the militaryÕs focus was still primarily on identifying soldiers lost in Vietnam, she said.
About 1,800 of the estimated 88,000 American servicemen listed as missing in action are from the Vietnam era.
Though delayed, Earnest Brown's case was not lost.
"We will never close a case unless we have an answer," Green said.
Then, in 2002, Paul Brown got the call. After 60 years his brother could come home. But not immediately.
The government official said more tests would be conducted to ensure that the remains were Earnest Brown's.
Another question came to Paul Brown Ð would he be willing to submit a DNA sample for comparison?
The DNA kit was mailed out and the day Paul Brown received it he drove to the hospital to have blood drawn. He dropped it back in the mail and waited for further word. None came.
Time passed and he began to wonder if it had all been a mistake. Those fears were confirmed by a simple, one-page letter from the Army. Mailed in January 2003, the letter informed Brown that his DNA did not match that of the remains in the Army's possession. The letter promised that the Army would continue the search for Earnest Brown's remains.
Paul Brown, then 74, was crushed, but not entirely surprised. Surprise came in May of this year, when a two-page letter arrived from the same Army office. A match had been made on the same bones, the letter said. Paul Brown was now free to begin planning a full military funeral for the brother he lost once to a war and again to mistaken DNA testing.
After 10 years in Hawaii, Earnest Brown's remains made the journey last week to Knoxville on a military transport plane.
Randy Bowers, the funeral director at Weaver Funeral Home who is handling the arrangements, said Army officials told him to treat the service and burial as if Earnest Brown had just died in Iraq.
"This man has never had a formal funeral," Bowers said. "This town needs to pay its respects now. HeÕs being brought a long way for his funeral and it'd be terrible if nobody comes. He's coming home. It just took him longer than many."
Anyone who ever served in the military is entitled to wear a full dress uniform for burial.
Before he was identified, Earnest Brown's remains were wrapped in a green blanket and nothing else. Now, a uniform with all the medals and insignia that Brown earned in his short military career has been laid on top of the blanket.