Family honors vet found after 40 years
Three sisters finally give naval chief a proper ceremony
Catherine Jun / The Detroit News
BERKLEY -- A sunlit nook in Mary Pineau's home displays snapshots of her brother's life: as a young boy playing the accordion on the porch of their Berkley home, a grinning teenager beside a bi-wing plane after his first solo flight, a portrait with his blushing bride.
But a final photo marks the end of his life, one his family waited for decades to commemorate: that of a fallen naval officer, being laid to rest in an oak casket at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
Nearly 40 years after Naval Chief Roland Pineau vanished on his third tour in Vietnam, his remains were identified and confirmed by the Defense Department this summer, allowing his family to finally claim his remains and bury him.
"We knew that he died, but we wanted to honor him," said Mary Pineau, 67, his sister.
The family had waited decades for word, and eventually loved ones passed, too: both of Pineau's parents, his two brothers, even his wife and stepson.
His three sisters, however, remain alive, along with their children and grandchildren. On Oct. 9, they shepherded Pineau's return to the United States and witnessed a proper ceremony, however belated.
"It was doing what my mom had wished would happen," said his sister Lynn Kalil, who lives in Royal Oak. "She just wanted to bring him home."
On Oct. 8, 1967, Pineau, then a 38-year-old aviation technician chief, was aboard an E-1B radar plane when it crashed in the mountains north of Da Nang.
A search began in 1992 as part of a massive effort by the Defense Department to recover tens of thousands of American servicemen missing in action since World War II. The search for Pineau and the rest of the five-man crew encountered fits and starts, threatened at times by limited funding, misinformation and flooding that prevented access to the area.
In 2004, searchers located the crash site and eventually excavated skeletal and dental remains of several people aboard the plane, including those with DNA matching that of Pineau's sisters.
About 150 mourners turned out Oct. 9 at Arlington National Cemetery, where Pineau was memorialized and regaled with full military honors. Friends and family attended, as did passer-by veterans seeking to acknowledge a fallen naval officer.
Another 250 turned out to a memorial Mass at Our Lady of LaSalette Church in Berkley on Saturday.
Through their ordeal, Mary Pineau and Kalil have become advocates of servicemen missing in action or captured as prisoners of war, helping to raise money and awareness and, most of all, make sure that they are not forgotten.
Today, 1,767 American servicemen remain missing or unaccounted for in Southeast Asia; 53 of them are from Michigan.
Despite the end to a harrowing wait, the family will continue some of its traditions shaped during their years of uncertainty.
The POW/MIA flag outside Mary Pineau's window will remain. Family members will continue to visit an empty grave marked with Pineau's tombstone in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Southfield, located alongside his parents' graves. The family will continue making annual visits to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., where his name is among the 58,000 etched in black granite.
"It's not something that we're going to put behind and forget about," Mary said. "We'll be talking about it for a long time."
But it seems that a heaviness has been lifted. The sisters won't wear their red aluminum POW/MIA bracelets on their wrists anymore. They were all placed atop the casket in Washington.
And the anxious days of waiting are over.
A patchwork quilt displaying her brother hangs on a chair, stitched patch by patch over the last year as Mary Pineau awaited the repatriation of her brother's remains.
"Every stitch is a prayer," she said. "And God answered our prayers."
© 2007 The Detroit News