‘We’ll always have questions’

 WASHINGTON – We'll probably never know what really happened to Air Force Maj. Perry Jefferson and Army 1st Lt. Arthur Ecklund. 

On April 3, 1969, Jefferson, 37, of Denver, Colo., and Ecklund, 24, of Galesburg, Ill., took off in a single-engine O-1G Bird Dog aircraft for a reconnaissance flight over the mountains of South Vietnam. They were never seen again.

An extensive air search turned up no evidence of a crash and no sign of the men, except for a faint emergency beeper signal for several seconds. Jefferson and Ecklund were listed as missing in action despite reports of two men fitting their descriptions being held captive by the Communist Vietcong.

For 15 years, their disappearance remained a mystery. Then, in 1984, a former member of the South Vietnamese Air Force turned over to a U.S. official in the Philippines a human jaw bone he said belonged to one of two pilots whose aircraft was shot down. The jaw bone turned out to be Ecklund's. 

And in 2001, a Vietnamese national living in California handed over to U.S. officials human remains he said were recovered at a site where two American pilots crashed. Those were Jefferson's.

What the two Vietnamese were doing with the remains in the first place was never explained.

Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Pentagon's POW/MIA office, said he didn't know why the two Vietnamese had the remains, but he said no action was taken against them. 

"If we did so," Greer said, "that would be the last time we'd have access to anyone's remains. It's not punishment we're after; it's information we're after which leads us to the identification of missing Americans."

After DNA tests proved last year the remains were indeed Jefferson's, the Pentagon returned his remains to his family for burial.

All of this was enough to convince Jefferson's younger brother that he was killed in a crash, not as a prisoner.

"The best part of the whole thing was to know he actually died in the crash," Michael Jefferson told The Denver News Channel.

Ecklund's elderly parents weren't so sure.

"To some extent, we'll always have questions," Ralph Ecklund, 87, told the Peoria Journal-Star in 2004. "But we've worried and stewed for some time, and if this is all they're going to find, then at least we'll have some closure."

That closure was completed last week with the burial of Jefferson's and Ecklund's remains at Arlington National Cemetery.

May they finally rest in peace.

www.dailynightly.msnbc.com (click on "John Rutherford" under "categories").