Stuart McPhail's mother was pregnant with him when an Air Force officer came to the door to tell her that his father's plane had crashed in Laos.
Forty-two years later, Mr. McPhail's father - Maj. William T. McPhail - and the plane's remaining unidentified crew members will be honored today in Arlington National Cemetery.
"A lot of the memories I have are pretty much what I've been told by mom, my aunt," Mr. McPhail said.
Mr. McPhail and his mother, along with Maj. McPhail's sister and her children, will be there.
William T. McPhail was born and raised in Chattanooga, graduated from McCallie School in 1957, then later graduated from the University of Chattanooga, now UTC, before joining the U.S. Air Force.
He dreamed of being a pilot, his sister Mary-Charles McPhail Forshay said, but a water-skiing accident from his high school days gave him a shoulder injury that kept him in the navigator's seat of the C-130, a transport plane highly valued for re-supply missions in Vietnam.
During a mission on May 22, 1968, the air base lost contact and the plane, with seven crew members and one passenger, disappeared from the radar screen near Tchepone, Saravane Province, Laos, according to an Air Force report.
Search planes flew over the last known coordinates and spotted a "circular fire" that resembled that of a crashed aircraft, but because of the terrain and lack of evidence of survivors, no rescue team was sent.
And for the next dozen years that was all the family knew.
"It was hard to know they didn't really have any information at that time," said Ginger McPhail, the major's widow.
She returned home to Texas from Okinawa to deliver her son and that's where the family still lives.
Mrs. Forshay was close to her brother, only three years apart in age. She and her husband, her brother's childhood friend, were living in Kansas City, Mo., when she heard the news that his plane had gone down.
In 1978, the Air Force changed the major's status from missing in action to legally dead. The family held a ceremony at Chattanooga National Cemetery, where a marker lays in his honor.
It wasn't until 2002 that search crews from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command discovered wreckage believed to be that of the "Blind Bat" cargo plane that carried the crew.
Because of a complex web of bureaucracy, intense monsoon seasons, difficulties in forensic research and other hurdles, the command couldn't formally announce that the remains and artifacts recovered from the site were that of the major's crew until 2008, Mr. McPhail said.
Five of the nine crew members were identified through items recovered and DNA evidence. But the intense rot of the Southeast Asia climate over 40 years made it impossible to clearly identify the remaining four members.
Maj. McPhail is one of those members. His and the other unidentified remains will be interred at Arlington this morning.