The pilot's instructions were both explicit and alarming: "You see that guy right there? Go straight to him, because if you don't you'll be chopped up by the helicopter blades!"
The small helicopter Jo Anne Shirley of Dalton was flying in had just landed at an awkward angle halfway up Bach Ma Mountain in South Vietnam, where an F-4D Phantom jet crashed during a medical mission decades earlier. They were looking for any trace of the aircraft that went down Nov. 28, 1972, or her brother who was aboard, U.S. Air Force Maj. Bobby Marvin Jones.
"I thought right then, this is crazy! What is a housewife from Georgia doing here?" Shirley said recently. "Then they had to come back and get us in the same way. For someone like me, it was an amazing experience."
Initially, Jones, a native of Macon, was reported as missing, but was ultimately declared dead on the same day the flight disappeared, military records state. His body has never been recovered, but Shirley has not given up hope of finding him. On the day of the 36th anniversary of the crash, the family received a special token from the Air Force that Jones had carried. It's tangible evidence Bach Ma Mountain may be his final resting place.
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Jones was deployed with the 7th Air Force, 432nd Tactical Reconnaissance Wing of the 432nd USAF Hospital.
"He was two years older than me, a great guy, and we just had a real close relationship," Shirley said. "We were both at the University of Georgia; the older we got, the closer our relationship got. It was wonderful."
After medical training at the Medical College of Georgia and an internship in Dallas, Bobby Jones, M.D., enlisted in the Air Force and was sent to Thailand's Udorn Royal Thai Air Base in September 1972 as a flight surgeon caring for Air Force personnel.
"He had to log flight time even though he wasn't a pilot," Shirley said. "One of his best friends was a flight surgeon in Da Nang, and so on Nov. 28 they were going to take supplies from Udorn into Da Nang, unload everything - and we don't know if they were going to load some other stuff up and bring it back to Udorn - but he decided he would go. They went in an F-4D two-seater, so he was sitting in the back seat because he obviously wasn't a pilot. They were going to fly in and do that and come back."
She added it is unknown whether the plane was hit by enemy fire, if weather contributed to the crash or if it was pilot error - or a combination. Bach Ma Mountain is more than 4,700 feet in elevation, and Shirley said she was told the Phantom clipped the top of the mountain. Thus began a mystery that is still unsolved 49 years later.
The Jones and Shirley families soon learned of a group called the National League of POW/MIA Families.
"For about 40 years I've been the Georgia state coordinator," Shirley said. "My mom and dad found out about the National League within a year after Bobby became missing We had no idea what that organization was, but it sounded like you were going to be there with other people who were going through what you were going through. And hopefully, you'd get an update on your case."
For around 18 years she also served on the league's board of directors, 16 years as chair. During that time, Shirley also participated in four delegation trips to Thailand and Vietnam.
Contributed photo / U.S. Air Force Maj. Bobby Jones"You learn very quickly that, yes, it is about your loved one, but it's also about all of our guys who are missing or unaccounted for," she said. "You begin to meet other family members and get close relationships with a lot of them. It was very interesting, and a real challenge."
During one trip there was a "moving, emotional with tears flowing" ceremony she was part of when the remains of U.S. servicemen were found. Her most recent trip was a half-dozen years ago with her husband, Rudy, who was in medical school with Bobby Jones years earlier.
Blood chit
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is a bureau of the U.S. Department of Defense. It is headquartered in Hawaii and is responsible for sending excavation teams into Southeast Asian countries involved in the Vietnam War.
"I've made close relationships with a lot of them," Shirley said of personnel there. "A number of years went by, and they went back to decide if they wanted to excavate that mountain slope. So they went to the very bottom of it and didn't find anything - they found a handful of airplane debris, and that was it. They were thinking that if they'd clipped the top, after all those years, it would wash down. They didn't find hardly anything."
However, several years later in 2007, a team returned to survey the central part of the mountain. They found a "blood chit" sitting in the root of a tree.
"I had no idea what a blood chit was; it's a piece of heavy silk fabric - about a foot wide and two feet long - and it has a message in English at the top, and in Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Chinese and any [language] in that area - it's translated [for whomever finds it]. At the bottom, on the right-hand side, it has a very small red number," Shirley said.
The chit went inside a pilot or passenger's flight vest, and the name or number went into a database. The chit would be turned in upon completion of a successful flight to be used again, but if the flight went down, the number stayed correlated to the person's disappearance.
"So they find the blood chit, and that number is barely visible," she said. "It was so exposed to their vision; it wasn't covered in dirt or debris or leaves or anything. When they took it back to the lab in Hawaii, they called me and told me they'd found this blood chit - and it was the one Bobby had in his flight vest that day."
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The chit was fragile and therefore carefully opened to minimize further damage, having been exposed for decades to the soil and high humidity. The chit was sent to the Department of Mortuary Affairs, and a technician Shirley knew there said it had to be logged into the system. He called back the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and the chit was delivered to the family on the day after the holiday on Nov. 28, 2008, by special delivery - the exact day of the flight going down 36 years earlier.
"My kids were home, my parents were there, and we were able to open it up together for the first time," Shirley remembered. "I took it and had it framed so people can't touch it because it's kind of fragile if you touch the edges.
"When I got it, I thought this might be the only thing I ever have. They went back into that central part of the mountain and excavated [where the chit was] and found no remains. They went back in a couple of years to the upper part and didn't find any remains. Now they've decided they should've expanded it more than they did. They were going back this year on Aug. 1 to Sept. 30 and expand the search to both sides. They had to cancel it because of the coronavirus."
She said the league plans a return in 2022 for the expanded search. Shirley was asked if finding her brother's remains has become a life mission.
"It has, and even though I know I might not get him back - and there are times when I feel like they're not going back out to his site - and I understand that because they have so many others that they've got to go do," she said. "I just pray for him every day, lift him up to the good Lord and say, 'I hope he's up there with you and my mom and dad,' and I hope that at some point I'll be able to bring him back."
Ann Mills-Griffiths is the current chair of the National League of POW/MIA Families board of directors and was asked about a potential trip to Bach Ma Mountain in 2022.
"They have a team in Vietnam as we speak doing investigations, and it's a joint team between U.S. and Vietnamese investigators," she said from their headquarters outside Washington, D.C. "We have worked on training Vietnamese personnel to be able to conduct unilateral recoveries, especially in sensitive areas where they much prefer there be no Americans running around. I know Bobby Marvin Jones is a high priority to our team."
Jones is listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. His commendations and medals include a Purple Heart, National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Campaign Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, Air Force Presidential Unit Citation, Vietnam Gallantry Cross and Air Force Good Conduct Medal.
According to the military, the number of Americans missing and unaccounted for from the Vietnam War is 1,584.