I was in my mother’s kitchen in Ely and remember the photograph in the local paper, the Ely Daily Times. A handsome airman with his plane smiled out at me. Bower was Nevada’s second casualty in the Vietnam War. He also was the big brother of one of my high school classmates.

I remember my first thoughts. How did his kid brother, Richard, feel? I knew how I would have felt had my big brother, Ted, who also was in the Air Force, been lost somewhere far away. It’s odd how more than three decades later one can remember what one thought and how one felt so long ago.

Occasionally over the past 35 years I’ve thought of that handsome young officer, wondered about him and prayed for him. Even more often I’ve thought of that World War I monument.

This past January, I decided to log into the guest book the Ely Daily Times has on the Web. There was a note from a Christian Svensson asking for information regarding the family of Maj. Bower. On a whim, I replied, telling the writer of the note about Maj. Paul Weaver, an Alamosa neighbor lost in the Persian Gulf War and never found, and commenting that twice in my life I had had some association with pilots whose planes were shot down and were missing.

I was curious as to why Chris would be interested in a pilot who, from the tone of his own note in the guest book, probably had not been born when Bower’s F105 Thunderchief went down over North Vietnam on Aug. 3, 1965.

Chris, it turned out, is only 17 and is a member of an organization called the Home Guard in his native Sweden. A medic with his unit, Chris decided to adopt a Vietnam casualty, find out all he could about the man and his family and perhaps one day repatriate him or his remains.

“I have some experience from our exercises of how it might be to be a prisoner of war, and ‘cause they’re out there and are real POW’s, I feel sorry for them, so I adopted one,” Chris told me in an email early February.

In my efforts to find Richard for Chris, I emailed two others who had similar queries on the Times guest book.

The Rev. Kimba Green is 34. Her own husband is in the Air Force, has been in “one war and two conflicts” and she has adopted Bower.

“If we do not get our government to address the fact that we are leaving service members in war zones, we will never be able to ensure the safety of future service members. Along with the three Vietnam MIA's, I have also adopted a MIA from the Gulf War, the same one my husband was in. I cannot even fathom what these families must feel not knowing. And I want to make sure that each of these members are accounted for and we do not give up. To make sure that no other family will have to endure such pain in the future. We must learn from the mistakes in the past, to make certain we do not repeat them,” Kimba told me recently.

Kimba has a Web page on Bower. She has searched the records and found that observers reported that Bower’s parachute didn’t “open until prior to his impact with the water.”

U.S. intelligence learned that Bower had died. His body was never recovered. Since then he has been declared Killed In Action/Body Not Recovered, the information on Kimba’s Web site for Bower notes.

I ran down Richard Bower from information from the third correspondent on the Times guest book, Joe Ayarbe of Reno, Nev., a classmate of Maj. Bower’s at my alma mater, White Pine County High. (He seemed hesitant to talk; perhaps the pain was just too great. And he was skeptical about the interest of strangers in his brother, who was 17 years his senior.)

Ayarbe’s email letters and remembrances of his childhood friend recall their years in Boy Scouts and various activities including high school sports.

“In 1946, we won the state championship in football. In those days we had to beat all the big schools, Las Vegas and Reno High. Joe, as an outstanding tackle, played a major role in our championship season. He was a great friend and teammate. We were runner-up in the state basketball tourney. Joe was a forward on the team. Joe was one of the brightest members of the class of 1947,” Ayarbe told me.

The two Joes enlisted right out of high school and went through basic training together in an “experimental unit.” The next April, Bower received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. “I helped Joe pack his gear, took him to the bus depot and never saw him again,” Ayarbe said. “I go to Ely a couple of times a year to place a flower on his memorial” at the Ely Cemetery, Ayarbe said.

In the past year or so, a new memorial has gone up in front of the White Pine County Courthouse, across from the high school from which we graduated.

I am still in awe of the fact that both Kimba and Chris care, that they believe justice will be done only when Maj. Joseph Bower’s remains are returned to his family and country and laid to rest near a monument now over empty ground in the Ely Cemetery.

This Memorial Day there will be a triangle of faith when we three who did not know Joseph Bower remember him and ask for that justice.

Picture: "White Pine County Courthouse Monument to its soldiers who died in various wars."
Joseph E. Bower listed first on Vietnam panel.

© Erin Macgillivray Smith--Used with permission. If you have any questions/comments about these pictures or article you can email Erin at: zapata@fone.net

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