One Brick Short

He’s been missing and presumed dead since April 3, 1969. Now he’s no longer missing.

He is Maj. Perry H. Jefferson, U.S. Air Force, of Denver, Colo., and he will be buried April 3, 2008 in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.

On April 3, Jefferson took off from Phan Rang airbase in a Cessna “O-1G Bird Dog” aircraft on a reconnaissance mission over a mountainous region in Ninh Thuan Province, Vietnam. Shortly after the pilot, Army 1st Lt. Arthur G. Ecklund, radioed their location contact was lost. After an extensive, three-day search and rescue effort, no evidence of a crash was found and hostile threats precluded further search efforts. 

Skip to 1984 when a former member of the Vietnamese Air Force turned over to a U.S. official human remains from what he said was one of two U.S. pilots whose aircraft was shot down. Ten years later, a joint U.S./Socialist Republic of Vietnam (S.R.V.) team, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), interviewed two Vietnamese citizens regarding the incident who said the aircraft crashed on a mountainside and the dead pilots were buried at the site.

The team excavated the crash site described by the witnesses and found aircraft wreckage but no human remains were found. Six years later, the remains turned out to be Ecklund.

In 2001, a Vietnamese national, living in California, turned over to U.S. officials human remains that he said were recovered at a site where two U.S. pilots crashed. These remains were identified as Jefferson’s.