Where Liberty Dwells, there is my country

From time to time, a small news story causes us to stop a moment and reflect upon what Americans have, and those who gave it to us.

The story below reminds us that World War II is still with many American families.  The sacrifice and loss of these is important to remember at Christmastime, especially when you recall how many Christmases Marine Maj. McCown (and the many thousands like him) lost.  He was shot down a few weeks after the famous Marine Maj. “Pappy” Boyington was lost in the same area near Rabaul. Boyington was captured and survived the war.

I want to call attention to this story so that we may keep their sacrifice in mind.  No other words are necessary to define the pain and poignancy present.

Full story is here.

The burial next month of Maj. Marion Ryan McCown Jr. in a family
plot in Charleston, nearly 65 years after his plane went down in the
South Pacific, brings relief and joy to a family who never thought his
remains would be found, his relatives said Friday.

The Marine pilot had been missing since Jan. 20, 1944, when his
single-seat F-4U Corsair failed to return from a combat mission over the
island of New Britain, in Papua New Guinea. His remains were recovered
from a crash site in the town of Rabaul, where the Japanese had a base,
and identified earlier this year, the Defense Department’s POW/Missing
Personnel Office announced Friday.

“It’s such a comfort. All of us just assumed he was lost at sea and
would never be found, and it was going to be an unanswered question,”
said Jane McKinney, of Channel Islands, Calif., who was three months old
when her half-brother went missing.

McCown was 27 when, on a bomber escort, his squadron tangled with 40
Japanese Zero fighter planes, said his nephew, Capt. John Almeida, a
retired Navy doctor in Jacksonville, N.C.

Almeida has the flight log the Marine Corps sent his mother in the
1950s.

“It must’ve been a heckofa fight. His squadron lost three pilots out of
11,” he said.

As for finding his uncle, “I’d given up years ago,” said Almeida, 63,
who was a Marine in Vietnam before serving 24 years in the Navy Medical
Corps.

McCown, who left Georgia Tech for the Marines in 1942, will be buried
with military honors Jan. 18 – four days after he would have turned 92 -
beside his mother, sister, and grandparents at The Unitarian Church
cemetery in Charleston.

Family members say the service will be a joyous occasion that will bring
together relatives who are scattered across the country.

“It’s going to be a fantastic trip,” Almeida said. “It’s opened up a
whole new world I didn’t know about.”

That includes meeting Helen Schiller, 87, of Summerville, who was
McCown’s girlfriend.

“He wanted the Marines, and he wanted to fly,” Schiller said.

She recalled him taking her to dinner in his dress whites whenever he
came home from training in Cherry Point, N.C. She still has a box with
wings he sent her before he vanished.

“Boy, I’ll tell you, he was a sharp one. He was the perfect gentleman,
like the old Charlestonians. He was really, really a nice fella,” said
the former Helen Miller of Charleston. On his identification, she added,
“It was the biggest surprise in the world. Nobody knew what had happened
to him.”

Unbeknownst to the family, a POW/MIA team recovered McCown’s
identification tag and bone fragments from the South Pacific crash site
in 1991, but forensic science could not identify the remains then. In
2006, when a team returned to prepare the site for recovery, a partial
parachute was found, and a local villager handed over remains he said he
took from the site. More remains and the wreckage were recovered last
spring. Dental comparisons and other forensic and circumstantial
evidence led to the identification, the Defense Department said.

Not wanting to make mistakes, the military won’t identify remains based
on “dog tags, because anything can happen in war,” Almeida said.

In May, as remains were unearthed, McKinney and her family were
vacationing in the South Pacific. Thinking French Polynesia, more than
4,000 miles from the site, was the closest she’d ever get to her
brother, McKinney tossed flowers into the ocean.

It wasn’t until August, when an Internet search by a McKinney friend
turned up information on the excavation, that the family connected with
the military. Because of his military background, Almeida was asked to
make the call. “We’ve been looking for you,” he recalled the head of the
POW/MIA office saying.

“It was very exciting. We kinda felt like the sadness was long over,”
McKinney said. She’s thankful “there are people who have just not given
up finding these remains.

“We knew we weren’t going to get him back. But it’s been such a comfort
and such a mark of respect for him and his sacrifice.”

But one thing still haunts family members, said McCown’s 41-year-old
niece Blair McKinney. While they’re grateful and understand the military
can’t make a conclusive identification with dog tags, they don’t like to
think of the 1991 find.

“The only heart-wrenching part of it as the family … is that his two
other siblings were alive in the ’90s and went to their graves not
knowing anything,” Blair McKinney said.

The Raleigh, N.C., resident is reading her uncle’s five-year diary now.
She’s touched by his last entry, written in 1942, when he was stationed
in Quantico, Va.

“What a beautiful place,” he wrote. “I might want to settle here when
the war is over.”