You wonder about the mission, the Martin Mercator lifting off, vibrating as it rises in the sky, the 16 crew members quiet because they’ve done this thing before. Engines thrumming in the dark. The East China Sea, restless and reaching for anything that comes too close.
How long did the plane play dodge-ball with Chinese radar during its nocturnal intelligence flight? How much information were the guys able to transmit before death came on two wings?
Before daylight on Aug. 22, 1956, a jet from the People's Liberation Army Air Force shot down the flight, a Navy intelligence-gathering mission. No one survived.
Among them: Wallace Powell of Folkston, a spot so far south from Atlanta that you may as well have said he was from Florida.
The Department of Defense says he's the sole Georgian lost during the Cold War whose remains have not been found. He's one of 126 Americans unaccounted for in that decades-long conflict. He's also one of thousands of Georgians and other Americans lost in overseas conflicts since the 1940s, their bones hidden under hill and wave.
Representatives from department's Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency recently visited Atlanta to tell people who lost relatives in armed conflicts about the search for their loved ones. On Feb. 20, officials talked with about 200 Georgians who kissed relatives goodbye as they headed off to war, never to see them again.
Those representatives have a ceaseless task, said Air Force Lt. Col. Holly Slaughter, a DPAA spokeswoman. The agency tracks MIAs from World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, Cold War, Operation Desert Storm and other conflicts.
“We never stop looking” for lost sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines, she said. “We’re all over the place, all over the globe.”
They search for the remains of people like Pfc. Alfred Gold. He was last seen, bloody and immobile, on the side of Pork Chop Hill. Rising nearly 1,000 feet, the hill was the site of two major Korean War battles during the spring and summer of 1953. Gold, 19, vanished July 6 of that year.
Technically, he is not one of the 154 Georgians missing from that conflict — New York was his home — but his niece lives in Georgia. “He was never recovered,” said the niece, Arlene Cohen of Roswell. “He never came back.”
Instead, the young man who wrote letters home became a fixture in family lore. He was the photo on the wall, the lost boy in a mother’s sad recollections. Cohen has attended the federal MIA briefings since 2008, hoping she’ll one day get good news.
That’s not likely. Her uncle, said Cohen, was probably buried on the North Korean side of the battlefield. Until relations between that nation and the United States improve, she said, that lost private’s body will remain unclaimed.
‘If they (federal searchers) could just bring back one bone,” said Cohen. “Just to know he was back in our land would bring us a lot of peace.”
An empty plot
The first troops had come ashore three days earlier, signaling the beginning of D-Day, the Allied assault on Nazi Germany's hold on Europe. On June 9, 1944, an LST (landing ship, tank) sank in the English Channel. The casualties included James W. Adams, a coxswain in the U.S. Navy. His name is the first in an alphabetical list of more than 1,000 Georgians missing and presumed killed in World War II. They were lost in every theater of the war, from the reaches of the Aleutian Islands to the depths of the Tyrrhenian Sea, from battlefields muddy to those filled with clouds.
More than 73,000 Americans still remain lost from that 1941-45 war.
Twenty-nine Georgians are still MIA from Vietnam, according to records. Among them: Army Staff Sgt. Lewis Howard of Macon. Drafted just out of high school, he was on patrol July 7, 1970, in a remote valley in South Vietnam. He was walking point — the lead soldier in his platoon — when rocket-propelled grenades struck. Howard, 20, and another soldier fell.
The remaining soldiers retreated, fought back, but couldn’t regain lost ground. At one point, they saw the enemy had taken the ground where their two buddies had fallen. Subsequent patrols failed to find either man.
That knowledge sticks with Guy Howard of Lawrenceville. He was still in junior high when his older brother shipped off to a jungle nation on the other side of the world. Howard and his brother, Ted, attended the Feb. 20 meeting in Atlanta. They got some welcome news: DPAA officials plan to search the region where their older brother fell nearly a half-century ago.
“They may very well find something,” said Guy Howard. If so, the two Howard brothers plan to inter their sibling’s remains in a cemetery plot in Macon. It’s beside their parents.
“We have a marker,” Guy Howard said. “But there’s nothing underneath it.”
And, in Folkston, a marker remembers Powell, that long-ago flier who left the flatlands of South Georgia for the skies over China. “He was,” the young man’s father told an Atlanta Journal reporter in a 1956 interview, “an exceptionally fine boy.”
Now, Powell’s great-nephew, Kai Johns, keeps his memory alive. He’s researched the doomed flight, and knows that the man’s remains will be forever lost. Only the angels could find them.
“I grew up hearing about him,” said Johns, raised in Folkston and now living in Ashburn, Va. “I still think about him.”
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