CARAS, FRANKLIN ANGEL
Name: Franklin Angel Caras Branch/Rank: United States Air Force/O3 Unit: Date of Birth: 19 January 1934 Home City of Record: SPANISH FORK UT Date of Loss: 28 April 1967 Country of Loss: North Vietnam Loss Coordinates: 210900 North 1042200 East Status (in 1973): Presumptive Finding of Death Category: 2 Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: F105 #1151 Missions: Other Personnel in Incident: Refno: 0658
Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews and CACCF = Combined Action Combat Casualty File.
REMARKS: REMAINS RETURNED 11/25/87 ID Announce 02/88
CACCF CRASH/PILOT POSTHUMOUS PROMOTION
No further information available at this time.
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Deseret News Tuesday, December 25, 2001
Utah family of downed flier given 1970 MIA bracelet By Rodger L. Hardy
For 21 years U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Franklin Caras was missing in action in Vietnam.
On April 28, 1967, enemy fire brought down the Utahn's F-105 fighter plane when he was returning from a sortie over North Vietnam.
No one knew if he survived the crash on the north bank of the Black River in the Nghia Lo Province or how he died, said Jacky Caras, Frank Caras' sister-in-law. But military reports given the family indicate he may have died in the crash. His remains were returned in a 4-foot-by-3-foot box in 1988.
While Lt. Col. Caras was missing, his name was engraved on perhaps dozens of POW/MIA bracelets. Los Angeles college students started the POW/MIA bracelet phenomenon in 1970 as a Vietnam war awareness fund-raiser.
By the time the Paris Peace Accords were signed on Jan. 27, 1973, Americans were wearing more than 5 million of the bracelets as a way to demonstrate their support for the prisoners and missing.
While the college group that started making and selling the bracelets, VIVA (Voices In Vital America), disbanded in 1976, today the bracelet phenomena continues under the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. Nearly 2,000 Vietnam era military personnel are still listed as missing, according to the group's Web site, www.pow-miafamilies.org.
"All the kids (in the family) wore those bracelets," said Jacky Caras.
"Those were years of pain."
When Lt. Col. Caras' remains were buried in the Benjamin Cemetery, family members, in turn, took off their bracelets and laid them on his casket.
One day just before Thanksgiving, New Yorker Johanna Eatmon and her friends decided to go to ground zero where the World Trade Center still smouldered to see the memorials New Yorkers had put up for the dead and missing of that attack on America.
"As we got down there I just couldn't do it," she said.
"It was too upsetting."
So they wandered into a flea market on East 26th Street. While she was browsing she spotted the bright red bracelet a few tables up.
"I knew immediately what it was," she said. "I grew up during that era."
She asked the vendor how much he wanted for it.
"What is it ?" he asked.
"I said, 'a POW bracelet . . . and I want to find his family."'
He looked surprised and said, "You're gonna find his family? Take it."
He too, had served in Vietnam and seemed embarrassed that it was on a flea market table, Eatmon said.
It wasn't until then that she read the inscription. Through the Internet she found the Caras family in Benjamin.
"I told them I'd found this bracelet and I'd like to mail it back to them," she said. "(A family member) was stunned -- silent."
But Eatmon felt something else -- the closeness of the Caras family and the feeling that Lt. Col. Caras is still very much a part of the family.
"It was like he's still there. I felt it absolutely -- to the core. It's not so much the bracelet. I feel that he's there . . . I felt that this guy's got to get home. It was like I was putting him on a bus and sending him home."
"I don't know the circumstances why it ended up in a flea market. Maybe they needed something tangible."
"We are a big family and a real close family," Jacky Caras said.
"It tears at my heart to know that people are still interested and thinking about him," Lt. Col. Caras' widow, Cathy Caras, said. "We were really touched."
Eatmon wrapped the bracelet in a small American flag and pinned it closed with a patriotic red, white and blue Big Apple pin. She enclosed $25 for flowers for Lt. Col. Caras' grave, Cathy Caras said.
In response, Jacky Caras sent Eatmon news clippings and a picture of Lt. Col. Caras.
"She was deeply touched," she said of Eatmon. "I think I've found a new friend in New York."