JONES, LOUIS FARR
Remains Returned 11/20/2000
ID's 11/26/2001
Family has NOT accepted ID ORIGINALLY. See 2004 story below.
Name: Louis Farr Jones
Rank/Branch: O4/US Air Force
Unit:				
Date of Birth: 29 December 1925
Home City of Record: San Angelo TX (family in Fairfax Co. VA)
Date of Loss: 29 November 1967
Country of Loss: Laos
Loss Coordinates: 163700N 1060800E (XD220269)
Status (in 1973): Missing In Action
Category: 2
Acft/Vehicle/Ground: F4C
Refno: 0929
Other Personnel In Incident: (pilot recovered)
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 15 October 1990 from one or more
of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources,
correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources: Washington Star and
Salina (KS) Journal, interviews. Updated by the P.O.W. NETWORK 2002.
REMARKS:
SYNOPSIS: Radicalization can be an instant process. For Mrs. Mitch Jones, it
came the minute President Nixon said he would keep a small force of American
troops in South Vietnam as long as the communists held American prisoners of
war. Mrs. Jones quit her job, sent out hundreds of letters to enlist support
and became a full time, unpaid lobbyist for peace and helped form a group
called "Families for Immediate Release." Mrs. Jones was convinced Nixon's
policy would continue the war forever - and that the prisoner problem would
then be solved - they would die waiting for the war to end.
Mitch Jones' husband, Louis, a 22-year veteran of the military, was shot
down over Laos on November 29, 1967. He was the bombardier/navigator onboard
an F4C Phantom fighter/bomber whose pilot was apparently rescued. The
aircraft was downed in Savannakhet Province about 5 miles southwest of the
city of Sepone, Laos. Mrs. Jones had not received any word of her husband
since that day, although she traveled to Laos to inquire in 1969.
Mitch Jones had been through this before. Her brother, Lt. Frank N.
Mitchell, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, had been declared
Missing In Action in Korea. Her family struggled for years against a growing
tide of indifference to her brother and the other men missing in Korea. She
watched helplessly as the war ended, and the men were written off one by
one. She had lived her years as a military wife knowing her husband could
also be captured or become missing, but not fully realizing that the
handling of the American POWs in Korea was not to be unique. Final
recognition came when she realized Nixon would continue the war with no
seeming regard for her husband or the other POWs.
When the war ended, not a single man held in Laos was released, although
many were known to have survived. Over 18 years has passed since Mitch Jones
began to realize her country was not going to bring her husband home. Still,
no word of Louis Farr has been received, and the U.S. engages in publicity
campaigns to renew relationships with the countries of Southeast Asia, while
ignoring and debunking mounting evidence that Americans are still alive in
Laos and Vietnam.
Mrs. Jones no longer walks the halls of Congress, and since an 18-year-old
clipping described her activities, she has disappeared from public view.
Louis Jones, if he is alive, must also have decided, in disappointment, that
the country he proudly served would not bring him home.
==============================
http://www.gosanangelo.com/archive/02/october/5/2002100511.shtml
MIA pilot's widow skeptical remains were husband's
Saturday, October 5, 2002
VICTOR WHITMAN
Staff Writer
The widow of a San Angelo Air Force pilot shot down in Laos in 1967 and
declared missing in action is not convinced that officials have found her
husband's remains.
The body of Col. Louis Farr Jones was identified in November 2001 after the
bone fragments were returned to the United States in November 2000.
Jones' widow, Marian Jones, now living in Santa Cruz, Calif., has declined
to accept the remains until she arranges for DNA testing.
"If this is my husband, I'll find out," Jones said. "I'm not going to take
the kind of superficial evidence that they have. It's not actual evidence.
It's circumstantial. They don't have any proof."
Jones said the Air Force Mortuary Service in San Antonio notified her last
fall that her husband's skeleton had been identified. He was shot down on
Nov. 29, 1967, in south Laos.
"I've been living with this for 33 years, almost 34," she said. "I've heard
of (families) receiving dog bones, Vietnamese bones."
An official with Joint Task Force-Full Accounting said remains recovered
from Southeast Asia are evaluated at the U.S. Army Central Identification
Laboratory in Hawaii. The laboratory employs casualty resolution
specialists, archaeologists and anthropologists. The lab spokeswoman
couldn't be reached for comment.
The military sent slides of a complete tooth and photos of dozens of bone
fragments as proof the colonel died in the crash, Jones said, but officials
told her that DNA testing wasn't possible. She said a molecular biologist at
the University of California at Santa Cruz told her a DNA test is feasible.
Jones said she wants to arrange a test on the tooth and only after a
positive match is confirmed will she concede that her husband died in the
crash. "They have said they can't do it, so we will have it done when we
receive those remains," she said.
In 1969, Jones traveled with the wife of a prisoner of war to Laos to
represent the interests of POWs/MIAs. She said she was assigned by the
Department of Defense to negotiate the release of prisoners in Laos and met
with Col. Soth Pethrasi, a communist who had a compound in Vientienne.
"We were offering $30,000 for information about a prisoner and a million
minimum for any man we could get released," she said.
In the presence of the international secretary of the Red Cross, Pethrasi
told Jones that her husband was on a list of 180 prisons held in the caves
of Sam Neuea in northern Laos.
She said six aircraft were shot down at different times within a mile of
each other, and the Air Force told her that differentiating among the
remains at the several crash sites was impossible.
"Now they are contradicting every piece of information they have sent me,"
she said.
Herschel Carmichael, past president of the Vietnam Veterans of America
Chapter 457 in San Angelo, knew Col. Jones, a friend and co-worker of
Carmichael's father.
Carmichael learned on Thursday that Jones had been identified.
"I'm glad it is finally over," he said. "I'm glad he is finally back on U.S.
soil."
=================
Tri-Valley Herald
Family closes painful chapter
Fremont man to bury his Air Force pilot dad, shot down and killed in Vietnam
37 years ago
By Sandhya Somashekhar
STAFF WRITER
Monday, March 01, 2004 - In two weeks, a few members of Col. Louis Farr
Jones' family will huddle over a flag-draped coffin at Golden Gate National
Cemetery in Colma. "Taps" will be played. Jet planes will soar overhead in
the missing-man formation.
Then, 27 bone fragments and a tooth -- all that the Air Force says is left
of Jones -- will be laid to rest.
What has transpired in the 37 years since Jones' F4C Phantom was shot down
during the Vietnam War still is a matter of controversy among family
members, some of whom believe the career military man actually survived the
crash and was captured.
The years also inspired in them conflicting emotions about their country,
which some of them feel abandoned a man who fought for its ideals.
One thing is certain, they say: The March 12 ceremony will bring all of them
a measure of closure.
"It bothered me immensely that, if there was the remotest chance that this
was my father, he was sitting in a plastic bag on a shelf somewhere," said
Jones' son, Fremont resident Jonathan Jones, who was 9 when his father's
plane was shot down. "He deserves a Christian burial."
Louis Farr Jones was born Dec. 29, 1925, in San Angelo, Texas. An ordained
Baptist minister, he earned two bachelor's degrees, one in English and one
in religion.
A career Air Force man, he was a strict disciplinarian who insisted on
respect for the uniform, his son said. He was an Army Air Corps cadet during
World War II, and he also fought in the Korean War.
At age 41, he was shipped off to Vietnam to fight in a war he quietly
opposed, his wife, Marian "Mitch" Jones, said.
"As they said at the time, that's what they hired him to do. There really
was no other choice," said Marian Jones, 77, as she sat in the dining room
of her Watsonville home. "Everyone was scared to death of the war, because
it was a futile, horrible thing."
On the morning of Nov. 29, 1967, a few weeks after Jones was deployed, his
plane was struck by small-arms enemy fire over Xepon, Laos, close to the Ho
Chi Minh Trail.
According to the Air Force account, the aircraft burst into flames before
Jones could eject and crashed into the jungle.
That night, two Air Force officers showed up at Mitch Jones' Southern
California home to tell her that her husband's plane had been shot down.
"When I opened the door, I knew," she said. "You always know."
Two years later, in a much-publicized trip, she and another soldier's wife
were sent by the Pentagon to Laos to inquire about American servicemen who
had been lost in that region.
There, in a jungle so black she could barely see, she said, she met a
colonel with the Pathet Lao, the Laotian communist movement. They talked
about their respective losses during the war. He told her that several of
his family members had been killed by U.S. forces.
The colonel, whose group had kept meticulous records, then gave her two
lists, she said -- one with the names of U.S. pilots who had perished in
Laos, the other of soldiers who were being held captive.
Her husband's name appeared on the list of living prisoners of war, she
said.
From then on, Mitch Jones said, she dedicated her life to bringing the
prisoners back and opposing a war she believed -- and still believes -- was
motivated by economic interests.
"I saw such horrible things going on over there, such corruption, things
that I knew were wrong," she said. "I decided to fight that war in the halls
of Congress."
When she returned from Southeast Asia, Jones packed up her family and moved
to Washington, D.C., where she became a full-time, unpaid lobbyist on
Capitol Hill working toward the end of the war.
Many people at the time believed the war couldn't end while the North
Vietnamese held U.S. POWs. Mitch Jones and others, however, believed that
prolonging the war simply prolonged their captivity.
She focused much of her effort on the 1970 McGovern-Hatfield Amendment to
end the war, which ultimately failed.
It was then that she concluded that the American people weren't ready to do
what it took to bring their loved ones home, she said.
During a press conference in the wake of its defeat, she recalled, she
announced that President Nixon "will not use my husband's name to spread the
blood of young men on Vietnam anymore."
Then, in 1971, she packed up her family once again, and moved back to
California to pick up the pieces of her life.
In 1994, the U.S. Department of Defense opened the investigation into the
disappearance of Louis Jones, who still was labeled missing in action.
American and Laotian investigators traveled to the Savannakhet province, the
site of several crashes, and interviewed two locals who said they remembered
watching Jones' plane go down.
At the crash site, investigators found small pieces of aircraft wreckage,
scraps of an ejection seat and pieces of a jet engine common in F4 aircraft.
They returned twice in 2000, digging up bone fragments and at least one
tooth. The tooth was compared against military dental records and, after a
year of tests, was determined to have belonged to Jones.
But Mitch Jones and her daughter, Jane Jones, have their doubts.
The government's analysis is full of holes, they say. Dental records show an
appointment that couldn't have existed because Louis Jones was training in
the Philippines at the time, they say. No DNA tests were done. Witnesses'
statements from 1967 conflict with more recent ones, they say.
And this isn't the first time they've been offered his remains, they note.
Twice before, military officials have contacted the family announcing
positive identification. Both times, it was discovered to be an error.
Both believe the government simply wants to close the cases of the 1,800
soldiers still unaccounted for from the Vietnam War.
Some people believe many of them still are alive somewhere in Southeast
Asia, said Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the National League of
POW/MIA Families.
"There are Americans who were last known to be alive, and until they are
found, those questions are going to persist," she said. "I don't think any
of us have the luxury of just walking away from that. That would be pretty
criminal."
If Louis Jones has survived, he would be 78 today.
But his family is ready for closure.
Jonathan Jones, who is familiar with the government's forensics techniques,
is fairly certain that he will be burying his father in two weeks.
"This does not eliminate all doubt, but it does reduce the likelihood that
we have the wrong person," he said. "I wanted closure for myself, for my
family."
The remains labeled Louis Farr Jones today sit in a warehouse in Camp H.M.
Smith, Hawaii. On March 10, one of Jonathan Jones' sons will accompany them
on a flight to the Bay Area. At the cemetery, a memorial marker already
bears Louis Jones' name.
"Through a miracle, I'm able to bury him there," Jonathan Jones said. "And
Mom can be buried there, too."
Mitch Jones is preparing for another move, this time to her son's home in
Fremont's Glenmoor neighborhood. She also is writing a book about her effort
to find her husband. This, she says, is the last chapter.
Her anger has faded over the years, she says.
"After so long, you just lose all faith in the system," she said. "After so
many distorted truths, you just sort of give up hope. Vietnam was a war of
lies. It's time for this to be over."
Barry Shatzman contributed to this report.