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.
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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."
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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.