Bio, Jones, Bobby M.

Name: Bobby Marvin Jones Rank/Branch: O3/US Air Force Unit: Udorn Airfield, Thailand Date of Birth: 05 May 1945 Home City of Record: Macon GA Loss Date: 28 November 1972 Country of Loss: South Vietnam Loss Coordinates: 161500N 1080000E (ZC065915) Status (in 1973): Missing In Action Category: 4 Acft/Vehicle/Ground: F4D Refno: 1949

Source: Compiled from one or more of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews. Updated by the P.O.W. NETWORK in 2008.

SYNOPSIS: On November 28, 1972, Jack Harvey and Bobby Jones were flying an F4D Phantom jet on a non-combat flight from their base at Udorn, Thailand to Da Nang, South Vietnam. The purpose of the mission was to log flight hours for Jones, the only Flight Surgeon missing from the Vietnam War, to maintain his Flight Surgeon status.

Shortly before arriving at Da Nang, when the aircraft was about 18 miles northwest of its destination, it disappeared from the radar screen without any voice contact. A few hours later, emergency signals were heard, but rescue efforts were hampered by monsoon rains and enemy held territory. When search teams were able to enter the area three days later, they did not locate the crew of the F4D. No further word has surfaced on either Harvey or Jones.

Examination of intelligence reports indicate that there was more than one prison "system" in Vietnam. Those prisoners who were released in 1973 were maintained in the same systems. If Jones was captured and kept in another system, the POWs who returned did not know it.

Now, nearly 20 years later, men like Jones are all but forgotten except by friends, family and fellow veterans. The U.S. "priority" placed on determining their fates pales in comparison to the results it has achieved. Since Jones went missing, over 6000 reports have been received by the U.S. that Americans are still being held captive in Southeast Asia. Whether Jones is among them is not known. What is certain, however, is that we, as a nation, are guilty of the abandonment of nearly 2500 of our best and most courageous men. We cannot forget, and must do everything in our power to bring these men home.

Dalton - On three previous trips to Southeast Asia over the past two decades, Jo Anne Shirley didn't have problems keeping her emotions in check about the brother who disappeared in Vietnam nearly 35 years ago.

But on those occasions, Shirley was part of large, formal delegations pressing diplomatic initiatives to persuade reluctant governments to provide more information on American service members still unaccounted for as a result of the Vietnam War.

'She's not timid a bit. She'll stand up to any general,' said Christine Jones (right) about her daughter, Jo Anne Shirley. Shirley leads a four-person group to Vietnam next month.

Wearing bracelets with Dr. Bobby Jones' name on them are Christine Jones (hands on left), Jones' mother, and Jo Anne Shirley, his sister. The Air Force major was a passenger in a two-seat F-4 Phantom jet that disappeared near Da Nang on Nov. 28, 1972.

Next month, the self-described "housewife from Georgia" will lead a four-person group - all relatives of men still missing - into the region to make a more personal and emotional appeal on an issue that has largely lost the attention of America.

Dr. Bobby Jones of Macon, an Air Force major, was a passenger in a two-seat F-4 Phantom jet that disappeared near Da Nang, in what was then South Vietnam, on Nov. 28, 1972. He is the only physician among the missing.

Shirley, now 59, was 25 when her brother was lost. Since then, she has gotten progressively more active in demanding an accounting, not only for her brother, but also for the 1,788 Americans still missing in Southeast Asia, 34 from Georgia. She now leads the board of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.

"She's not timid a bit. She'll stand up to any general," said Shirley's mother, Christine Jones, also of Dalton. Although Jones is now 90, she remains active in the search for information about her missing son, attending yearly meetings of the National League of Families and offering daily encouragement to her daughter.

The two-week trip will take the group to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where the four relatives will meet with government officials and private citizens and appeal to them to be more cooperative in the ongoing search for remains.

The trip comes just four months after President Bush's November visit to Vietnam, the first by an American president since the war. While Bush pressed for better business ties between Vietnam and the United States, families of the missing men believe the more government-to-government accommodations that are made, the less leverage they have.

Nevertheless, Shirley said she and her group will make personal appeals to officials with the three governments for better access to previously off-limits areas, including official archives, and providing more information about the nearly 200 Americans known to be alive at the end of the war but never accounted for. She also plans to press the Vietnamese to follow through on a previous agreement to let U.S. Navy ships assist in underwater searches for downed planes off the coast.

A nonprofit group, the Georgia Committee for POW/MIA, is helping Shirley raise money. Tax-deductible donations can be made to the group in care of Tommy Clack, 1329 Portman Drive, Suite A, Conyers, Ga. 30094.

Since the end of the war, 795 sets of remains have been recovered from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and identified through a U.S. government agency now known as the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command based in Hawaii.

Published: July 30, 2008 08:10 pm

http://www.northwestgeorgia.com/local/local_story_212201042.html?keyword=topstory

Call leads to 'relief' for Dalton family of Vietnam-era MIA

Victor Miller

Jo Anne Shirley likens it to “a big load lifted off your heart.”

Last week, the Dalton resident received a phone call with news she had been waiting almost 36 years to hear, apparently definitive information about what happened to her beloved brother, Maj. Bobby M. Jones, a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon who had been missing in action since Nov. 28, 1972, when the jet he was in disappeared from radar near Danang in South Vietnam.

Shirley, chairman of the board of directors of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, was with her mother, 91-year-old Christine Jones, when the call came from the Air Force Casualty Office. Shirley was told a “blood chit” — a military identification marker containing a number specific to her brother — had been found in June by a team led by a forensic anthropologist that was evaluating the site where a plane that was perhaps her brother’s had been excavated 11 years ago.

“It has a number on it and that number is lodged to your name,” Shirley said of the blood chit. “So Bobby would have a number, the pilot would have a different number, and if you come back, then they take that (number) out of the database and I guess they assign it to somebody else.

“If you don’t come back, then that number stays attached to your name until you get a resolution.”

When the blood chit was found, “they called Hawaii, where the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command is located, and said who does this number correlate to,” Shirley said. “And it correlates to my brother.”

Shirley and Christine Jones must still wait for a written report, “and the paper trail will be who knows how long exactly to get that,” Shirley said. But she called the information about the blood chit “huge for us.”

“We know two things,” she said. “We know the two people in that plane — an F4 is a two-seater — did not survive, and that Bobby was one of those.”

When the Air Force Casualty Office representative called, he asked, “Do I need to call mom?” Shirley recalled, “and I said no, she’s actually standing right here baking brownies for the National Guard. She was there, which was good timing, and we both cried.”

Shirley said it was “a huge relief” to finally know for sure what happened to her brother after all the years of family members attending meetings of the National League of Families — at first not knowing exactly what they were getting into — then Shirley taking on a leadership role — she has traveled on four delegations on behalf of families to Southeast Asia — and trying to rally the federal government to ensure an accounting for families similarly situated.

“It was like a big load is lifted off your heart,” she said. “We’ve known for a good while, we have felt this was Bobby’s crash site, and when they told us 11 years ago these two people didn’t survive I think part of the questions about ‘what if this,’ ‘what if that,’ were resolved at that time.

“But this is verification that he’s not a prisoner, he probably didn’t suffer, he was probably killed on impact.”

Still, questions remain.

A more extensive excavation of the site is planned. Asked when, Shirley said, “I have no idea. It could be a year. We have to get back on the schedule, weather comes into play, I don’t want to bump somebody off to get us back on there, so we’ll have to work into their schedule.”

“I have a lot of questions about this particular team and what they found,” Shirley said. “How do you find something that easily that they didn’t find if they did an extensive excavation 11 years ago? My plan is to wait on the report, wait on the excavation. I will talk to the forensic anthropologist at some point one on one even if I have to go to Hawaii to do that because I want to know where did they find this in proximity to where they dug before.”

She asked the Air Force Casualty Office representative, “What are our chances of recovering remains, when you go back and do this more extensive excavation?”

“And they believe there’s a really good chance at that,” Shirley said. “So they won’t close our case out until that new excavation is done and they either recover remains or do not. But even if they don’t, this is big for us, this is more closure than a lot of families will have, and it takes away that wondering, ‘What if? What if?’”

Shirley is thankful for all the support she has received from the Dalton-Whitfield community as her search for “an answer for Bobby” continued all these years. Bobby Jones was born May 5, 1945, in Macon and graduated with honors from Lanier High School for Boy. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia before graduating from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta in 1971.

“I am so blessed to have that kind of support or we couldn’t continue to do what we do,” Shirley said.

And just because she now believes she knows what happened to her brother, her work on behalf of other families who are still seeking an accounting of loved ones won’t end.

“This issue is not over for us,” Shirley said. “We have so many friends that we’re close to that still don’t have a resolution. We will not quit or even diminish what we’re doing as far as trying to reach the fullest possible accounting because there are an awful lot of people still missing, and there are hundreds that we can recover and identify.

“There are a lot of families out there that can get the same closure we have if everybody will make sure that’s not put on the back burner.”

Shirley provided these numbers for soldiers unaccounted for and identified from some of the nation’s most recent wars:

• World War II: 74,374 unaccounted for (6,319 buried at sea), 453 identified

• Cold War: 127 unaccounted for, 20 identified

• Korean War: 8,055 unaccounted for, 101 identified

• Vietnam War: 1,757 unaccounted for, 889 identified

• Desert Storm: Three unaccounted for

• Iraq: One unaccounted for (translator), three identified (plus six civilian contractors)