Last Sunday, Sharon Buck of Stockton, Calif., resumed her search of 40 years for Maj. Perry Jefferson. As she searched the Internet, she finally got the answer to what happened to the man whose MIA/POW bracelet she wore for 10 years — in junior and senior high school and for a short time after she married.
“My God, oh, my God,” was her reaction when she found a Denver Post story from April.
“I wore the bracelet every day,” she said of her years as a young adult. “It was a personal commitment.”
During all those years, she said, she had prayed for Jefferson and his family.
“I cared deeply — to honor his sacrifice,” she said.
When she became a young mother, she took off the bracelet for fear she would scratch her baby daughter. But she kept it, never thinking of discarding it.
The story she found chronicled burial services for Jefferson of the Colorado Air National Guard’s 120th Fighter Squadron. His remains had been identified in December 2007.
On April 3, 1969, then-Capt. Jefferson disappeared while on an intelligence mission in a 01-G Bird Dog plane, attempting to spot enemy forces on the ground in Vietnam.
The 37-year-old Northglenn resident left behind his wife, Sylvia Jefferson, who later led campaigns to remember prisoners of war and those who are missing in action. She died about five years before his remains were identified.
He has one child in the Denver area and another in Pittsburgh. His brother, Mike Jefferson, lives in Greenwood Village.
On April 3, 2008, Perry Jefferson was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Buck grew up in a family of military veterans. Her father was a first sergeant at the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium during WWII, and two uncles served in the Navy in the South Pacific. One of those uncles later became an Alaskan fisherman who was lost at sea and whose body was never recovered.
Buck knows what kind of closure can be brought by the finding of a body, by finding out what has happened to a missing person.
She said she decided to wear an MIA bracelet after a Marine medic she knew from her church in Southern California was killed in Vietnam. She got Jefferson. Over the years, she searched for him with no luck.
But Jan. 18, she found The Denver Post story.
“I just needed to know” what became of him, Buck said. “It’s always been a private search. It’s always been on my bucket list.”
“I would like to return the bracelet to his family,” Buck said. “The 40th anniversary of his disappearance is in April.”
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
