Standing in the shivering cold on the tarmac of Buckley Air Force Base, the man’s thoughts were not so much with his hero brother. No, they were with his and Perry’s dad.
How he wished the old man could be here on this day, to see what Perry meant to folks, to see that his death in the Vietnam jungle would be remembered.
Ah, but it is enough, Mike Jefferson finally said, that at least he is here on this morning, scheduled to hop on a military transport to attend the formal dedication of the Maj. Perry H. Jefferson Auditorium of the Air Force Intelligence School at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas.
It was 40 years and a week ago that Jefferson, an intelligence officer with the 120th Tactical Fighter Squadron, 140th Tactical Fighter Wing of the Colorado Air National Guard, was shot down in a mountainous region of Ninh Thuan Province. He volunteered for the reconnaissance mission just one week before he was scheduled to come home.
For 38 years, Jefferson was listed as missing in action, the last Colorado Air National Guard member from that war so listed.
The pilot’s remains were found in 1984 and positively identified in 2000. Then in 2001, a Vietnamese national living in California turned over remains he said he found at a crash site. After years of forensic work, those bones proved to be Perry Jefferson’s, and on April 3, 2008, he was laid to rest with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
“This is overwhelming,” Mike Jefferson said, only moments before boarding the military jet to Texas. “That his name will grace a building where every Air Force intelligence officer will study means the world to my family.
“It has been a long road to this day,” said Mike Jefferson, now 69, a longtime resident of Greenwood Village. The grief over and uncertainty of Perry’s fate weighed too heavily on his father. He died 17 years ago.
Perry’s wife, Sylvia, becoming an activist in the MIA movement, once headed a delegation of missing servicemen’s families that traveled to Paris to unsuccessfully plead with North Vietnamese officials for information and closure. She died six years ago.
So it is left to Mike to travel to Goodfellow with generals and assorted other Air Force brass, in addition to some two dozen former Colorado Air National Guard members, many of whom served with his brother.
“People keep coming up and telling me it’s been 40 years — like I don’t remember. And truthfully, it doesn’t seem that long ago,” Mike said.
He and Perry were nine years apart, his older brother going into the Air Force as Mike started college. Perry wrote him weekly during his year overseas.
Today, Mike Jefferson cannot say that he believed he would live to discover his brother’s fate.
“I will say it is a tremendous story, how they found him in somebody’s home in Los Angeles. It’s all still a mystery to me,” he said.
The plane is ready. Mike Jefferson takes a deep breath.
“What is overwhelming to me is all the people who care, even after all this time. They all remember him, guys who served with him, who sat with him and shared his life, who still care so much.
“To me, it is one of the great things about our country, how it tries to get everyone back, how no one ever forgets.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
