It seems every generation has a date or event that changes their lives and perhaps the course of this nation. For many of the “Greatest Generation” who lived through the bombing of Pearl Harbor and World War II, Dec. 7, 1941 is a date of infamy.
But for 75-year-old Mary Jo Urban of Henderson, Sept. 13, 1944 is the date that forever changed the portrait of her small Italian family.
She was 8 years old in 1944 when her Uncle John, Staff Sgt. John J. Bono, left for Europe with the United States Army Air Corps. He called her Jo Jo and she still has the doily and 1945 Coca-Cola calendar he sent her while on leave in Switzerland.
She never heard from him again.
That is, until this October, when two men from the U.S. Air Force knocked on her door.
Bono was a ball turret gunner on a B-17G Flying Fortress, lovingly named Mag the Hag 2, that was shot down over Werra, Germany. It was his 25th mission and was to be his last before coming home.
They had just left their target, a synthetic-oil plant, when enemy fire hit. Nine crew members went down with the plane. Only one survived.
In a letter written after his release from a German prisoner-of-war camp, Sgt. George F. Clark wrote of parachuting from the burning plane, “I looked back and I thought Johnny was right behind me.” Clark was captured and watched from the bed of a truck as parachutes were stripped from three of his crew mates.
Townspeople in Werra dug a big hole and buried the Americans. In 1991, a local, Thomas Deitman, was digging a hole to bury a relative when he came upon the remains of three servicemen. He notified the mayor, who in turn notified the Red Cross.
Unfortunately, the German government would not allow an investigation by the United States. It wasn’t until 2007 that Germany agreed to allow the site to be excavated. In 2008, a recovery team found the remains of the eight crew members of The Hag.
The U.S. government listed Bono as missing in action and “unrecoverable,” but his family never gave up hope.
“Are you sure?” Urban kept asking the men at her door.
After 67 years of waiting and wondering, she couldn’t believe Uncle John was coming home. All of his teeth and most of his bones were recovered and matched her DNA. They found his dog tags with the emblem of Mary Immaculate given to him by his mother.
“We were a very small family” says Urban. “It was a huge loss for us.”
John Bono was born March 28, 1916, in Denver to Joseph and Camilla Bono. His parents separated when he was 12. John and his older sister, Josephine, stayed with their mother.
“My grandmother always expected him to walk through the door,” explains Urban. She took her grief to the grave when she passed away in 1980.
Joseph Bono, who never spent much time with the family, died in 1973.
Five wars were fought while Bono lay in a field in Germany. We watched the Twin Towers rise and fall. Men walked on the moon and airplanes broke the sound barrier. But for his family, a part of their life stopped on Sept. 13, 1944.
Staff Sgt. Bono’s remains were interred at Fort Logan National Cemetery on Dec. 2. Mary Jo’s two granddaughters rode atop my horse-drawn hearse, accompanying the uncle they had only known as a picture on a wall, as it made its way through the countless rows of white headstones of Bono’s comrades who have waited 67 years for their brother to join them.
His funeral procession was met by members of the Colorado Patriot Guard Riders, many of them veterans from the Korean, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who formed a flag line to the gravesite. World War II veterans — aged, but still proud — stood tall on the snow-covered ground and saluted as the flag-draped casket passed.
As for me, I could think of only two words: “Welcome home.”
Lorraine Melgosa (lorrainemelgosa@yahoo.com) of Manzanola is a self-employed farmer and owner of the Wellington Carriage Company.
