Coming Home

SAN ANTONIO — He's listed among the names on the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C., and at a local cemetery, one can find a memorial marker bearing Airman First Class Jerry Mack Wall’s name.

But after nearly half a century of being classified by the military as “missing in action,” the Jacksonville native returned to Texas Tuesday, his casket greeted at the San Antonio International Airport by his family and members of the local Patriot Guard Riders group.

“It's been 46 years,” nearly most of her lifetime, said Wall's daughter, Lea Ann McCann, in a phone interview from her North Carolina home.

McCann described how the family was notified by a staff member from the Air Force Mortuary Affairs office in Dover, Del., in late August.

“I just walked around for the first 24 hours, just going, ‘Wow,’” she recalled. “It was the only thing I could say. The whole process of it all … I’m still in awe of the news.”

Wall was born Dec. 19, 1941, in Jacksonville, the son of Lewis and Lora Mae Wall. He enlisted in the United States Air Force in Nacogdoches and was a member of the 310th Air Commando Squadron, 315th Air Commando Wing at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio.

According to the pownetwork.org website, he and Staff Sgt. William J. Moore “were crewmen assigned to a C123B squadron which was dispatched on a candlestick mission on May 18, 1966. The aircraft was dropping flares about 45 miles east of the city of Pleiku in Binh Dinh Province when it was hit by enemy fire and crashed.”

Wall, 24, and Moore subsequently were listed as missing, according to the website.

But the Wall family never gave up hope that the military would find him – or his remains – and the whole time, McCann said, “our family stayed in touch with the military to keep him alive in their search, and we kept contacting them.”

At one point, “about the time the (Vietnam) Memorial was erected, his status was changed from MIA (missing in action) to KIA (killed in action),” she recalled. The family contacted the military about the status change, peppering them for the reason why.

“I believe the governor of Texas at the time notified me that it was changed back,” because there had been an error in paperwork, she said. “And when my grandmother (89-year-old Lora Wall) had gone to Washington, DC, (for an MIA meeting regarding Vietman veterans), she was very vocal about what was being done to find the missing men, because one of them was her child. My grandmother had been very active in keeping his search a priority with government officials.”

Jacksonville resident Altha Haba, who became friends with Lora Wall when they began volunteering at Love's Lookout in 2004, said as she got to know her better, they began talking about their families and that’s when she learned of Airman Wall’s MIA status.

“She said he hadn’t come home yet, and then she told me why. And I asked her if they had found them, she said the’'d been looking for him,” Haba recalled. “It just broke my heart.”

When she got home that day, she began writing a letter meant for government officials, and told from a mother’s – Wall’s mother – point of view.

“We wrote to Sen. (John) McCain (a Vietnam POW), we wrote to the President … I had found their addresses on the computer. The military has a saying, ‘No man left behind,’ and I even put that in the letter,” Haba said. “It was a four-page letter, and it was fairly close to 15 to 20 letters that we sent.”

In April 2011, what were thought to be Wall's remains were returned to the United States, then positively identified on Aug. 13 of this year, according to the Defense Prisoner of War-Missing Personnel Office. The office was established in 1993 as a single office to oversee and manage POW/MIA issues, according to its website.

“We were notified in August – I believe it was the 26th, then we met with Ruben Garza (of Air Force Mortuary Affairs in) Dover on Sept. 3, he had some declassification papers for me to sign,” McCann said, then paused.

“This has just been an amazing whirlwind of events, and everybody from the military has just been wonderful,” she said.

Likewise, Haba was amazed and thrilled by the news, which came to her via a relative of Lora's living in the Jacksonville area.

“I was just shocked, just speechless at the news,” she said, “but I was so thankful they found him.”

The joy of knowing that Wall, their beloved son, brother, husband and father, is finally coming home after 46 years has outweighed the years of sadness the family has felt surrounding his loss.

“We've been filled with so many emotions, and questions” over the years, but now the main emotion is relief, McCann said. “Of course the flood (of emotions) are beginning to rise again with the anticipation (of Wall returning home for good).”

Her mother, Wall’s bride Verna, has since remarried, but when “my mom received the phone call from Dover, her first response was, ‘You have found my husband!'”

The couple met in the early 1960s in San Antonio, where Jerry was stationed and Verna was a local resident.

“He was 21 and she was 18 when they met. My mother said she saw this man at a restaurant where she had gone with her sister, and she kept going back to see if he would be there,” McCann said.

Verna’s persistence paid off, because several days later she saw the handsome stranger again, and the couple married three years later.

Little Lea Ann joined the family a month shy of her parents’ first anniversary.

“I was a honeymoon baby,” she laughed.

But their honeymoon years were cut short when, two years later, the military notified Verna that her husband’s plane was shot down over Vietnam during a mission.

“My mom was notified on the 18th of May, my birthday was the 24th,” McCann said. “He is not somebody that I know, but there has always been a void, he’s always been missed.

“So, this has been a wild last two months,” she said.

Still, her thoughts are with the family of Sgt. Moore, whose body still has not been recovered from the crash site in Vietnam.

“There’s still one gent missing from that mission,” McCann said. “(The military have) gone to the site twice, the first time they found teeth and skeletal remains, and the second time they found Daddy's tags.”

Because the search would have led the military beyond the secure perimeter they were in, “they had to notify (the Moore) family that they wouldn’t be going back,” she said.

Over the years, two memorial markers were set up in Wall’s name: One, a flat marker with a bronze plaque, is at Resthaven Cemetery in Jacksonville, while a white granite was erected at Fort Sam National Cemetery, something McCann said she “had done” as a Father’s Day gift to her dad shortly after the birth of her second son.

Because Wall’s remains will be interred and there is no longer a need for a memorial marker, a permanent marker – also of white granite – will be erected at his grave, which will be in another section of the cemetery, said a Fort Sam Cemetery official.

A visitation for Airman Wall will be held from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday at Puente & Sons-Northeast Funeral home in San Antonio, with a chapel service to follow at 7 p.m.

On Friday, a procession departs from the funeral home at 10 a.m., with interment in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery at 11 a.m.

His family will be greeted at the cemetery by members of the local chapter of the Patriot Guard Riders.

The group, comprised of former military who are bike enthusiasts, formed in 2005. Members, who are invited guests of the family, “show our sincere respect for our fallen heroes, their families and their communities” while shielding mourners “from interruptions created by protestors” at burial services, according to the PGR mission statement.

Kathy Green Blackshear, a San Antonio resident who with her husband, Kevin, are members of the local Patriot Guard Riders chapter, has attended a number of military funerals, but the POW/MIA funerals are “extra special to us,” she said.

“(The families) are not quite as sad, sinces it’s been so long, but it is sure a nice ‘Welcome Home FINALLY’ type of thing,” she said. “The family is just glad to be able to have some closure.”

The couple stand in tribute because “it is so very important to honor our military because (theirs) can be a thankless job,” Blackshear said.

“Here you are, putting your very life on the line for someone you don’t know or perhaps (for)someone who just wants to kill you. There is a family who is now separated from their loved one and just wants them to come home again. It is such an honor for us to be able to say ‘thank you’ to a service member, but it’s so much more important to be there for the family when that person comes home to be buried.” she said. “They need to know that it wasn’t for nothing. That people do care.”

A1C Wall is survived by his daughter, Lea Ann McCann of Graham, N.C.; his widow, Verna George Teer of Chapel Hill, N.C.; his mother, Lora Wall of Dallas; a brother, Larry Wall of Texas; a sister, Karen Sue Casey, also of Texas; two grandsons, Jerry and Dillan Fletcher of Graham, N.C., and a great-grandson, James Fletcher of Graham, N.C.

He was preceded in death by his father, Lewis C. Wall, in 1997, and a brother, Mike Wall, in 2007.

Memorials may be made at Wells Fargo Bank in the name of “Jerry Mack Wall,” with funds distributed among various military veteran associations.

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Airman’s remains – missing for 46 years – to be laid to final rest

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