Worldwide Search for Marine's Resting Place Ends in Florida
Orlando Sentinel | Aug 04, 2015 | by Steven Lemongello
A watch and a knife.
When Chi Nguyen discovered the body of a U.S. Marine pilot shot down over South Vietnam in the early days of the war, he buried the remains in a makeshift grave.
But he kept those two objects: an Indian-themed folding knife with a man's face carved into the handle, and the face of a Swiss Zodiac watch, rusted and cracked.
Decades later, Nguyen, a former North Vietnamese soldier, felt it was time to return those artifacts to the loved ones of the man whose death he discovered long ago.
But who was he? Where did his remains ultimately end up? And who was left to receive the watch and knife?
After a nationwide search by documentarians, academics and researchers that stretched from Vietnam to Hawaii to Ohio to Rhode Island, the answer turned out to center on a small patch of grass in Winter Park.
An image of the grave of U.S. Marine Captain John Brooks Sherman, 1940-1966, located somewhere near the center of Glen Haven Memorial Park cemetery, appears in a documentary by Vietnamese broadcasting organization VTV International that premiered last week.
The long search for Sherman's resting place, and efforts to return his mementos and those of others killed in battle, was just one part of the process of rapprochementbetween the two countries in the 40 years since the end of the Vietnam War and the 20 years since relations were normalized.
In thank-you letters to those who helped in the search, project leader Minh Le described the group's goals: "Bringing people together, raising the public awareness of our joined efforts for the reconciliation, healing the wounds caused by the war (physically and mentally), closing the past and looking forward to the prosperous future of our two nations."
Jay Hartwell, student media adviser at the University of Hawaiiat Manoa, said that VTV "understood how important reconciliation was, not just to individuals but also towards healing after the war itself."
In a ceremony earlier this year, Hartwell and others presented Sherman's knife and watch, along with a bouquet of white roses -- representing a deceased, unmarried man in Vietnamese culture -- to the Hawaiian chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America, or VVA.
Also in the display was a box containing letters from Chi Nguyen to the VVA, asking for help in returning the watch and knife to Sherman's family -- the letters that sparked the search for Sherman.
"As he got old, he thought it was not right that he should hold on to these things," Hartwell said of Nguyen. "He thought he should hand them back. But he didn't know who the pilot was."
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John Brooks Sherman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and graduated from Brown University in Rhode Island in 1962. He was shot down over South Vietnam on March 25, 1966, and his body remained in its makeshift grave near his crash site until it was found by a U.S. recovery team in 1993.
He was not identified until 1998 -- all facts that the VVA and Le's team soon put together. But after that, the thread began to wear thin.
Hartwell works right down the street from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl, where Sherman's name is listed at the Court of the Missing for the Vietnam War.
Le and the VVA reached out to him to find out whether Sherman was buried there. But no -- not only was Sherman not there, the American Battlefields Monuments Commission didn't know where he was, either.
There were no public burial notices, no listings of funeral services.
Sherman's last known address was listed as Darien, Conn., where his father had moved the family before his own death in 1963.
Hartwell called the Marines Casualty Office. He called a friend who worked at The New York Times' Pentagon bureau. No luck.
Next, Hartwell reached out to Brown University's alumni office, which sent out a mass email to the class of '62. That carved out a number of leads.
"It was incredible, talking along the way with people who really loved this guy," Hartwell said.
He was captain of the soccer team, full of the "joy of life," Hartwell said. "I would talk to guys, and they got choked up about him."
Sherman's roommate remembered a younger brother named Stephen, while a library staffer found Sherman's parents' names, Allan and Mary.
The alumni office also found an old address for Sherman's mother, Mary, who had moved after her husband's death: Winter Park, Florida.
Soon, the Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency confirmed that Sherman's remains had been turned over to an Orlando mortuary in 1998.
A memorial website had listed Glen Haven, a 56-acre cemetery in eastern Winter Park, as a possible burial site for Sherman. But employees there said that there was no listing of him among the numerous Shermans buried there.
But with the information from Brown and the DOD, they were able to piece it together.
Stephen Sherman, a Winter Springs resident, had taken possession of his brother's remains and buried them in his parents' plot. So only the parents' names were listed in the cemetery records.
But today, next to the graves of Allan and Mary Sherman is the gravestone of their son, dead at 26, buried in a foreign land for decades, returned to his homeland and, somehow, lost and found again.
A Sentinel photographer shot footage of the grave for use by the documentary crew, bringing images of the resting place of Captain John Brooks Sherman to the land where he died.
Stephen Sherman, however, will not receive his brother's watch and knife. Public records list him as having died in November. His grave is not marked or listed at Glen Haven, leaving yet another Sherman resting place unknown.
With no immediate next-of-kin, the watch and the knife will be donated by the VVA to the Brown University Alumni Office, which will eventually put them on display.
As for Chi Nguyen, the VTV crew came back to him with the name and photo of the man he buried years before.
"You see the reaction when he sees the photograph," Hartwell said. "For him to find out who he was and what happened to him, for that closure to took place? That's part of the story that continues to resonate."
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/08/04/worldwide-search-for-marines-resting-place-ends-in-florida.html
