RIP: John C. "Buzz" Ellison

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...092001663.html

Father and Son, Separated by War, Crash and Disappearance, United

By Candace Rondeaux
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 21, 2006; B03

James E. Plowman Jr. was just a boy when he first visited Arlington
National Cemetery all those years ago. It was a different time, and the
country had just finished fighting a different war. He didn't know then
how much he would miss a father he had never met -- or that he'd be
back 35 years later to say goodbye, again.

But there he stood yesterday, teary-eyed, searching the blue early
autumn sky as four Navy jets streaked overhead. He and his family had
waited years for this moment: Navy Lt. James E. Plowman Sr. was home at
last.

His burial at Arlington yesterday took place 39 years after he and his
pilot, Capt. John C. "Buzz" Ellison, were shot down in their A-6A
Intruder near the Vietnam-China border. The two were declared missing
in action after their plane disappeared from radar March 24, 1967.
Their plane went down near a village in Ha Bac Province in North
Vietnam.

James E. Plowman Jr. was born five months later.

For years, Plowman's family held out hope that the 23-year-old Navy
flier would someday return. Plowman's relatives wrote letters to
members of Congress. They sent care packages to Vietnam. All that
returned was silence from Hanoi. When the young Plowman began to call
his grandfather "Dad," his mother, Kathy Super, decided it was time to
let go. She asked the Navy to declare James Plowman Sr. killed in
action in 1973, and a ceremony was held at Arlington shortly afterward.

Up until about two years ago, James Plowman Sr. was counted among the
more than 1,800 Americans still missing in Vietnam. But his remains
were found after a team of U.S. and Vietnamese researchers traveled to
Vietnam's Ha Bac Province in 1993 to look for the Intruder's crash
site. Many false leads and many years later, the team found charred
fragments of human bone scattered at the crash site. Tests on the
remains showed a DNA match with Plowman, but there was no conclusive
match for Ellison, according to the Defense Department.

The news was a relief for the Plowman family but it also reopened old
wounds. When the Navy offered this year to hold a second funeral
ceremony at Arlington, Plowman, now with a family of his own in
Leesburg and a job as Loudoun County's chief prosecutor, initially was
not sure.

But yesterday, as a Navy band played a few feet from his father's
flag-draped coffin, he was more certain. "Every time I hear things
about him, I miss what we could have had," Plowman said. "I know we
would have had a good time together."

Many of the more than 60 people who stood by his side remembered the
good times they had with his dad. Some remembered with a smile the
young Navy pilot's love of a good joke and fast cars. Some recalled the
day a Navy chaplain and an officer strode solemnly to the door to
deliver the news about Plowman's downed fighter jet. As sailors in
ceremonial white uniforms fired a three-gun salute yesterday, still
others thought of the long years of waiting for news it seemed would
never come.

Many also remembered how the younger Plowman had been at his mother's
side when the Navy honored his father at Arlington the first time. They
called the boy "Little Jimmy" and said he was probably too young to
remember much about that long-ago ceremony.

This time, he said, he'll remember every minute.