As Veterans Day approached I thought of Sgt. Rivers.

Jewel Rivers, “Jack” to his friends, was from the New Prospect community in rural Clarke County, Alabama. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps on Dec. 28, 1943. Rivers wanted to be a pilot but instead became a waist gunner on a B-24 Liberator flying with the 90th Bomb Group – the

Jolly Rogers.” They sent him to New Guinea.

From there he wrote his wife and infant son of how important

was for them to “keep the world we know a place for men to live in peace, to plan, to hope, and to dream the future that is ours and yours.”

He never saw that future.

On Nov. 19, 1944, Rivers’ plane flew off to bomb a Japanese base on Mindanao Island in the Philippines. It did not return. Eventually the Department of the Army notified his wife that searches had been unsuccessful and that Sgt. Rivers had been declared officially killed in action “in the Pacific.”

A grateful government gave Mrs. Rivers just enough so that by moving in with her mother and working two and three jobs she was able to support the family. To this day her son remembers her

crying herself to sleep at night longing for my father’s return.”

I wouldn’t know any of this if that son, Alfred, was not a friend from childhood. But I didn’t learn of it then. Growing up I knew his father went to war and was lost, and I think I was a little guilty that mine had returned, but kids don’t talk about such. So it was not until last year that the story of Sgt. Rivers began to spill out.

It started when Alfred told me of finding a message on his answering machine from a fellow named Bruce Fenstermaker asking him if he was the son of Jewel Rivers, and if he was, give him a call.

Not sure just what to do, Alfred waited. A couple of days later, another message. So he answered.

Fenstermaker, it turns out, is an aviation historian who works to identify and recover planes that were downed in the Pacific Theater during World War II (check it out on www.pacificwrecks. com).

And there are lots of planes to recover, so many that by 1944, the complexity of the search, discover, report and verify effort was so great that somewhere, somehow, some things were bound to be misfiled, overlooked. This was what had happened. Jewel Rivers did not go down “in the Pacific.” Army records reveal that the plane crashed near Babo, Indonesia, but word never got back to the family.

How do you respond to something like that?

When Alfred first told me, not long after he got the news, he was obviously troubled. His mother had recently died believing that her husband’s remains were in the ocean, unrecoverable.

Now her son learns that not only had his plane been found but that after the war two sets of remains were removed, taken to the Manila American Cemetery and buried among the unknowns. Other members of the 10 man crew were still there, in a remote mangrove swamp, far upriver from civilization.

Fernstermaker was in the Babo area in 1990 when he heard of the crash site. It took him five hours in a boat and a long hike through the jungle to get there. When he arrived he found a “large aircraft debris field” and was able to identify Rivers’ B-24. He gave the identification numbers to Alfred.

So what does the son do now?

Like his father, and maybe because of him, Alfred went into the service. He became the pilot his father had wanted to be and today is a retired Air Force colonel. Had he known what the Army knew back when he was serving in Vietnam, Alfred might have found a way to make the trip and search on his own. He was a young man then. Today, just turned 67, there are physical as well as geographic limitations.

But still, as he wrote me, “while I might have some closure knowing about the crash site,” one link in the chain is missing.

It might be in Manila.

Army records, according to Fenstermaker, are remarkably complete. The graves of those two unknown airmen could well be found, the remains exhumed, DNA tests run. If one of them is Jewel Rivers, Alfred would know where his father lies.

If none are, well that’s an answer too.

But, as Alfred told me, getting the Department of the Army to act on these things is difficult. You need people in high places to help you. Alfred lives in California now.

But Jewel Rivers was not a Californian. He was from Alabama.

What would it take to get an Alabama senator or congressman to use their influence to help identify one of our own, one of our veterans?

Well, maybe we are about to find out.

Help us if you can.

Elsewhere on this page are addresses for our congressional delegation. Write them about Sgt. Rivers if you are inclined to do so.

Harvey H. “Hardy” Jackson is Eminent Scholar in History at Jacksonville State University and a columnist and editorial writer for The Anniston Star. He grew up in Grove Hill.

E-mail: hjackson@jsu.edu.