After waiting 41 years, widow of Korean War MIA can visit gravesite

WASHINGTON -- Patricia Scharf comes prepared when she visits her husband's grave at Arlington National Cemetery every week.She keeps clippers in her trunk to trim long flower stems, and she brings cupcakes to the security guards.For 41 years after her husband, Charles Scharf, went missing during the Vietnam War, Scharf did not know where he was. Now, she said, she visits his grave, where his bone fragments and photos are buried."He's not lost forever," said Scharf, 75, of Falls Church, Va. "I know where he is, and I know where I'm going right next to him."The U.S. Air Force colonel she refers to as Chuck, disappeared Oct. 1, 1965, when his plane was shot down over North Vietnam, two weeks before he would have returned home.On the day she found out he was gone, she answered the door without checking who it was. The base commander from MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, where her husband was stationed, stood at her doorstep along with two squadron commanders and a base doctor.Sobbing, Scharf said she asked if her husband was dead."They said, 'No, as far as we know, he's only missing'," Scharf said.At first, Scharf said she held out hope that he would be found as a prisoner of war. She listened to each news report of a recovered plane, hoping it was his.But in 1978, after every soldier located in a POW camp had come home, Scharf officially became a widow when her husband's status was changed from missing in action to killed in action. By then, she had moved from the base in Tampa, Fla., to Northern Virginia.She took a job at a jewelry store located in the Pentagon jewelry store and worked there for more than 40 years before retiring in April. She never remarried.As long as a service member is missing, each branch of military provides casualty service officers to update family members, said Jim Russell, chief of the Air Force's Missing Persons Branch."We knew it was important as a trust to our service members and to the families that there's an agency that would assist families," Russell said.In October 2006, there was a break in Scharf's case. She said the researcher trying to match DNA to remains found in Vietnam asked if she had anything else they could use."I said that all I still had were the letters he had sent me," she said After a long pause, Scharf said the researcher asked her to overnight about 12 envelopes to the lab in Hawaii. They would try to extract DNA from the stamps, he told her.It worked. Chuck Scharf was the first service member whose remains were identified using DNA from old stamps.When Scharf visits her husband's grave near sunset and hears taps in the distance, she said she imagines all of the service members standing at attention, saluting the flag.Then she thinks about them heading off to happy hour to share a beer and a story, she said. And one day, she said she wants to join them.Amanda Peterson is a reporter for the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire in Washington.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)