THE WALL OF FACES

I can't imagine how hard it must have been for you to be away from your family, as you waged both a physical and spiritual war, from Thailand, in Vietnam. Thank you for giving your very life for the same beliefs as I hold dear; you gave your all, for your brothers, for many innocent strangers and for a difficult, but heartfelt hope. Bless you, Sir, and reat forever in well-earned peace with our Savior. I met your little girl last weekend. She's all grown up and beautiful, and you would continue to be so very, very proud of her!

I'll never forget you.

- A MOTHER'S STORY -

A REMEMBRANCE OF

LIEUTENANT COLONEL

KENNETH ARNOLD STONEBRAKER



HIGHLAND, Indiana - 27 MAY 1996 -

For 26 Memorial Days, Mary Stonebraker participated in parades and ceremonies honoring those who died in combat, never knowing the fate of her own son whose Phantom jet disappeared over North Vietnam the night of 28 October 1968.

For those same years, a white POW/MIA flag has been displayed first on her car antenna and later in the window of her Highland home.

This Memorial Day, she can honor her own firstborn, and she could now take down the flag.

In January of this year - 27 years, two months and 19 days after that jet disappeared - the 76-year old mother and her family were officially notified of Lt. Col. Kenneth Stonebraker's death on that late October night.

The jet, on a night reconnaisance mission to photograph behind enemy lines in North Vietnam, slammed into a remote mountain, apparently hit by enemy fire.

The normalization of relations with North Vietnam under the Clinton administration allowed a team of U.S. military personnel and North Vietnamese to locate and excavate the crash site last summer.

Completely shrouded by a double canopy jungle, the crash site was in rugged mountain terrain on a steep west-facing slope.

During the three weeks of excavation no human remains nor personal effects of Kenneth Stonebraker or the jet's pilot, Captain William Harry Stroven, were found.

However, details given by an eyewitness to the crash - at the time a North Vietnamese student - indicate both men perished in the crash and ensuing fire.

Heavy scavenging of the crash site by the eyewitness and other area residents left little remaining of the jet to be found by the excavation team.

However, based on the eyewitness' credible story and the excavation itself, the U.S. government officially determined both men had perished on the night mission.

It was a mission Kenneth Stonebraker was trained well to do.

A photographer and navigator, he entered the Air Force after the Stonebraker family moved from Highland to a farm in Hobart.

" We lived there (on the farm) only two months when he came to us and said he was going into the service," Mary Stonebraker recalled.

That was in the 1950s, in peacetime.

During the following years, Kenneth Stonebraker traveled around the world, stationed at Air Force bases in exotic locales.

He married Highland resident Zelda Border, too, and when he shipped out for Vietnam in 1968, the nearly 30-year old Air Force Captain Kenneth Stonebraker left behind a young son and daughter.

With two field promotions while he was stationed in Vietnam, he was a Lt. Colonel when the Phantom jet left base that late October night to photograph the build up of enemy troops in the Bo Trach district of Quang Binh Province, North Vietnam.

After the jet disappeared, the Air Force sent an airman to the Stonebraker's farm in Hobart to deliver the news that their son was missing in action.

" He was really just a young man. He couldn't have been more than 25. I really felt sorry for that young man having to come and tell us that news,"

Mary Stonebraker said, looking out in the distance, perhaps back over those years.

" My husband sat at one end of the table and I sat on the other. That young man told us what happened and we all just sat there silent," she recalled.

The silence stretched into minutes and eventually became too much for the young airman.

" He asked us, ' What do you have that others don't have ?' I guess because we didn't cry," Mary Stonebraker said, recalling those days.

" We told the young man ' We put him (our son) in God's hands. Whatever was to be would be.'"

Arnold Stonebraker went back into the barn without saying another word but his widow now recalls, " It was the hardest thing he ever had to do to come into the house and hear that news."

Arnold Stonebraker died 14 years ago while fixing up the Highland home where Mary still lives, never knowing what exactly happened to his son.

" We didn't know if Kenny was laying in a prison camp. We heard so many rumors about him. It didn't make any sense," Mary Stonebraker recalled.

Although the Stonebrakers didn't know if their son was alive or dead, the government sent them a military tombstone in 1979 with that year as his death date.

That was the year the government was attempting to tie up all the loose ends of the war in Vietnam, Mary Stonebraker said.

Families of other servicemen listed as missing in action also received tombstones in 1979.

" I was surprised they did it that way (sent a tombstone with a date without knowing her son's fate)," she said. " We thought it was odd that it had a date on it. My husband set up the tombstone himself in Ross Cemetery. He's buried alongside it."

Each day of these long 27 years, Mary Stonebraker said she's prayed about her son.

" I prayed every day that he was gone (dead). I know that probably sounds horrible, but I didn't want him laying in some prison," she said looking directly into a visitor's eyes.

" If he was in a prison camp, what would he be like (after all those years)?

Unless he was just captured. But if he was injured ...," she said, her voice trailing into silence.

With the official notification of her son's death in her hands, Mary Stonebraker did take the POW/MIA flag down from her window as the Air Force instructed but a number of Highland residents asked her to return it to her window.

" I put it back up to remember the rest of the men who are still missing," she said, glancing at the white flag with the familiar sihouette of a man and a prison guard tower in the background

Twenty-seven years after his plane was reported missing, Kenneth Stonebraker is no longer considered an MIA. His fate is finally known and his grave will remain empty.

Now there's only one thing left for his mother to do, she said, wistfully.

" I'd like to have the date changed on his tombstone."



~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~



DAUGHTER SHARES TAPES FROM MISSING

IN ACTION FATHER ON POW / MIA DAY

http://www.theleafchronicle.com/story/news/local/fort-campbell/2015/09/18/daughter-shares-tapes-missing-father-powmia-day/72391444/

https://www.army.mil/article/156199/fort_campbell_commemorates_powmia_day

https://vvmf.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/daughter-longs-for-closure-49-years-after-father-went-missing-in-action/


~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~


LIEUTENANT COLONEL

KENNETH ARNOLD STONEBRAKER

served proudly with the

11th TACTICAL RECONNAISSANCE SQUADRON

432nd TACTICAL RECONNAISSANCE WING

7th AIR FORCE



and was a

posthumous recipient

of the following

military decorations

and service medals


AIR MEDAL with 4 Oak Leaf Clusters

PURPLE HEART

NATIONAL DEFENSE SERVICE MEDAL

VIETNAM SERVICE MEDAL

REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM CAMPAIGN SERVICE MEDAL

USAF LONGEVITY SERVICE RIBBON with Oak Leaf Cluster


and was entitled to wear


USAF COMMAND PILOT WINGS



HE HAS AN IN REMEMBRANCE HEADSTONE IN

ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA





YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN

NOR SHALL YOU EVER BE





R E M E M B R A N C E



http://www.virtualwall.org/ds/StonebrakerKA01a.htm







~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~

Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Arnold Stonebraker, Served with the 11th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, 432nd Tactical Reconnaissance Wing, 7th Air Force.

At Fort Campbell, the pain of ‘POW/MIA’ explained
By Philip Grey, The Leaf-Chronicle, Clarksville, TN September 19, 2014

On Friday, the daughter of an Air Force Lt. Col. missing in action for 46 years brought her father’s memory back to life at Fort Campbell on National POW/MIA Recognition Day

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. – Fort Campbell held an observance of National POW/MIA (Prisoner of War/Missing in Action) Recognition Day on Friday, which was the first time the post has held a formal event marking the day.

The post’s Survivor Outreach Services (S.O.S.) program hosted the event at the Don F. Pratt Museum, thanks to the outreach of a surviving family member of a missing-in-action Vietnam-era Air Force pilot.

Suzy Yates of S.O.S. said that Cindy Stonebraker approached her about the national day of observance and inspired her to help put together a program.

It was a natural fit for S.O.S. to do so, since their function is to support surviving military family members. Though the fate of Stonebraker’s father is not known for sure, after 46 years she has come to terms with being a surviving family member of an American serviceman who is not coming home.

And if the day signifies something beyond recognizing the nation’s debt to prisoners of war and those who never came home, it is the acknowledgment of the debt owed to those they left behind – the family members who have had no grave to visit, and no closure for a wound that has remained open for decades.

On Friday, Cindy Stonebraker, daughter of U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Kenneth Stonebraker, told a small crowd at the Don F. Pratt Museum on post what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a missing servicemember.

‘POWMIA’

Col. David “Buck” Dellinger, Commander, Fort Campbell Garrison, preceded Stonebraker and related the Department of Defense numbers of missing servicemembers from Vietnam – 1741, with the remains of 841 MIAs recovered since the end of the war.

Cindy Stonebraker’s father has not been recovered and his ultimate fate is unknown from the day he took off from a Thailand airfield to perform a night reconnaissance mission over Vietnam on Oct. 28, 1968.

The date was ten days after her birthday, and her last memory of him was a dollhouse he bought for her birthday before he went missing.

The word, “missing” would be her cross to bear for all the years to come. It made her different from other children, especially when her mother moved the family to a northern California area as far from the military as they could get.

“POWMIA,” Stonebraker said it as a word. “It was something we didn’t deal with, didn’t talk about.

“Kids I grew up with didn’t know anyone in the military, certainly didn’t know anyone lost in military service and had no idea about anybody being missing.”

‘Not alone’

For more than four decades, Cindy felt isolated and alone with a pain that had no end and no explanation.

Then one day four years ago, she was driving from Hopkinsville to Clarksville and ran into nine members of Rolling Thunder, an organization dedicated to publicizing the POW/MIA cause. They were hoisting a POW/MIA flag at a rest stop.

Meeting them and talking to them made her realize her dad was not entirely forgotten and she was not alone. It was a life-changing moment that led her to others like her – children of the missing.

In the last three years she has spent Father’s Day at the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C., found her dad’s military records, visited a plane like the one her father flew, and attended a reunion of tactical recon Vietnam-era pilots like her father, finding not just one, but three men who knew him.

And after all the years of doubt and pain, she wondered if they were just telling her what she wanted to hear, until one asked her, “How did you like your dollhouse?”

He had been with her father when he bought the present in Thailand, and she asked him how he could possibly remember such a thing.

He explained that the small event was memorable for him because it was a rare moment of normalcy in the chaos and destruction of war. And she realized how many others were affected by her father’s disappearance 46 years ago.

‘Not one word’

If someone in the room didn’t get the meaning of the POW/MIA flag before Friday, they left the room with a better understanding.

Vietnam veteran A.J. Perrone was one person in attendance who “got it” long before Friday’s ceremony.

Since the day he was almost left behind to become one of the Missing during his service in the Vietnam War, he has been driven to visit every state capital and even the Nation’s Capitol on multiple occasions to fight for the honor and meaning of the POW/MIA flag, and to secure for families like the Stonebrakers the simple respect that is the very least owed to them.

And while he briefly savors a few victories in his mission of education, a day like National POW/MIA Recognition Day drives home the fact that the words, “You Are Not Forgotten,” ring hollow for too many people – including here in this heavily military community.

“The saddest part of this day,” said Perrone, “is when you put your TV on in the morning checking the national news and then the Nashville news and not one word is said about today being a National Day of Observance.”

At least for the few people who attended Friday’s ceremony at Fort Campbell, there was a rare chance to make a personal connection with the meaning of the black and white POW/MIA flag that is seen across the country every day, and yet not really seen at all.

And maybe now they can explain it to someone else.

Although I never knew you as a person I assume you are much like your beautiful talented daughter I do know. God bless you and Thankyou for your service! Never forgotten! One day you will be found!