Rays from the morning sun slipped under the shade and bounced off the silvery metal like an exclamation point. Even without my glasses I knew it was the bracelet. I knew the inscription on it—Lt. Barton S. Creed, USN-MIA, March 13, 1971—by heart. As the simple nickel-plated semicircle rested there on the dresser in my son's guest room, I knew the journey it had taken before it came to that place.
She was a young nursing student in the early 1970s when the Vietnam War still raged but was near its inglorious end. She had cared about the soldiers who fought the unpopular war, the ones who lived and the ones who died. She had been moved, too, by the plight of men who were held as prisoners of war (POWs) or were missing in action (MIA), their fates unknown.
Wanting to do something—anything—to help the cause of those men, she bought the plain memorial bracelet from an organization raising funds to keep the issue of the POWs and MIAs before the public. She did not ask for any one man's name, because she did not know any of them or their families personally. So she requested a name at random. A man she never had known became someone in whom she would invest her hopes and prayers for a safe return home.
She also requested, and was sent, a brief biography of Lieutenant Barton S. Creed, a U.S. Navy flier missing in the jungles of Laos, on the other side of the world from his happy boyhood in Peekskill, New York. Shot down over Southeast Asia soon after his 25th birthday, he had been hurt but was alive on the ground. His last radioed words were, "Get me out now. They are here." Then he was gone, leaving behind devoted parents, a brother, a wife, and a son and daughter. He was never heard from again.
Marrying and practicing nursing in the Indianapolis area, she continued to wear the bracelet for almost 20 years, never forgetting Bart, always searching the news for the repatriation of remains of those lost from that war, always wondering what happened to him and to his family.
It was with mixed emotions that she and her family moved from Indianapolis to a small town outside Akron, Ohio, in 1992. But that move entangled with fate to answer some of her decades-long questions about the man whose name she wore on her wrist.
In a different area, beginning a different job, she scanned the paper daily to get a better sense of what went on in her new town. She read the obituaries to know the histories of ordinary folks and she read the wedding and engagement announcements to know their futures. That was when her eyes and her heart almost stopped.
Among the engagement announcements was the picture of a handsome young man in a Marine Corps uniform. In front of him sat a pretty local Ohio girl. "To marry in August," it read. But what pulled her up short was the name under the picture. "Creed." She continued reading. Second lieutenant Scott Creed, who was to marry Barbara Houck, was the son of a Marine colonel and his wife from Virginia. Oh well, it was not him, she thought at first. Then she continued and found there was more. "He is also the son of Lt. Barton S. Creed, USN, MIA in Laos since 1971."
Stunned and tearful, she quickly wrote down the names of Barbara's parents, who lived in the same small town. She found their number in the phone book. She hesitated to call, fearing it would be intrusive in the lives of families who did not know her. In the belief that what she had to tell would be important to them, she overcame the fear and finally placed the call.
Without hesitation, both families asked her to come to the wedding. She had earned a place on the groom's side of the aisle after all those years of caring about his father, and about him. He had, after all, grown up in her heart, if not in her reality.
When the ceremony ended and the guests had gone outside, she went into the vestibule of the church where the bride and groom were preparing to emerge as husband and wife under the traditional sword arch of a military wedding.
"I think it's time for you to have this," her voice quaked as she handed the bracelet to the young man who represented the future his father had been denied. He smiled at her as he took it. Then he embraced her. And a story that has not ended added one more chapter to a family's search for peace and closure.
I looked at the bracelet again as I rose from the bed in my older son's guestroom. Suddenly, memories were interrupted by the sounds only a baby can make. I left the bedroom to gaze on a symbol of how life continues. I lifted my new grandson and held him in my arms. I melted into his big blue eyes as I greeted him brightly, "Good morning, Barton Creed."