FAYETTEVILLE — Kelly Meroney sat at the head of the dining room table in his Fayetteville home gently holding a small blue and white card inside a plastic bag.
The military identification card of his father, Capt. Virgil K. Meroney III, is a cherished reminder for the 47-year-old Tyson Foods computer programmer.
It’s one of a handful of items he has to invoke memories of his father.
After resting more than four decades in a jungle in southeast Asia, the mundane, government-issue piece of plastic recently completed a long-awaited journey back to Northwest Arkansas.
At A Glance
Memorial Day Service
When: 10 a.m. Monday
Where: Fayetteville National Cemetery, 700 S. Government St., Fayetteville
Who: Featured speaker is retired Navy Rear Adm. Michael Johnson
Source: Staff Report
“I’m surprised it’s in such good shape,” the son said, looking over the still-legible signature of the U.S. Air Force pilot on the cracked and faded card.
The remains of his father are making the same, long-overdue trip back home.
Members of a military unit called the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command recovered the card last summer. Based at Hickam Air Force Base near Honolulu, the command is dedicated to recovering remains of service members killed in past U.S. wars. Mostly, they work to identify those killed in the Korean and Vietnam wars, but they have even been called upon to identify the remains of Civil War soldiers.
“We made a promise to bring our service members home,” said Allen Cronin, chief of the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations’ past conflicts branch.
Cronin has consulted Meroney’s family for years as JPAC slowly pieced together what happened to Meroney.
“Family members still have questions and we as a government owe them answers,” Cronin said.
But Cronin said the reaction from families can still be mixed.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” he said. “On the one hand, they have a semblance of closure. On the other side, it opens up all these wounds.”
Ball Of Fire
Kelly Meroney was only 4 when his father was shot down over the border of Vietnam and Laos on March 1, 1969.
His mother, Connie, for years periodically played audio tapes his father sent from Vietnam. She didn’t tell him of his father’s death until he was about 10 years old when she felt he could better understand the loss.
Neither he nor sister Kim Townsend, who now lives in Houston, have any memory of their father. They have heard many stories about him.
“He was a hero basically. A very amazing man, very funny, very outgoing,” Townsend said.
The Air Force pilot grew up in Pine Bluff. His father, also named Virgil Kersh Meroney, was a fighter pilot in World War II who eventually reached the rank of colonel.
Meroney readily embraced following in his father’s footsteps. He took the nickname Mike from his father, who was known as “Iron Mike” in World War II following a stint in a German POW camp.
The Meroney family traveled around the world as the colonel pursued a career in the Air Force.
“Being Air Force brats, Mike and I were both caught up and entrenched in the daily routines of military family life,” said Meroney’s brother, Doug. “It definitely had its long-term effects on us and we both felt that our futures included service in the military.”
Meroney excelled at sports and science, his brother said. When he moved to Fayetteville in 1963 to attend the University of Arkansas, he joined ROTC. Upon graduation from flight school, he volunteered to go to Vietnam.
“He wrote in his letters that he felt that the war and the mission were justified,” Kelly Meroney said.
In January 1969, Meroney flew his first combat mission with his father. He also flew at his father’s side during the eldest Meroney’s final mission the following month.
Meroney planned an Air Force career. Those plans were cut short as he flew a nighttime bombing run of Vietcong supplies in Laos.
It’s unclear from Air Force records whether Meroney or his superior, Col. Wendell Keller, was flying the McDonnell Douglas F-4D Phantom II. The airmen in the other plane said Meroney and Keller were approaching a final run when anti-aircraft fire took them out.
There was a ball of fire, then almost no sign of the two men for more than 40 years.
A Long Wait
Col. Virgil Meroney died in 1980. He knew his son probably died in Vietnam but went to his grave unsure of his son’s exact fate, Kelly Meroney said.
Connie Meroney died in 2008, also unsure of what became of her husband. She spoke of him fondly until the end of her life.
“He was the love of her life for sure,” Townsend said. “She called him her knight. It was a short-lived but very special relationship.”
Meroney’s mother, Louise Mildred Meroney died in 2009, though until the end she held out hope her son had survived the crash in Vietnam.
“It was my mother and grandmother’s life mission to find out what happened and have closure,” Townsend said.
Over the years, there were glimmers of hope. In the 1980s, as political conditions improved in southeast Asia, the U.S. government expanded efforts to find the remains of those killed in the Vietnam War.
In 1994, the Air Force contacted the Meroney family to tell them they found several crash sites. One might be where Meroney’s plane went down.
It wasn’t until 2011 that the excavation of a creek bed on the border of Laos and Vietnam turned up results. The searchers found Meroney’s military identification card in July.
JPAC personnel found hundreds of airplane pieces, though because of scavengers, the largest piece they found was only a tire, along with numerous human remains.
In March, many those remains were positively identified as belonging to Meroney and Keller.
“There’s a sense of shock mixed with relief,” Kelly Meroney said.
Alishia Ferguson, a professor in the University of Arkansas School of Social Work who teaches a class on death and dying, said the military’s mission to find the remains of soldiers is important because a burial ceremony lets families know their loved one’s remains are safe and have been treated respectfully.
“It’s less like closure, and more like punctuation,” she said. “It’s the last thing we do before moving on to the next chapter.”
The family now knows what happened to Meroney, and on June 6 his remains will be flown from Hawaii to Northwest Arkansas to arrive at their final resting place.
The remains that couldn’t be identified as Meroney or Keller will be interred together later this summer during a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.
Funeral services will be at 1 p.m. June 9 at University Baptist Church with burial at Fairview Memorial Gardens following the service.
Meroney will be buried next to his wife.
“We were always planning for that. We just weren’t sure how soon it would happen,” Kelly Meroney said.