When Jimmy Pannell and his brother-in-law Jeremy Nietert surfaced from a swimming hole below a Mulberry River waterfall this past Father's Day, they had no idea they'd discovered one of the best Father's Day presents imaginable.
Nietert, a Fort Smith fire fighter, held aloft a bracelet he'd culled from the bottom of the hole.
"Jeremy said, 'Hey, this has your name on it,'" Pannell said. "It said 'Jimbo,' but I didn't think anything of it at the time. I just put it on my wrist, and we kept going.'"
"A lot of people jump off that waterfall," Pannell said, describing the variety of items they find there. "Go-Pro cameras, Kodak cameras, cheap sunglasses. But this is the first time we ever found anything that was actually worth finding."
When Pannell and Nietert returned to their camp along the river that afternoon, they knew they'd found something that was likely missed by someone.
"One side said 'greatly loved,' and the other said 'KIA,'" Pannell said. "I'm from a military family. I knew what 'KIA' meant."
Killed in action.
After returning to Branch that evening, Pannell began researching the name inscribed on the bracelet: U.S. Air Force Master Sergeant James B. "Jimbo" May II. He quickly found several websites describing how May, a gunner aboard a C-130 gunship, had been posthumously awarded the Silver Star for gallantry during the Battle of Khafji, Saudi Arabia, on Jan. 31, 1991.
The battle was one of the first ground engagements of the Persian Gulf War. On Jan. 19, May's aircraft was firing on an Iraqi ground-to-air missile site when anti-aircraft fire downed the plane, according to the "Hall of Valor," an online project from the Military Times, which reports on issues involving the various branches of the U.S. military.
Additional research led Pannell to locate May's widow, Christina May, in Fort Walton Beach, Fla.
"At that point, I just wondered how something from Fort Walton Beach ended up in the Mulberry River," he said.
It wasn't a phone call Christina May was expecting. She herself has several different versions of her late husband's KIA bracelet, in addition to some inscribed with MIA -- missing in action -- that were given to her in the month between the disappearance of James' plane and the discovery of the wreckage that confirmed his death.
"They'd been blowing up the oil fields," said Christina, an 18-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force. "There was smoke everywhere, oil on the water. You couldn't see jack."
Both of the children she and James had together, James Scott and April, had their own bracelets memorializing their father, but neither had mentioned losing theirs. So when Pannell and Christina spoke on the phone, "I just thought it was the weirdest thing," she said.
But when Christina posted the anecdote on her Facebook account, it wasn't long before she received an urgent call from April, 400 miles away in Elberton, Ga.
"I picked up the phone, called my mom and started crying," April said. "'That's my bracelet.'"
Earlier that June, April had attended her third Wakarusa, the camping and music festival that draws about 25,000 attendees each summer to Mulberry Mountain, a 600-acre venue about 20 miles north of Ozark, Ark. Two days into the festival, she accompanied a friend on the 2-mile hike to the same waterfall where Pannell and Nietert would be scuba diving a week later.
Joining the dozens of campers jumping into the pool below the fall, April emerged from the frigid water and instantly realized something was wrong.
"The water was so cold; I couldn't breath," April said. "When I grabbed my chest, I already felt there wasn't anything on my wrist."
April said she flailed beneath the surface of the water for a moment, hoping to find the bracelet, but quickly realized it was fruitless.
"It was instant," April said. "But the moment I lost the bracelet, honestly, was a really humbling moment for me."
April had journeyed to Arkansas with two other people -- an aunt whose son, April's cousin, had been killed in a car crash in January, and a friend whose father had died two months earlier.
"So I'm with these people who were all hurting because they'd lost somebody, and the last thing I could do was talk about a bracelet," April said.
April was 2 years old when her father was killed. She said her only memory of James was him "suiting up" one day before leaving their house to report for duty. Although she had worn the KIA bracelet consistently since leaving her mother's home in 2006 to attend college, she made a decision not to fixate on the loss of the keepsake.
"I didn't want to go through the motions of it. I just had to let it go. A bracelet's just a bracelet," she said. "But evidently, it's more than just a bracelet."
Christina May said she had recently received the bracelet from Arkansas in the mail, and would soon be sending it on to her daughter in Georgia.
Metro on 07/05/2014