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Father's Day bittersweet for one Airman's family

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Brendan C. Vargas
  • Air Force Print News
HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii (AFPN) --  Father's Day weekend was a special one for the family of Staff Sgt. Calvin Cooke Jr. After 34 years, his widow and daughters ended a chapter in their lives of wondering what happened to the remains of their husband and father.

Sergeant Cooke was a C-130 Hercules loadmaster during the Vietnam War. While taking part in an emergency resupply mission in April 1972, the plane he was on received enemy ground fire and crashed in South Vietnam. The crew was placed in missing-in-action status, then later was changed to killed in action.

More than three decades later, the Department of Defense identified and returned Sergeant Cooke's remains to his family during a ceremony at the Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command, or JPAC, headquarters here.

A JPAC team, working with Vietnamese citizens, recovered remains at the crash site and returned them to the headquarters for further investigation.

Once at JPAC, teams of anthropologists worked to identify the remains using DNA samples from family members of the Airmen involved in the crash. After extensive testing and analysis, it was concluded that one of the sets of remains belonged to Sergeant Cooke.

For Sergeant Cooke's family, coming to Hawaii and taking their loved one's remains home is a weight lifted off their shoulders.

"It was sad. It was like hearing it all over again, but it was the news we waited all that time for," said his widow, Carol Anderson.

Sergeant Cooke's remains were returned to the United States on Father's Day weekend. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., on Tuesday, June 20.