MISSING NO LONGER

OLIVE BRANCH, Ill. -- For nearly three decades, Doris Isom didn't leave her home without tacking a note to the door in case her Bubby came home.

They were little shards of paper, covered in plastic if it looked like rain, explaining that she was out of town visiting family, or grocery shopping, or at a neighbor's house for a visit.

Isom's younger half brother, Jerry Bridges, was declared missing in action in 1968 after his helicopter went down in Vietnam.

"I always wanted them to be able to find me," Isom said. "Just in case."

It wasn't until the mid-1990s that his status changed to killed in action. She still carries a photo of Bridges, who the family called Bubby, in her wallet.

Now all his 11 siblings will gather for a service May 25 at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. The family also will hold a private service in Columbia, Tenn., in June, with burial at Memory Gardens in Pulaski, Tenn.

Bridges will be buried next to his mother, Ora Mae Bridges, who died in December. She always kept hope that her lost son would return home. Sometimes just the sight of uniformed officers would upset her, Isom said.

With her mother's death, things have been a little tougher for Isom. But bringing her brother's remains back home will give the family peace, she said.

With a catch in her voice and eyes filling with tears, Isom tells a story about hearing a helicopter flying overhead and racing into a field behind her back yard to see if it might be bringing her brother home from Vietnam.

"I don't know what happened to me. I knew they wouldn't bring him home like that," she said. But the emotions of losing a relative -- and never really knowing what happened -- sometimes catch up to her.

Others unaccounted for'

The story is the same for thousands more relatives of missing soldiers. Since 1973, the remains of 593 American service members missing in action have been identified and returned to their families. But the Defense Department lists 1,990 Americans as "unaccounted for" from the war in Southeast Asia, 1,497 of them in Vietnam.

Isom is still learning to cope, dragging out scrapbooks and photo albums to hold until the pain subsides.

"He was the light of my life," she said. "I couldn't wait to get home from school to see him."

Bridges, who would be 53 now, was born when Isom was 13. He was the child who bridged two families after Isom's mother got a divorce, remarried and moved to Olive Branch. Another sister, Sandra, was born two years later.

Bridges attended a year of high school in Thebes, Ill., before the family returned to Tennessee. Just after his high school graduation, Bridges eagerly joined the Army, even re-enlisting after his first tour of duty.

Before he returned to Vietnam between hitches, he spent 30 days in the United States visiting with Isom and his other siblings, and a nephew named for him.

A member of the 243rd Assault Support Helicopter Company, he was a flight engineer on a resupply mission out of Dong Ba Thien airfield in South Vietnam in October 1968. He never returned from that mission.

Watching and waiting

For decades, the family waited for word about Bridges. Telegrams from the military never confirmed anything about the disappearance until 1984, when information began surfacing about a helicopter crash. Locals were talking about a crash site they had found.

It took almost 10 years for any military recovery teams to investigate that information and then visit the site to excavate and recover remains. It wasn't until 1994 that officials could recover the bodies of the crew, and it took another two years to identify them with DNA.

They used Isom's DNA to make the match.

Isom and her husband, Gene, live in Gainesville, Fla., but return to Olive Branch for a few months every year to visit Isom's half sister, Ethel McCrite, and enjoy the change of seasons.

They await the day of Bridges' funeral and burial but approach it with some reservation.

"It will be closure, but it comes with mixed feelings," Isom said.

She will keep the flag from Bubby's coffin.