‘Not My Brother’
(part 2 of the Charles J. Scharf Story).
Barbara Scharf Lowerison would stop the funeral if she could. And she certainly won’t be there for it, she said.
“I don’t know what they are burying,” she said. “That is not my brother.”
Charles Scharf was older by a year-and-a-half, and he was her protector before he was his wife’s.
“I’ll never forget when I had my first baby. I was 18 years old, and he wanted to take over,” she said, laughing. “We had a brother-and-sister rivalry at times, but there was nothing I wouldn’t do for him.”
About 25 boxes sit in her Hemet, Calif., home filled with letters, witness statements and scientific reports. She thinks he survived the crash, and if he isn’t alive, he was until this year. For four decades, she fought to bring him home.
“I think I’ve been a pain in a neck to everybody. But that’s okay. I’m fighting for my brother,” she said.
Before he disappeared, Lowerison was a housewife raising five boys and had no involvement in politics.
Since then, she has established sources in Vietnam and Russia whom she has asked for help. She has lobbied presidents from Richard M. Nixon on, giving each a POW bracelet with her brother’s name. And for every piece of evidence Pentagon officials have put forth to prove they found Scharf, she has fired back questions:
Why were the items at the excavation site not burned beyond recognition like the bodies?
Why did he have anything on him when most Air Force officers had to store personal effects in a locker before a mission?
Why was the bone fragment not good enough to establish a match with the blood sample she gave in 1992 but now can be matched with the letters?
“No one is telling the truth in this story,” she said. “That’s the bottom line. No one is telling the truth.”
Her proof, she said, includes statements from a former POW who was in her brother’s squadron. He told her that he saw photographs of Scharf after the crash. There is also a propaganda film in which a man can be seen for only seconds but walks exactly like her brother, she said.
“I used to say he swiveled when he walked,” Lowerison said. “He had a little bit of a sway to him.”
About two weeks before he disappeared, she received a letter from him. In it, he told her that he was sending her a ring for her birthday and that he had “some good war stories” to tell her boys when he got home, she said.
She thinks he would appreciate the fight she has launched in his name. “He would have a smile on his face and give me a thumbs-up sign,” she said.
If she had never seen the evidence, never heard from others who think he didn’t die in the crash, she said, she might have gone along with the military’s version, might have been able to bury him long ago. She still might be able to, she said, but not this way.
“If they come and tell me he died six months ago, I’d go along with it,” she said. “I would go to that burial.”
Lowerison and Patricia Scharf don’t speak ill of each other. They don’t speak much of each other at all, each dismissing the other’s beliefs in short, neutral sentences. “That’s her prerogative,” Lowerison said of Scharf. “Everyone has different ways of grieving,” Scharf said of Lowerison.
So on Thursday, Scharf will stand before her husband’s plot at Arlington, content that she has a place now to lay flowers. Lowerison will remain in California, not saying goodbye, not letting go.
I was under the impression that they did not use saliva at that time in vietnam for letters as the humidity was too high. Is there anyway to confirm these details? Does anyone from your club have recolection of these details? Saliva just doesn’t make sense to me!
From the article:
“Military scientists recently compared the bone recovered in a North Vietnamese jungle where an Air Force pilot’s plane went down 40 years ago to saliva on letters he had sent his wife. It was a DNA match, they announced.”
How can you assume that no one who served in Vietnam *ever* sealed their letters without saliva?
If the letters that were used came from blood relatives, there might be DNA contamination. The letters were provided by his wife, who would not be a DNA match.