“You gotta be kiddin’ me.” Ann Mills-Griffiths is almost speechless. Almost.
It’s Aug. 14, 2018. She is sitting at her desk in Falls Church, Virginia, on a sweltering summer day, across from three officials from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA. They had called her this morning, asking to see her in person. “I didn’t think anything of it because I talk to them all the time.”
They have news. They have retrieved a few tiny bone fragments from the shallow, muddy waters off the coast of the fishing village of Quynh Phuong, north of Vinh. Using DNA samples she has given DPAA, they have confirmed that the osseous material is her brother’s, Navy Cdr. James B. Mills.
It has been 52 years since he disappeared during an armed reconnaissance mission, the seventh mission of his second deployment to Vietnam. Mills, a radar intercept officer, and his pilot, Capt. James Bauder, were flying an F-4B Phantom when they disappeared from radar in the dead of night. No flak, missiles, nor anti-aircraft artillery were in the area. No explosions were seen or heard. Search and rescue aircraft saw nothing. Bauder and Mills had vanished.
Ann was at the home of her parents in Bakersfield, California, when she received the news. A chaplain and the local high school football coach, also a Navy reservist, knocked at the Mills’ front door in his uniform. Ann, then 25, escorted them inside. “I looked at them with dread. And they said, ‘Yes, it’s
