Bringing Them Home
 More than 50 years after a pilot was shot down during the Korean War, his remains will be buried this May. The missing pilot’s fate was solved by a chance find and hard work.

More than 50 years after North Korean fighter jets shot down Capt. Troy Cope’s F-86 Sabre over Dandong, China, his family finally has learned his fate and will bury him in Plano, Texas, May 31.

In 1952, Cope was flying near MiG Alley when he encountered several MiG-15 aircraft and engaged in a fierce air fight. Contact with Cope was lost. Then in 1995 a U.S. businessman traveling in Dandong saw a display in a military museum there that included Cope’s military dog tag; he reported it to U.S. authorities. Four years later, a records search in Podolsk, Russia, by DoD analysts revealed more details about the case, including information about the crash site. Then in 2004, Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command officials sent a team to Dandong to excavate the crash site. The team recovered human remains identified to be those of Cope.

Army Rights a Wrong

Chaplain Capt. Henry Plummer, one of the first black officers to be commissioned a chaplain in the Army, has been issued an honorable discharge after being court-martialed more than 100 years ago. Plummer, born a slave in Prince George’s County, Md., in 1844, joined the U.S. Navy in 1864, during the Civil War. At the end of the war, he became a minister and was commissioned as an Army chaplain in 1884. He served with the 9th Cavalry Regiment, the Buffalo soldiers, as a chaplain for 10 years before he was dismissed for consuming alcohol and getting into an altercation with a noncommissioned officer.

In 2004, Plummer’s great-grand nephew asked the Army to review the case. Army officials did not overturn the court-martial but concluded that racism contributed to Plummer’s dismissal.

Picture Perfect

Memember posing for your basic training photo? Tech. Sgt. Tracy English, a 37th Training Wing historian at Lackland AFB, Texas, has created an online repository of Air Force basic training flight graduation photos. He has collected more than 2,000 photos and estimates there are some 117,000 to go. The project seeks to collect all U.S. Air Force basic training flight photos from the inception of the Air Force in 1947 to the present, from all the bases that conducted Air Force basic training. To trace your roots, visit the Web site at www.lackland.af.mil/info/flightphoto.asp.