Businessman keeps airman's memory alive
Lt. Cmdr. James B. Mills was lost flying a mission over North Vietnam
BY STEVEN MAYER
Californian staff writer
e-mail: smayer@bakersfield.com
9/21/2006
When Gordon Wickersham walks out his front door each morning, he makes sure a simple stainless steel bracelet is wrapped securely around his wrist.
The plain gray band seems the antithesis of the glittering gold one might expect to be worn by a professional jeweler like Wickersham.
But the 69-year-old Bakersfield native treasures his familiar band of engraved steel -- or more accurately, he treasures the idea it represents. Forty years ago today, the man whose name the bracelet bears was lost in action over Vietnam.
"If I don't put the bracelet on in the morning, I can hardly get out of the house," he said. "I feel naked without it."
For more than 36 years, Wickersham has worn the curved steel bracelet engraved with the name of Lt. Cmdr. James B. Mills, a Bakersfield boy who became a Naval aviator before he was lost to an uncertain fate during a combat mission over North Vietnam.
Mills, an academic and sports standout who graduated from Bakersfield High School in 1958, survived 148 combat missions during his first tour of duty. But on the first mission of his second tour, his Phantom F4B failed to return to its aircraft carrier.
The 26-year-old radar intercept operator was declared missing in action on Sept. 21, 1966.
As the four-decade anniversary approached, Wickersham and Mills' family were still hoping for some sort of closure.
"I wrote to his sister and told her I put her on my prayer list," Wickersham said this week. "If you believe in prayer, then it works."
The Bakersfield jeweler also attended BHS, and he remembers Jim Mills and other Mills siblings.
"That guy was something else," he said of James.
Mills earned letters for four years in basketball, football and track, according to information provided by his family. He attended Bakersfield College for one year before transferring to UC Berkeley, where he earned a business degree before joining the U.S. Navy.
Mills was last known to have been over a target 20 miles north of the demilitarized zone in North Vietnam. There was only one other two-man crew in the area, but neither man reported seeing Mills' jet go down.
It was an uncertain accounting that hundreds of American families endured in the years following the war. It's an uncertainty many live with still.
During President Jimmy Carter's administration, all the MIAs and POWs except one were declared presumptively killed. But presuming and knowing are very different notions, said Judie Mills Taber, one of Jim's sisters.
"For the first time, there's a glimmer of hope," Taber said from near her home in La Habra, Calif.
Increased cooperation between Vietnam and the United States in searching for evidence of servicemen missing in action has yielded results for other families, she said.
And this summer some aviation wreckage that had not been turned over by rural villagers was located, Taber said. It could be wreckage from her brother's plane -- or from one other plane that also likely crashed in the same area.
"We're hoping for something," she said. "If not for us, then for the other family. It could mean answers for one of two families."
As of this month, 1,798 Americans are still missing and unaccounted for from the Vietnam War, according to the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.
Their names are engraved in steel -- and in memory.