A reunion of sorts
Veteran seeks out family of city soldier who never returned from Vietnam to gift bracelet
Sometime in the early 1970s, Paul Longbrake of Michigan went to a veterans function in Grand Rapids where he received a bracelet bearing the name of Staff Sgt. James
“Jimmy” Ray.
A Navy veteran of Vietnam,
Longbrake had never heard of Ray, but that didn’t matter. What mattered is that the Army was listing Ray as
MIA – for missing in action – and that various veterans groups were passing out the commemorative bracelets as a way to help shine a light on the plight of Ray and thousands of other soldiers like him whose families were still waiting for them to come home from Vietnam. So he wore it.
“I wore it for two or three years,” said Longbrake.
“Until I got it caught in a machine in the factory where I was working and it nearly took my finger off.”
Longbrake says he’s moved “probably 25 times” since he got the bracelet and forgot he even owned it until a few days ago. He says he was “looking for something else” when he found the bracelet at the bottom of an old footlocker.
And he knew what he had to do.
Longbrake did a little poking around on the internet to glean a few details about Ray, learning – among other things – that he was a Woonsocket resident when he joined the Army and that he still had siblings in the area. He asked The Call for help in putting them in touch with him.
“I wanted to give the bracelet back to members of his family for them to have,” Longbrake explained in a recent phone conversation from his current residence in Lansing, Mich. “If they want it.” They do.
“I really do appreciate it,” said Charles Ray Jr. – Jimmy’s younger brother. “It’s a gesture that tells me that this guy is still thinking about my brother. And I really do appreciate that.”
Charles Ray is one of three surviving siblings of Jimmy Ray – one of the city’s most celebrated veterans of Vietnam. Ray, who grew up in public housing, was permanently honored by the city many years ago by having the community center in the Veterans Memorial Family Housing Development rededicated as The Jimmy Ray Center. A photograph of him, in uniform, is still prominently displayed in the hall.
Over the years, Ray’s story – and his family’s tireless efforts to learn his fate in the jungles of Vietnam, were copiously chronicled in The Call. But Charles Ray says they don’t know much more today than they did as long ago as 2007, when Jimmy’s survivors gathered in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, to pray at a headstone inscribed with his name, where no body is buried.
Based on the reports of soldiers who fought alongside him, Ray was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers on March 18, 1968, after a firefight in which Ray suffered shrapnel wounds. Fellow prisoners who eventually made it home from Vietnam describe him as being in poor physical condition – the result of maltreatment and abuse at the hands of his captors – when he was last seen late in 1969.
The official date of death on his memorial at Arlington is Nov. 30, 1969.
Jimmy Ray would have been 20 years old.
Today, Ray is one of just six Rhode Islanders from various branches of the military who are still unaccounted from the battlefields of Vietnam, according to the Defense MIA/ POW Accounting Agency. They include Laurent Norbert Dion of Providence; Curtis Abbot Eaton of Wakefield; Kenneth B. Goff of Warwick; George Henry Jourdenais of Central Falls; and Edward Brendan Shaw of Cranston.
In addition to Charles Ray Jr., 63, Jimmy Ray’s surviving siblings include Dennis Ray, a retired North Smithfield policeman who lives in Cumberland, and Maureen Vien of Florida.
Charles says they’ve reluctantly come to accept the sketchy evidence of their brother’s death in Vietnam, but there’s always a glimmer of hope that someday true closure will come with the discovery of his remains.
“I would never want him to be there all these years,” he says.
The bracelet that’s now on its way to Charles Ray’s house on Pearl Street from Lansing, Mich., is but one more bit of proof that his brother is still remembered – 50 years after he disappeared in the jungles of Vietnam.
Indeed, says Ray, it will join a collection of Jimmy Ray bracelets that never seems to stop growing.
Charles Ray already has more than a dozen of them, many of them gifts from folks like Longbrake, who send them to him from all over the country. After all, Ray says, it’s easier than ever to track down survivors in the age of Facebook.
“I must have 10 or 15 of them,” he says.
That includes the one on his own wrist.
The one he’s never stopped wearing.