27 Years Have Not Weakened MIA Activist’s Will

Barbara Lowerison had faced the President of the United States and now she was ready to face the press.

In the 27 years since her brother, Air Force Col. Charles Joseph Scharf, was shot down northeast of Hanoi, Lowerison has made it her business to talk to presidents and the press.

She has taken her message about her brother and other missing servicemen from the Vietnam War to Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. She has talked to Time magazine and the BBC, been mentioned in 48 stories in San Diego newspapers in recent years and been interviewed repeatedly on local television.

But her chance to confront President Clinton on live television, as part of last week’s “town meeting” where Clinton answered questions from a studio audience, was Lowerison’s biggest opportunity yet to keep the POW/MIA issue on the nation’s agenda.

She told Clinton that she is convinced her brother is alive, and she pleaded with him to sign an executive order to force the government to declassify all POW/MIA information.

Clinton said he would consider it. She pressed into his palm a metal bracelet with her brother’s picture and the plea, Freedom Now.

Later, she waited patiently to talk to reporters in a parking lot at the television station. Reporters pounced first on audience members who had asked Clinton about welfare reform, summer jobs for gang members and racial justice.

For several minutes Lowerison stood alone in near darkness, clutching the framed picture of her brother that she had shown Clinton. She was willing to wait.

If nothing else, 27 years have taught Lowerison to be patient, and persistent. Her appearance on TV had buoyed the hopes of those who believe their loved ones are the final casualties of a war the nation would rather forget.

“We couldn’t have had a better person representing us than Barbara,” said Gladys Fleckenstein of Big Bear, whose son, a Navy lieutenant commander, was shot down in 1969. “She’s been active in all the organizations and done everything. She knows her brother is alive, just like I know my son is alive.”

After the return of American POWs in 1973, the military declared Scharf dead, despite an eyewitness report from another pilot that he had bailed out when his plane was hit.

As proof of his death, the Vietnamese have provided an I.D. card, a piece of bone and a partial dental bridge. Lowerison will not be convinced until the bone is subjected to DNA testing; as for the bridge, the military has no record of Scharf’s dental work.

“She has an almost spiritual belief that her brother is alive,” said Robert Dietrich, a retired military affairs writer for the San Diego Tribune.

Like many other POW/MIA family members, Lowerison believes information is being kept secret about the number and location of POW camps, which could force the U.S. and Vietnamese governments into a fuller accounting. She persists in this belief despite statements by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, that there is nothing in the classified documents that would change things.

Military regulations prevent Lowerison from seeing classified documents relating specifically to her brother. Even a letter to Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill McPeak, a classmate of her brother at San Diego State in the 1950s, was unavailing.

“It makes me mad,” Lowerison said. “It burns me up. . . . I think it’s ludicrous.”

Despite declaring Scharf dead, the government still lists him among the “discrepancy cases” in which more information might be recovered. Next week, Kerry and other senators will travel to Hanoi seeking more information about Scharf and the others on the list.

Lowerison, 59, who worked as a medical secretary and lately as a real estate saleswoman, is constantly looking for a fresh angle. She sent a telegram to Mikhail S. Gorbachev after the failed coup in 1991: “You now know what it is like to be a prisoner for 72 hours. My brother has been a prisoner since Oct. 1, 1965. Please help me find my brother.”

She sends periodic telegrams to Hanoi addressed to her brother. She says that after every telegram she gets “weird phone calls,” including one that she swears is a man’s voice saying, “Help me.”

She had a tape of the call electronically enhanced by an acoustics expert in London and then sent it to the military as evidence, but it was rejected as unusable. She keeps a telephone listed in her brother’s name.

“You get so discouraged, there are days you get really down,” Lowerison said. “Every time we get some proof of live sightings, we get discredited. As I told the President, we’re getting stonewalled. A live POW could walk out of Vietnam, and the government would say he’s a deserter or something.”

Lowerison has talked to Vietnamese officials at the United Nations within the last few years and to a variety of sources she declines to identify. From one source, she got a document that alleges that her brother escaped from a POW camp but was captured and beaten.

“From the Vietnamese, all I’ve gotten is a lot of verbal innuendoes about ‘he’s healing from his war wounds’ and ‘maybe you’ll be reunited with your brother soon,’ ” she said. She has declined to visit Hanoi, lest she be used as part of a propaganda ploy.

Her tidy condominium in the Tierrasanta neighborhood of San Diego has one room virtually devoted to her brother. The framed picture she showed to Clinton is back on the bookshelf, along with her brother’s medals, a white-on-black flag of the National League of Families, and the book “The Complete Military History of the Vietnam War.”

She goes to Washington every year. Her voluminous documents, many obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, are stored in boxes. “Not a day goes by that I don’t get a phone call, a letter or something,” she said. “It’s made me a nervous wreck.”

Her four sons support her activism but her husband, a disabled carpenter, is skeptical. “He says I’m wasting a lot of time and money, and you can’t fight City Hall, and that I haven’t gotten anywhere in 27 years,” she said.

A second brother, retired in Los Angeles, has not assisted in her campaign. Nor has Charles Scharf’s wife, from whom he was estranged when he went to Vietnam and who receives a widow’s pension.

Two years ago, Lowerison got a miniature poodle and named her Mia, as in MIA.

“I thought maybe she’d bring me luck,” Lowerison said.