In every remembrance ceremony I've seen at a VFW or Legion, there was a special part with a table set for a service member who had not returned. On the plate was salt and lemon, if I remember correctly. I always knew that it was for my daddy.
On April 23, 1952, a flight of five F-84E jets did a low flyover and dropped their bombs on a bridge over a deep canyon near the northernmost shore of the sea between Korea and China. One bomb, however, had not dropped, that of the flight leader. He decided to make a second pass rather than continue to their secondary target, and asked my father to fly as wingman. Lt. Croft was only on his second mission, and on that return pass his plane was heavily damaged. Nobody actually saw it go down, but did see the explosion.
It may have been on a subsequent run that another member of a flight did a close flyover on the site of my father's plane. He saw the seat ejected some distance before the crash, seat belts open. This did not go into the official reports, though. This man took it upon himself to visit my grandfather's place of business in Kansas City, the Croft Trailer Company. (My granddad invented the trailer hitch and built a rental business, Nationwide.) This report was given to my aunt and granddad, and she passed it on to me.
But the simplest part of the story is here:
"When You Comin' Home, Daddy?"
Other parts of the story have surfaced over the last several years. A man commented on my YouTube page for this song (it's still there if you want to go look) about the list on which my father's name appeared. This is one more bit of evidence pointing to his survival.
We also need to remember those left behind.