When the decades of not knowing finally ended, Jimmy Caniford's photo sat in its usual spot on a shelf opposite his parents' living room sofa - a portrait of the warrior, forever 23 and fighting the Vietnam War.
In the picture, Caniford strikes a pose brimming with machismo. His flight helmet is tucked under his left arm; his right arm dangles close to a pistol on his hip. Tall, handsome and jug-eared, he eyes the camera as if he's about to swagger out of the frame.
The man in the picture bears little resemblance to the baby-faced 17-year-old who joined the Air Force in 1966, fresh out of Middletown High near Frederick, and then re-upped despite the worsening war. "This is what I do," he told his father.
To the end he remained a jokester. A month before he vanished, he'd affected cool nonchalance in a letter home, despite writing from the world's hottest fire zone. "Hi!" he wrote, "That's about all I can think of right now to say."
In March 1972, not long after that photo was snapped, a North Vietnamese missile blew his plane out of the night sky over the jungle in Laos, near the Vietnam border. All 14 crew members, it appeared, perished.
But Jimmy's body was never found, and with no body, James Caniford was not willing to close the book on his son. And why should he concede to the most grievous loss a man can endure if there was any chance at all that Jimmy had survived?
Of course, his insistence on clinging to some long-shot hope only forced on him another anguish, namely, not knowing what had happened to his only son. Had he been captured? Tortured? Brainwashed? Later killed at the enemy's hands?
As the years rolled by - as family members aged, moved, changed jobs, retired, got sick, saw the country embark on three new wars - he worried more and more that he'd go to his grave without the knowledge he craved.
On March 20, everything changed. The Air Force called to report that Jimmy Caniford was no longer missing in action. Remains recently unearthed at the crash site had been identified as his. Finally, on Wednesday, Jimmy will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
In an instant, the discovery seemed to clear the ambiguity that had hung over those close to Jimmy. It also extinguished - or seemed to - the hope that had flickered, if dimly, all these years.
