Diana cried her way through the service, as did her younger sister, Shelly. Diana, 11 months Jimmy's junior, saw him as a near-twin. They'd smoked their first cigarettes together. As kids, they would play house one minute, then roll toy trucks through the mud. Shelly, just 12 when he joined the service, had flirted with the peaceniks but, when it came to her big brother, she had gauzy notions of a hero.
Sitting in the front pew, the sisters held hands as the pastor gave a talk infused with the belief that Caniford was in heaven. Before the capacity crowd, he said Caniford had come to him in a dream and uttered this: "Tell my family that wherever they are, I will be with them."
Diana was outraged. She was convinced the pastor had made up the story. But worse, who was he to pronounce Jimmy dead?
She saw her father struggle with what to think. He knew the chance of Jimmy's survival were negligible. But he also believed the myth that French prisoners stumbled out of Vietnamese jungles 30 years after the French pullout in the 1950s.
And he had heard rumors about two men being dragged alive from the Spectre 13 crash site as prisoners. It was a fate he thought possibly worse than death. On the other hand, it could mean his son was alive.
This is how the elder Caniford would explain his mindset: "When a plane goes into the ground and digs that deep a hole, there's a very slight chance any of them survived that crash. But there's always a slight chance. It's not false hope. It's just that you didn't give up hope."
All the Canifords eventually left Western Maryland, where family roots ran deep, for Florida. Diana went first, pointing her VW Bug to a sunny place free of any association with her brother. Shelly joined her, followed by Jim and Janice.
In the 1980s, Jim Caniford and Shelly attended meetings of the National League of Families, a group that did not accept the notion - firmly held by the Pentagon today - that the last American prisoners were let go by the Vietnamese in 1973.
Shelly felt cheated at having lost her brother so young. Looking back, she thinks her anger over his loss played some part in her "kamikaze" romantic relationships and even the fact that she, like her sister, never had children.
In 1986, a year after the U.S. signed a cooperation agreement with Laos, an American military team excavated the crash site. DNA testing was still years off, so forensic experts relied on dental records. Nine of the 14 crew members were identified after that dig.
