Pearl Rex-Hartzell wears a simple metal bracelet on her right wrist. The words on it -- her son's name and the day he was killed in action in Vietnam -- are almost a plea to the world not to forget him.

Robert Alan Rex died Dec. 8, 1968, while bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail that China's armies were using to get supplies to North Vietnam.

"His was the last plane to drop its bombs, and then they said it crashed into the mountainside and burned," Rex-Hartzell said.

She remembers that Sunday more than 40 years ago when a shiny car pulled into their driveway in Randolph and a chaplain got out. They didn't know then that he'd died; military officials said Rex could have ejected from his plane and then been taken prisoner. That in some ways was worse.

"It was like the end of the world, almost," Rex-Hartzell said quietly.

She found out in 1994, after joining American Gold Star Mothers and begging the military to send soldiers in after prisoners of war, that her son hadn't endured the tortures inflicted on American prisoners of war, that he had been killed in his plane. Troops found 17 bone fragments and part of his uniform by the plane, and almost 30 years later, Robert Alan Rex came home.

To his mother, though, he still is the 26-year-old patriotic pilot who graduated with honor from BYU and volunteered to fly the fastest plane the U.S. military had to offer. And she wouldn't change it.

"I think those who join have a special need to bring freedom to the countries that are oppressed," she said.

-- Heidi Toth

Return to the Veterans Day 2009 Profiles.

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