namvets.com  Welcome home Bothers and Sisters!

Ft. Wayne Woman can finally bury Son

Thirty-two years after burying her son, Mary Jellison will do it all over again. Jellison thought she laid her son, Mark Judge, to rest in 1967 after he was killed in Vietnam. The military now says those bones belong to a soldier named William Berry, whose remains were dug up and sent to California last month. On Sept. 21, 1967 , on the edge of a rice paddy in Vietnam, Judge walked into an ambush while working as the point man on a search and-destroy mission. His body was last seen in a rice paddy. It was a month before the military was able to return to the scene of that battle to recover the bodies of American soldiers who died there. Another month passed before the body the government said was Berry's arrived in Fort Wayne. The body was laid to rest on Nov. 17, 1967, at Concordia Cemetery Gardens.
In 1994, the military
announced a mix up, discovering that Judge had survived the ambush, been taken prisoner and been killed while trying to escape. His remains were returned to America in 1986, the government said. Jellison couldn't accept that. I n 1996 she had the remains in her son's grave disinterred and put them in a mausoleum, refusing to grant the military access unless DNA test could prove the bones were not those of her son. In May, the military finally agreed to the test, and four weeks ago Jellison was told they were those of Berry, a soldier from California. Earlier DNA test, Jellison was told, had shown that the remains that were repatriated in 1986 were those of her son. By now, though, Jellison has no idea who to believe or who to trust. She can only hope that the bones the military says belong to Mark Judge are those of her son.