Published in The Frederick News-News Post Jul 4, 2007
The day Jimmy Caniford got his first haircut, he found his destiny.
In late 1949, blond curls covered the 1-year-old's face. His father, Jim Caniford, took Jimmy to Frank Snoots' barber shop at the square corner on West Potomac Street in Brunswick.
"I put him in the chair and sat him on that little bench," he said. "As soon as I backed off, my son looked at me and started to cry."
Caniford had to think quick to calm his son, so he said a P-38 airplane was on its way. Snoots turned on the clippers and made a sweeping motion to mimic an approaching plane.
As Snoots arced the electric shears closer, Jimmy stopped crying. When the clippers buzzed his ear, he giggled.
"That was the last time he cried in a barber shop," he said. "I think that was the beginning of his love for aircraft. From then on, that's all he ever talked about."
Jimmy was the first of three children and the only son born to Jim and Janice Caniford, who live in Fort Myers, Fla.
The couple had hoped for twins, but Diana was born 11 months later. Their youngest, Shelly, came about four years after.
The family lived at 142 W. Church St., across from Baker Park. Over the next 12 years, the Caniford children shared joy and spread mischief.
Once, when the trio would played in the park, Jimmy and Diana trapped Shelly on a swinging bridge that crossed Carroll Creek. They rocked the bridge back and forth, telling Shelly it was about to collapse.
As they grew older, Jimmy often took his sisters fishing and let Shelly join him on his paper route. Even though she didn't work much, he always gave her a dollar.
Sometimes, Jimmy got himself into trouble.
When Caniford bought a new claw hammer from Sears, he warned Jimmy not to use it. The 6-foot teen was known for his heavy hand.
While his dad was away, Jimmy hammered together some wooden boards and took the wheels off a pair of bicycles to make a road racer. He broke one of the claws off the hammer.
"When I got home, I went into orbit -- he really upset the old man," Caniford said. "He wasn't perfect, but I loved him for it."
When the family moved to Wolfsville in 1963, Jimmy built a playhouse for Shelly in the loft of the barn. He added a ramp so the family dog, Pepper, could join his baby sister.
"Of the three of us, Jimmy was the kindest," Shelly said. "There was just a sweetness about my brother. He never pushed me aside and never told me no. Jimmy was just a good person through and through."
Head in the clouds
Jimmy dreamed about flying. He flew paper airplanes, built model jets and borrowed books about military aircraft from the library.
After three years in Wolfsville, the family moved back to Frederick.
During his senior year at Middletown High, Jimmy talked to Ken Grimes, an Air Force recruiter who was the family's Allstate insurance salesman.
During one of the weekly fishing trips along the Monocacy River, Jimmy asked his dad about joining.
"I know you want me to go to college, but I don't want you to be concerned with that," Jimmy said.
"If it's OK with you and you don't have any objections, I want to sign up with the Air Force."
"Why do you want to go into the service?" Caniford asked.
"You know I love planes," Jimmy said. "I can be around the airplanes, and I can continue my studies."
It was 1966, the height of escalation for American involvement in the Vietnam War. But Caniford didn't object. As a medium tank driver in the Army during World War II, he understood the value of serving in the military.
For many teens in Frederick County at the time, college wasn't an option, Shelly said. Jimmy often earned money helping farmers throughout the county.
"Growing up, all you'd see was farmers," she said. "If he joined the Air Force, he'd get an education and wouldn't be stuck pushing a plow. But I never thought for a minute that he'd never come back."
Two days after graduation, Jimmy flew to San Antonio to attend basic training at Lackland Air Force Base. He soon became an illuminator operator on an AC-130 gunship. Jimmy's job was to spot targets on the battlefield.
"They would send a beam down, and it would bounce back to tell them what was on the ground and what was moving," Caniford said. "One day they thought it was tanks, but it turned out to be elephants. They were using them to transport supplies."
An Air Force staff sergeant, he spent much of his time flat on his belly looking over the open ramp at the back of an AC-130 gunship, calling out anti-aircraft artillery and setting off flares to divert enemy heat-seeking missiles.
When Jimmy came home during leave, he wouldn't say much about his missions. But he told all his friends and family how much he loved the Air Force. He planned to make a career of it.
He had found his niche, so he re-enlisted in 1970.
"I could never quite comprehend Jimmy in a plane in a war," Shelly said. "He was different when he came back; you could see the boy went, it was gone. Now, he was this just amazing man."
While on leave in October 1971, Jimmy spoke with his dad in private. He had a bad feeling about returning to Vietnam for his second tour.
The next day, Jimmy waited with his parents at Dulles International Airport for a flight back to the war.
Just before boarding the plane, Jimmy removed his aviator's watch.
"Daddy, I want you to hold this for me," Jimmy said. "You can wear it until I get back."
"Don't you need your Seiko?" Caniford asked.
"No, I have another one," Jimmy said. "I might ask you for it again, but I'm giving it to you to hold."
Caniford held the watch in his hand as he watched his son board the plane and the door close. As the jet taxied on the runway, Caniford's wife held out her hand.
"You'd better wave at your son," she said. "It'll be the last time you see him."
'Please don't tell me'
About 3 a.m. March 29, 1972, Caniford woke up when his wife sat up and screamed "Jimmy!"
She saw her only son dead.
Caniford reassured her Jimmy was fine. Everything would be OK. It was just a dream.
Caniford worked as a meat inspector at a slaughterhouse in Hagerstown, so he was used to waking early. That morning, he got up extra early to take his wife to her mother's house in Hagerstown. She planned to spend the day helping her sister clean and paint their mother's kitchen.
While Janice painted the walls turquoise and Caniford surveyed the kill floor, a male sergeant and a female captain dressed in Air Force uniforms walked up the sidewalk to their Frederick townhouse on West Third Street.
Shelly was home alone. She recently started attending Frederick Community College to study elementary education, but there was no school that day.
"When I saw those Air Force people come, I knew they weren't there to bring good news," she said. "It's like a slow motion dream. I remember opening the door and calling my sister hysterical, but the next few days were a blur."
The Air Force representatives would only tell Jimmy's parents why they had come. Shelly, 18 at the time, refused to tell them where her parents were unless they told her what happened to her brother.
Jimmy's gunship had been shot down. Rescue attempts would continue for 72 hours.
That's all they would say.
"I thought they were going to find him," Shelly said. "I thought it was a mistake, he should be coming home."
In Hagerstown, Caniford heard his name over the loudspeaker on the kill floor.
"I walked in the office, and when I turned around and saw these two Air Force people, my heart sank," he said. "I thought, 'please don't tell me.'"
"Do you know why we're here?" the woman asked.
"Tell me," Caniford said. "Don't hold back."
"You're son's gunship was shot down," she said. "We're searching for it."
Everything went silent. Caniford saw her mouth moving, but boiling rage deafened him.
"I just looked at her and I got so angry," he recalled. "I know it wasn't her fault, so I bit my tongue."
When it was over, Caniford turned to walk away, then faced the pair again, fists clenching, teeth gritting, temper seething. The room was silent.
"I wouldn't have your job for all the cows in Texas," Caniford said, then stormed back to the kill floor.
Caniford's boss followed to tell him to go home to his family. He was in such shock, he couldn't cry.
"It wasn't until I was in bed that night that the full impact hit me," he said. "I just couldn't stop crying."
Aftermath unfolds
Over the next 30 years, the family pieced together much of what had happened to Jimmy on March 29, 1972.
Early that morning, Jimmy joined 13 other airmen on board an AC-130 gunship on a mission in the heavily defended province of Savannakhet in southern Laos.
Before takeoff, Jimmy shared a hot dog and a soda with Ken Felty, a crew member from another plane.
Almost three decades later, Felty e-mailed Caniford to ask if he was related to the Sgt. James Kenneth Caniford he'd flown with in Vietnam.
"This gentleman talked to Jimmy before he crashed," Caniford said. "The things he had to tell me about Jimmy were great, but he was carrying a guilt complex because Jimmy's plane went down and his didn't."
During that mission, three AC-130s flew together, escorted by an F-4E Phantom II. Something went wrong with Felty's plane, which was supposed to fly first in the formation.
Jimmy's crew took the lead instead.
About 3 a.m., the escort spotted three surface-to-air missiles. The first one just grazed the gunship, but the second one struck Jimmy's plane, which exploded in flight, the pieces tumbling to the ground.
The escort didn't see any parachutes open. Wreckage burned on the ground. Search and rescue efforts continued for the next two days but found no sign of survivors. While the wreckage was visible from the air, enemy forces kept ground crews away.
For Jimmy's family, that's when the wait started.
Days turned into weeks with no word from the Air Force. Two months later, Caniford struggled to come to terms with losing his son.
"Jimmy was the son I always wanted," Caniford said. "He wasn't perfect, but if I had five sons, I don't think any of them could have been any better than Jimmy was. I don't ever remember that boy committing a heartache."
Caniford grew so numb with grief, he turned to the book "On Death and Dying" by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.
"I was searching for answers and I couldn't find any," he said. "In that book I found out what I was feeling was perfectly natural. I don't know if that woman knows how much she helped me."
In 1986, a joint United States-Laos team excavated the crash site, recovering the remains of nine crew members. Jimmy's remains and those of four others were never found.
That's made it almost impossible for Caniford to deal with his son's death.
"If they would have walked in and said, 'Your son was killed in action,' I could deal with that; we would have buried him and have a place to visit him," said Caniford, now 82. "But when you're in MIA status, there is never any closure. That's the most difficult part. We will die without knowing what happened to our son."
When Shelly got the news, she shared that numbness. Over the years, anger consumed her. She grappled with her faith in God.
During those times, she dreamed about Jimmy. Shelly always woke up from those dreams in a good mood.
In the dreams, Jimmy was older. Shelly can't recall much of what happened in the dreams, but she found the sensation of being with her brother comforting.
But living in Frederick was too painful. Everything reminded them of Jimmy.
In 1974, the sisters packed their belongings into a trailer hitched to a red Volkswagen Beetle named Raquel and drove to Florida.
Between them, they had saved about $200 to start a new life.
About six years later, their parents followed.
"I was having a bad time of everything, trying to get my life in order," she said. "I guess I just made all the wrong choices. I hit a pocket when everything was coming at me financially. I got divorced. Everything just fell apart."
One night in 1997, Shelly woke up upset because she dreamt Jimmy was angry at her.
That helped Shelly turn her life around. She started dating her current husband, Bill Noel. She also started a new career managing a medical office.
"I do take a lot of stock in dreams," Shelly said. "That was my connection with Jimmy. As soon as I started doing what Jimmy wanted me to do, I was happy."
The dreams stopped.
She accepted Jimmy's fate, but she still misses dreaming about him.
"I believe my brother's at peace," she said. "I know he died, but I hope he wasn't captured, because I don't think I could handle that. Knowing that he was in a prison for years, I couldn't handle that."
Everything changed when Jimmy was shot down.
The family moved out of Maryland.
Shelly never had children.
Jimmy never came home.
For Shelly, the hardest thing for her to accept is never getting to know her brother. He joined the Air Force when she was 12. The last time she saw Jimmy was on her 18th birthday.
Jimmy never got to know the good things Shelly accomplished as an adult. She worked for the FBI as a latent fingerprints specialist. Later, she shared her expertise with many police agencies for more than 20 years.
Shelly occasionally reads the last letter she wrote to Jimmy, dated March 26, 1972. She can't explain why she didn't mail it the week Jimmy's plane went down.
"I have it and I read it because it's the last thing I wrote to him," she said. "It's just something I have of his that's tangible because there isn't a lot - just toys in the attic and things that were Jimmy's."
In the letter, she scolds Jimmy for not writing sooner. She's proud of her new job with the FBI. She wants her first car to be a Datsun. She loves and misses him.
The last time she read it was in May. She keeps it in her Bible.
For Caniford, the only thing that overshadows not knowing what happened to Jimmy is coming to terms with outliving his only son.
He hopes people will understand such losses are not about war or politics. They're about people.
"You have to comprehend the immensity of what this does in a family's life," he said. "The forgotten people in all of this are the wives, the brothers, the sisters. But I'm not quite as made of steel as everyone thinks I am."
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