Separate Truths

"Nobody has that. What other pilot has that? That is ours. That is ours," she said.

The items, officials said, were found during several excavations of the crash site.

"Now I'm convinced," Scharf said. "I really am."

They met when she was 16 and married two years later. They had 13 years together before he left for war. She remembers standing among the other Air Force wives on a runway in Florida the day the men flew away. She waved a scarf so Chuck would see her, and he saluted back. A pilot's pregnant wife stood next to her, crying.

"She was saying she knew she wasn't going to see her husband again," Scharf said. "I said: 'Yes we are. We're going to meet them with champagne when they come back.'

"Well," she started, then stopped.

"It was a beautiful life," she said. "It had glory in it. It had strength in it. It had romance in it."

The love letters he sent, about 75 over three months, are addressed to "Mrs. Charles Scharf" outside and to "darling" and "sweetheart" inside. In one, he talks about the family they would start when he returned. They had lost a baby, a girl, at birth.

If she had lived, she would have been almost 50 today, Scharf said. "I would have been a grandma."

After her husband disappeared, Scharf said, she had to learn to take care of herself. She sells jewelry in the Pentagon, and the people there are her family, she said. But when she comes home, she is alone. She talks about her life with Chuck separately from her life without him.

She said that, unlike his sister, she had to let him go.

"I was the wife. It was our life. It was us who lived together. She still has a family. She has everybody there," she said of his sister.