Separate Truths

Scharf first held a memorial for her husband in 1978, when the Air Force technically declared him dead. It was a memorial with an empty box. When she buries him Thursday at Arlington National Cemetery, the coffin will carry the bone fragment and a uniform, complete with badges and medals, as if he were wearing it. She also will place the items from the crash site and the love letters in the coffin.

She plans to be buried there with him eventually.

"I now know where I'll be," she said.

'Not My Brother'

Barbara Scharf Lowerison would stop the funeral if she could. And she certainly won't be there for it, she said.

"I don't know what they are burying," she said. "That is not my brother."

Charles Scharf was older by a year-and-a-half, and he was her protector before he was his wife's.

"I'll never forget when I had my first baby. I was 18 years old, and he wanted to take over," she said, laughing. "We had a brother-and-sister rivalry at times, but there was nothing I wouldn't do for him."

About 25 boxes sit in her Hemet, Calif., home filled with letters, witness statements and scientific reports. She thinks he survived the crash, and if he isn't alive, he was until this year. For four decades, she fought to bring him home.

"I think I've been a pain in a neck to everybody. But that's okay. I'm fighting for my brother," she said.

Before he disappeared, Lowerison was a housewife raising five boys and had no involvement in politics.

Since then, she has established sources in Vietnam and Russia whom she has asked for help. She has lobbied presidents from Richard M. Nixon on, giving each a POW bracelet with her brother's name. And for every piece of evidence Pentagon officials have put forth to prove they found Scharf, she has fired back questions:

Why were the items at the excavation site not burned beyond recognition like the bodies?