For more than 54 years, a Bay Area woman has wondered what happened to her husband, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot missing in action during the Vietnam War. Now at age 90, Joyce De Soto of Burlingame and her family finally have answers.
For more than 50 years, Joyce said she wondered if her husband was alive, captured or being tortured. She said she joined forces with other women in the same situation pressing the government for answers.
"We would meet secretly because we were told to be quiet, not to say anything, because the war was not popular," Joyce recalled. Decades later in 2021, a U.S. recovery agency working with a team in Vietnam searched the remote site where Ernie De Soto's plane was shot down, and they discovered a bone. More than a year later, scientists using mitichondrial DNA confirmed the bone belonged to De Soto.They are answers Joyce thought she’d never have in her lifetime.
"It's closure," she said."He’s here, he didn't suffer. He was killed in the airplane, which I have never known.""It means a lot, it really means a lot. He can be put to rest, and we feel better knowing that he was not being tortured and other awfulness," Denise said. Joyce admits she is still stunned more than half a century later she can finally close one painful chapter.The family is now planning a funeral for the Purple Heart recipient to take place Friday at Golden Gate Cemetery in San Bruno. It will include a military flyover.
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