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After 84 years, Capt. Marvin Lancaster finally came home — a soldier surrounded by corn and cotton fields he left as a boy, buried in Craven County soil next to the father, mother, brothers and sisters who believed him lost forever.
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He arrived in a flag-draped casket, carried by airmen and Marines young enough to be his great-grandchildren, and when they laid him down, the younger brother Lancaster last knew as a 2-year-old boy hobbled over on a cane and dropped a carnation in a tribute.
“Long time coming,” said his brother Ted, his beard gone white.
In 1942, Lancaster died flying his P-40F warhawk on a strafing mission over Egypt in the early months of World War II, attacked by German fighters in midair. British forces recovered only the remains of an unidentified pilot, eventually burying them in Tunisia among other nameless fighters.
Lancaster left a family of 15 brothers and sisters on a tenant farm back in tiny Vanceboro, home to only about 800 people then and now, posing for a photograph in his crisp Army uniform in front of the Main Street building that is now a closed-down ice cream parlor.
Before, during and after the war, his paychecks pulled the family through rural poverty and gave him an almost mythical status among his younger brothers and sisters — like having a statue sit down at the dinner table each night.
Two of his nephews — Jack and Jerry Brown — grew up admiring the uncle they knew only from pictures, a ghost grinning at them in a flight suit. Jack Brown flew missions for the Marines over Vietnam; Jerry for the Navy during the Yom Kippur war of 1973, which brought him within 70 miles of his uncle’s crash site.
High over Egypt, Jerry Brown felt a pull from the past, and he made himself a promise:
“I’m gonna find him.”
More than 70,000 Americans remain missing from World War II, and for decades, Brown pressed for answers that wouldn’t come. He found his uncle’s name on the wall at the US cemetery in Tunisia, and because so few soldiers there remained unidentified, figured he must be among them.
He collected Lancaster’s after-action report and even spoke to German pilots who fought there on the same day. But by 2014, he had largely gave up the hunt. One year later, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency started up, merging a tangle of government offices that didn’t always work together well, and nine years later the Brown family got the long-awaited call about a DNA match.
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“That’s why he’s here,” Brown said Friday. “The magic of DNA and the persistence of a data analyst stuck in the bowels of an office who wanted to take a name off a wall.”
The small Methodist church sits 10 miles outside Vanceboro, its tall white steeple jutting out of the corn and cotton fields that stretch nearly to the horizon on all sides.
Lancaster’s service drew dozens of family from around the country, many of whom were so distant from each other that they had to wear name tags and introduce themselves — connected by a soldier they’d heard about in childhood stories.
Jack Brown rose to speak and noted that their family might not have grown so large and successful if not for the Army checks that came home to Vanceboro until 1949, seven years after his father, Augustus, received his son’s belongings in a box.
“A man’s worth at the end of his life cannot be summed up in an inventory of his personal effects,” Brown said. “We have only to look around us, and we’re seeing family we haven’t seen for years, second and third generations I’ve only heard about. Largely because of my uncle’s support after his death. … What a fine and good man he was.”
Outside, at the grave, with the temperature past 90 degrees, Brown recalled summers cropping tobacco, praying for clouds to pass over the sun.
And as he walked away, he left his uncle to catch up with family, rejoined at last, at rest in the sandy soil.
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