The Beloved Woman Who Shared My Name had a refrigerator magnet that said: “Coincidence is God’s Way of Remaining Anonymous.”
I have just experienced a number of coincidences that will require some explanation, so please bear with me.
This column generates quite a bit of reader response, depending on the subject. Most of those responses come via email, but I also receive mail at the P.O. box listed at the bottom of this column. I am not as punctual about getting to the post office as I should be.
So it was that last week a number of letters were awaiting me, including a package from Elloree, S.C. Since my column doesn’t run in Elloree (pop. 570) — or anywhere else in South Carolina — that naturally piqued my curiosity. Needless to say, I don’t get much mail from South Carolina.
The writer was Catherine Kennedy. She was writing to tell me about a remarkable coincidence. (Cue the refrigerator magnet.)
During the Vietnam War, when she was a child living in Miami, Okla., she requested and received a POW/MIA bracelet. She dutifully wore it, hoping to learn the fate of the individual whose name was on it and that he would return home safely.
“Eventually,” she said, “I tucked the bracelet away in a jewelry box, occasionally taking it out and wondering what happened to him. Had he been found? Had he made it home to his loved ones? I could not bring myself to ever let loose of the bracelet. It seemed I had a responsibility to safeguard it.”
Catherine said she has moved across the country more times than she cares to count, but she held onto the bracelet. She admitted, however, that “there were times I couldn’t tell you where it was.”
Here comes another coincidence.
“Yesterday, I reached into a suitcase pocket and pulled out something that had no reason to be there,” she said.
It was the long-forgotten bracelet.
Ms. Kennedy decided to do a quick search to learn more about the name on the bracelet and found a column I wrote in December 2023. It was about my having discovered the fate of Maj. Paschal (Pat) Boggs, my classmate at Russell High School in East Point and later my fraternity brother at the University of Georgia.
His was the name on the bracelet she had worn as a child.
Pat and I lost contact after graduation. All I knew was that he had joined the military. Later, I found out that he was missing in action. Years passed.
I was in Washington and happened to be jogging by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on The Mall when something compelled me to stop, walk over and look at the names. Of the approximately 58,000 names on the wall, I looked straight at the name of Maj. Paschal Boggs.
A coincidence?
It gave me goosebumps, and I wrote a column about that surreal experience.
By another coincidence, a reader sent the column to Pat’s brother-in-law, Ron Breuch, in Monterey, Calif. Ron was married to Pat’s younger sister, Cecile, who had since passed away. He filled in the details.
“Ceil was very active in the POW/MIA movement and traveled many times to Washington in attempts to get North Vietnam to follow international rules on POWs and MIAs,” he told me.
“It was not until 2005 that North Vietnam finally opened their country to U.S. military teams, and we finally knew the complete story of what happened in August of 1967.”
Pat Boggs was the navigator on a two-man Grumman A-6 Intruder launched from a carrier at night and headed to North Vietnam. Their plane hit a karst, a limestone formation prominent along the coast there.
Total devastation.
U.S. military recovery teams later found only their harnesses and a pistol Pat always carried with him. Nothing more.
But now, at least, I finally knew what had happened to my fraternity brother, Pat Boggs, after all these years, and I wrote a column about it.
It was closure.
End of story.
Only it wasn’t.
By coincidence, Catherine Kennedy of Elloree, S.C., read the account almost three years later and sent me the bracelet she had had in her possession for 53 years.
In closing, Ms. Kennedy thanked me for “being the next caretaker on this journey of your friend’s bracelet.”
It is she who deserves the thanks.
I am wearing it as we speak and will continue to do so.
I told you this story would be full of coincidences. And it is.
God has been working overtime.
You can reach Dick Yarbrough at dick@dickyarbrough.com or at P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.