DALLAS — Early Monday morning, a Dallas-area family gathered at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to welcome a lost brother and uncle home.
On Friday morning, just four days later, they get their chance to say a final and long-awaited goodbye.
"It's a very emotional day," Shelia Kirven said as she waited with other members of her extended family outside Gate D27.
American Airlines and airport security, as they do for dozens of these emotional homecomings each year, allowed the family to await the arrival of AA115 from Honolulu on the tarmac as the plane rolled to a stop.
"A long time coming," Kirven could be heard saying as she stood next to her cousin, Erma Flemmings, and their uncle, Ulysses Cherry.
They were waiting for a mystery -- and a family story -- to finally come home.
His name was R.B. Cherry. He was number 15 out of 16 brothers and sisters from Dallas family. But, he wanted to see the world and volunteered to join the Army.
"Our dad told us we had an uncle that went off the war and never came home," Kirven said of the story she was told as a young girl.
R.B. Cherry was just 17 when he convinced his mom to sign for him so that he could, underage, join the Army. His immediate assignment was the Korean War.
His family never saw him again.
"I just always knew that he was missing in action and that was really all the information that I had," Kirven said of her uncle.
"It just brings back old memories," Ulysses Cherry said. He was the youngest of the 16 brothers and sisters. And now, at 89, he is the last surviving sibling.
"A difficult day, yeah," he said of the arrival of that American Airlines flight that landed carrying his brother's remains. "It brought back old memories."
Because for 70 years, he never knew what happened to his big brother. But in the last decade, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency more closely looked at remains repatriated to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.
Remains designated only as "X-13460."
In 2018, X-13460 and thirteen other unknowns were disinterred following recommendation from researchers with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. It was determined that some of the remains, including X-13460, originally came from the cemetery at POW Camp 5 near Anju, North Korea.
And by 2020, burial records, witness accounts, and mitochondrial DNA comparison finally proved that R.B. Cherry, a 19-year-old kid from Texas, died in that prisoner-of-war camp in 1950. Military records suggest he suffered at the hands of his captors and eventually succumbed to pneumonia.
"You can just relive the thing yourself inside of you knowing oh my God, he actually went through something as horrific as that," said his niece, Erma Flemmings. "And that's really painful to even consider and think about."
"A lot of pain a lot of heartache for my uncle," Shelia Kirven said of her lone surviving uncle Ulysses Cherry. "But I'm glad that he's still here to be able to know that his brother is finally coming home."
In the corner of her Duncanville home, Shelia Kirven keeps a painted cabinet door on the fireplace hearth. It says "every family has a story... welcome to ours."
They wanted to share their 72-year-old story because from the Korean War alone, more than 7,500 families are still waiting for this same difficult answer on this same difficult kind of day.
"Because it's still family," Kirven said explaining why she gets emotional when she talks about an uncle who died even before she was born.
"Whether I knew him or not, he was family that was my dad's brother," Kirven said. "And to not know what happens to your family is kind of hard."
"Yes. And he's a part of our hearts," her first cousin, Erma Flemmings, added.
"It's hard at times you know," Ulysses Cherry said of the memories that came flooding back when the brother, only two years his senior, was finally found.
"It's just... I don't know... I don't know," he said as he searched for words too difficult to find.
So, in these moments where airplane passengers look out their windows and see a flag-draped casket respectfully unloaded from the cargo hold and delivered by an honor guard to a waiting hearse, yet another family wants you to understand they struggle with a mix of sadness, relief and sometimes joy.
"When the plane came in and landed," Erma Flemmings said, "it was just beautiful and my heart was just racing and so happy inside but yet, tears of joy you know that he made it home."
R.B. Cherry, a son of Dallas and a member of Company G, 2nd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, will be buried with full military honors Friday morning at DFW National Cemetery.