Airman

First, some history. In the late summer of 1951, 22-year-old Paul Siemasko was working the bar at the NCO club at Marine Corps headquarters outside Washington, D.C., when a young woman walked in. Her name was Charlotte Rose, from South Bend, Ind. Things clicked. Paul, the New England Catholic, and Charlotte, the Midwestern Protestant, began dating. Six weeks later, when Charlotte was scheduled to return to her Marine base assignment in North Carolina, she promised to write.

Lebanon's Hezbollah has told Israel it does not know what happened to an airman missing for more than two decades, but it believes he is dead, Israeli officials said. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert received the Hezbollah report on the fate of Ron Arad, missing since he was captured alive when his fighter jet went down over Lebanon in 1986. The report was part of a deal to swap prisoners.

Jake Yelner thought he'd pulled a fast one on his mother. He enrolled at Diablo Valley College near his hometown of Lafayette, in the East Bay -- but he never showed up for classes. His mom finally busted him, dragging him to campus to prove that he wasn't a student. "He never went to school at all, that little brat," Yolanda Vega recalled. "I gave him two choices: go back to school or join the military. And if you do join, I said, I'd love it if you joined the Air Force."

The images are engraved in their memories, and captured in photos hanging on the walls and fanned out on the kitchen table. They still bring smiles and tears to his parents because they show his transformation: a skinny, towheaded kid balancing on a skateboard. A bodybuilding trophy winner. Air Force crew chief for the F-117 Stealth fighter. Para-rescueman. Husband. Father of two young boys. William "Bub" McDaniel II filled the lives of his parents for 36 years. Then, on Feb. 22, 2002, he was gone.

The remains of an airman killed in a 1942 military training crash have been identified nearly a year after they were found in the Sierra Nevada by an author researching the accident. Defense Department officials announced Monday that they had identified Aviation Cadet Ernest G. Munn of St. Clairsville, Ohio, one of four crew members who died. Another airman, Leo A. Mustonen of Brainerd, Minn.

The last time Cesar Ayala saw his brother Alejandro was Aug. 14, when they played some pool and shared a late McDonald's lunch near the Camp Virginia military base in Kuwait. They had only one day together because Cesar Ayala, 22, a sergeant in the Marine Corps, was on his way back home to Riverside after completing his second tour in Iraq.

Milo Radulovich, an Air Force reservist caught in the net of 1950s communist hunters, whose case was championed by CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in a historic television program that led to the collapse of the McCarthy era, died Monday in Vallejo, Calif. He was 81. The cause was complications from a stroke, said his sister, Margaret Fishman. In 1953 Radulovich was threatened with discharge from the Air Force Reserve because of allegations that he was a security risk.

The Air Force has dropped a criminal indecency charge filed against an airman who refused to testify against another airman she had accused of rape, her attorney said Friday. The commander of the 43rd Airlift Wing at Pope Air Force Base decided last week to drop the indecency charge, which alleged sex in the presence of others, said Capt. Christopher Eason, an attorney for Airman 1st Class Cassandra Hernandez, 20.

A hiker preparing a book on an ill-fated World War II-era plane that crashed in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park found the remains of a man believed to be a crew member on that flight, authorities said Monday. The remains were found Wednesday, 150 feet from those of another airman, discovered inside a Sierra Nevada glacier in 2005, said Fresno County Coroner David Hadden. The hiker "was there to look for evidence in the glacier of the crash," Hadden said.

Henry Cabot Lodge Bohler, 82, a former Tuskegee Airman who went on to battle racial barriers in postwar Florida, died Friday in Tampa as a result of brain injuries suffered in a fall nearly two years ago, his wife said. Born in Augusta, Ga., Bohler dreamed of flying and joined the Army Air Forces at age 17. He learned to fly the P-51 Mustang at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama with the elite unit of black airmen.