Shirley Esquerra put on the thin metal bracelet in 1970 and vowed not to take it off.
She never has.
The Orem elementary school teacher refused to remove the bracelet for sports, surgeries and even the delivery of a child. Doctors urged her to remove it while in labor, but she instead slipped it off wrist but kept it around her fingers.
Last week, Esquerra sat in her wood-paneled living room lined with cowboy memorabilia and ran trembling fingers over the fading grooves in the band. The grooves spell out a name, the name of a man she never knew: Sgt. 1st Class Donald Shue. Soon, 41 years after she put it on, she’ll finally remove the bracelet.
Donald Shue has come home.
Shue was a member of a Special Forces reconnaissance patrol operating in Quang Tri Province near the Vietnam-Laos border on Nov 3, 1969. Enemy forces ambushed his patrol, forcing the team to leave behind three soldiers, including Shue, still wounded on the battlefield. Enemy presence and inclement weather prevented search teams from surveying the area.
The U.S. Army declared Shue and others “missing in action.”
During the Vietnam War, more than 2,600 soldiers were declared either prisoners of war or missing in action. More than 1,693 are still missing. The return of Shue’s remains add him to a list of 953 soldiers identified and returned home.
Esquerra’s own husband was deployed to Vietnam in 1970. The couple first lived together at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base in southern California and she watched soldiers in admiration as they prepared for war. She saw soldiers exude courage, but she knew something more. She knew they were scared.
After her husband went to Vietnam, she moved to Arizona, where she discovered a program started by The National League of POW/MIA Families. The program issued bracelets to honor missing soldiers.
Esquerra ordered a bracelet. The bracelet represented her commitment to Shue and other soldiers who had paid the ultimate price.
“I didn’t do anything compared to what they have done,” Esquerra said. “I just put on the bracelet.”
Organizers of the bracelet program urged wearers to be politically active on the issue of soldiers considered prisoners of war and missing in action.
“We were supposed to, but I didn’t,” Esquerra said with a laugh. “I took it to a higher power because I figured He could do more than any politician could.”
Shue’s older sister, was one of the first to find out about the return of Shue’s remains.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Betty Jones said in a telephone interview from her home in North Carolina.
When the Army contacted her to inform her of the discovery, Jones hung up on them. Army officials went to her home to show her some of Shue’s possessions they had recovered. She saw his “Zippo” lighter and knew it was her brother’s.