The love letters arrived in Patricia Scharf's Florida mailbox every day, sometimes two and three at a time. Each one revealed the tender side of a husband fighting a war half a world away in Vietnam.

This was 1965, a time when letters were the only way for Scharf to connect with her husband, an Air Force pilot flying dangerous missions.

There was just the two of them; their only child died at birth. So, Scharf's husband — Capt. Charles "Chuck" Scharf — filled those letters with promises of the family they would have when he returned.

He never made it back, though. He was killed in combat, shot down over North Vietnam on Oct. 1, 1965. All traces of him were lost in the jungles of Son La Province and his widow never remarried.

It would seem a distant echo of war that has nothing to do with Hawai'i on this Veterans Day.

Not so for a small group of aging Hawai'i Air National Guard pilots — men now in their 70s — who flew with Scharf out of Hickam Air Force Base when he and Patricia were stationed in the Islands in the early 1960s. Even after all these years, the old pilots consider their fallen friend one of the most honorable men they've ever known.

But their hearts are beating a little faster today for reasons none of them could have imagined: Chuck Scharf is coming back to them.

Forensic anthropologists at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command at Hickam analyzed remains recovered 14 years ago in Vietnam and concluded in August that they had found Scharf.

Now his widow is giddy, his old friends are planning a memorial service at Hickam, and a military funeral is scheduled for the end of the month at Arlington National Cemetery.

"I'm very happy," Patricia Scharf said by telephone from her home in Virginia. "I can't explain it. I am bubbling all over. He is home again, home now after 41 years."

The military will fly the 72-year-old widow to Hawai'i in two weeks to pick up her husband's remains from the accounting command, which operates its premier identification lab down the street from the air guard hangar at Hickam.

Hickam stands as a crossroads for the Scharfs.

When the Air Force wanted someone to train Hawai'i air guard fighter pilots in their new F-102 jets, it sent Scharf to Hickam for three months in 1958. He returned in 1961 for a three-year assignment in Hawai'i.

It was the best time of their marriage, Patricia Scharf said.

They went to the beach. They would pick 'opihi with neighbors. They went to the old Monkey Bar in Pearl City. They went boar hunting on Moloka'i.

"I was young," she said. "I was happy. I had a lovely life and a husband."

At Hickam, working with the 199th Fighter Squadron, Chuck Scharf met the men who remember him today.

Charles Carroll still remembers the joke — even though he won't repeat it — that Scharf told him one day on the base tarmac that made him laugh so hard, he almost puked.

"When we heard he died, we all felt it was really tragic," Carroll said. "He was a good stick, as they say, a good pilot. You have an emotional attachment to these guys and I guess you never lose it."

Carroll will be at the Nov. 26 memorial service, which will start at the hangar and finish with a few beers at the Sea Breeze.

Jim "Spike" Dykes will travel from Gillette, Wyo. to attend.

"I didn't think twice about it," said the 73-year-old Dykes. "When I heard they were going to do something for him, I said I am coming back. He was quite a guy."

Scharf was that rare breed of Mainland haole who found kindred spirits among a tightknit Hawai'i-born crowd, said Dykes, who grew up in Hilo.

"He blended in well," Dykes said. "Fighter pilots are a different breed. We like to raise hell. Chuck was one of the gang, even though he wasn't regular air guard. He was Air Force."

Scharf had transferred to MacDill Air Force Base just before his tour in Vietnam. He flew more than 160 combat hours between Aug. 25 1965, and the day he was shot down.

Scharf and his co-pilot were on a midday strike and reconnaissance flight out of Ubon Airfield in Thailand, flying low in their 15-ton F-4C Phantom jet to avoid surface-to-air missiles. Near their target area, they were hit by anti-aircraft artillery and crashed.

An extensive visual search found no evidence of the two airmen and they were declared missing in action. In 1978, they were declared killed in action.

But in 1990, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam provided U.S. officials with a possible crash site location, according to the joint accounting command at Hickam.

Teams from the Hawai'i lab carefully excavated the area in late 1992 and early 1993. They found a few human remains and numerous personal items, including a dental prosthesis belonging to Scharf. But lab officials decided they had to return to the crash site in 2004 for another excavation before they could make an ID.

That time they found a captain's insignia and a plastic tooth.

The lab was able to obtain a mitochondrial DNA sample from a bone uncovered at the crash site and came up with enough evidence to confirm that Scharf had been found.

A report on the lab findings landed in Patricia Scharf's mailbox.

"When I read all the documents, I said, 'Thank you, God. Thank you very much,' " she said. "It was like a load that came off my heart."

She called her husband's old friends in Hawai'i, none of whom had any clue that the pilot's remains were so close to the place where they had first come together.

And in time, she went to the trunk where she stores the love letters her husband mailed so long ago.

They connected them back then.

They connected them one more time.

When the Hickam lab obtained the mitochondrial DNA from Chuck Scharf's bone, it found matching genetic evidence on the saliva he used to seal his love letters.

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.