‘Place of honor’: Valley family has funeral at Arlington for dad who’s still MIA from Vietnam War

FRESNO, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) – For decades, Debbie Shea, a woman living in Richmond, Virginia, held onto an old Vietnam War MIA bracelet. 

She knew nothing about the man whose name was etched into the metal.  It read, “Ralph Balcom.”

“I just thought, is he still missing? You know what happened? I needed to know the end of the story,” Shea said last year in September of 2024. 

So, she decided to finish the story herself. 

“So, I Googled a little bit more and found a site where you could go to the bracelet area and kind of leave a note on the bulletin board. So I just said I acquired this bracelet in 1971 and I would love to return it to the family if possible,” she added at the time. 

The possibility became a reality when Shea learned Ralph’s son, Chris, was a volunteer with the Central Valley Honor Flight, a group that flies vets to see the war monuments in Washington, D.C. It’s just a short drive from her home in central Virginia. 

Debbie surprised Chris with the bracelet at an emotional meeting in front of the memorial built to honor veterans like Chris’s dad. 

By figuring out the ending to a story Shea wore around her wrist for years, she inspired an epilogue. His family decided it was time to finally say a formal goodbye.  

But Captain Ralph Balcom’s location has been a mystery for years. He was last seen on May 15, 1966. The United States military believes his plane crashed over Laos during the Vietnam War. To this day, his body has never been recovered. He was presumed dead in 1977, and it was then that they promoted him to the rank of Colonel.

“When the prisoners came home, that’s when we- and he wasn’t among them, that’s when we knew that he was just gone. But we didn’t know. We had no idea what had happened,” Tracy Kline said, speaking about her father. 

Now his family, including Chris’s mother, Marian Balcom-Pratt, officially has a spot to visit him forever. The family was able to have a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. 

And while his body isn’t there physically, his memory is. 

“He’ll finally have a resting place, and you can’t ask for more,” Balcom-Pratt said. 

After decades of pain and missing him, Colonel Ralph Balcom’s family finally got to see him receive full military honors. 

“He has a permanent place, such a beautiful permanent place of honor, so we are super, super grateful, humbled, honored,” Kline said. 

And of course, Shea was there to help say goodbye. 

“I contacted Debbie Shea, and I said, ‘Hey, you want to be there for that?’ And she said, ‘Absolutely,'” Balcom said. 

But the story isn’t over yet. 

Investigators are planning on heading to where they believe the crash site is in Laos this upcoming spring. They want to dig and try to see if they can find Balcom’s body. It’s not a guarantee they will find him, but as DNA technology gets better, more families like the Balcoms have more hope to find their heroes they lost during the war.