Gebhart Schmidt Parramore Funeral Home

Dennis was the first young man from Miamisburg to die in Vietnam. Decades after the war, some in his family are just accepting his death. The Dennis family in 1966 — parents Charles and Vera, brother Jerry, sisters Eileen and Anne — was never convinced the flag-draped coffin sent back to them from Vietnam and buried in Miamisburg’s Hillgrove Cemetery held Mark. The family was told the remains so little resembled a person — Mark perished in a helicopter crash — that the casket stayed closed for the Aug. 9, 1966 funeral, said Mark’s sister, Eileen Brady. “We were warned not to open the coffin. It was nothing we wanted to see,” said Brady, 80, of Largo, Fla.» RELATED: Vietnam vets honored on 50th anniversary: What was it about? The war by the numbers Four years after the funeral, Jerry Dennis made an urgent phone call to his sister. He spotted a photo in Newsweek magazine of an unidentified prisoner of war who resembled Mark, a 1964 Miamisburg High School graduate. “It looked so much like Mark,” Brady said. “We were sure it was Mark.” Haunted by the face in the photo and with no definitive identification of the body in the Miamisburg grave, the family latched onto hope that Mark, a Navy medic, might still be alive.‘POW or corpse?’ Unlike the Navy’s version of events, the family held out belief the agile 19-year-old somehow made it out of a Marine CH46 Sea Knight transport helicopter that took enemy fire on July 15, 1966, then burst into flames and exploded onto a hillside.» The missing: 7 facts about the more than 82,000 service members never heard from again“POW or corpse?” read a caption under a photo of Mark along with an August 1971 story of the family’s search for truth in this newspaper.Jerry Dennis prodded defense officials for the rest of his life and spent a small fortune mounting legal challenges in search of answers along with his sisters. He died in 2002 following his parents’ deaths. Just last year, though, ... (MyDaytonDailyNews)