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Above: Navy Lt. Bernard Francis Rupinski is among the many names that appear on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the Luzerne County Courthouse in Wilkes-Barre. Right: Rupinski, of Edwardsville, was killed when a fighter jet he was co-piloting was shot down over North Vietnam on June 16, 1968. He was 24. Far right: Jake Piatt flew aircraft on the USS Kitty Hawk in 1968. Piatt, now a retired Navy commander, has researched what happened to Rupinski in Vietnam.

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They never met.

But Jake Piatt, a retired U.S. Navy commander who grew up in Wilkes-Barre, wants to keep alive the memory of a man killed long ago - a man to whom he's bounded by service in the Vietnam War.

Navy Lt. Bernard Francis Rupinski, of Edwardsville, was co-piloting a fighter jet that was shot down over North Vietnam nearly 45 years ago. He was 24.

A local veteran, Neno Sartini - a retired Air Force master sergeant who served in Korea and Vietnam - helped bring the men together.

Sartini said he knew about Rupinski's case from when he and a group of about 14 other veterans built the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the Luzerne County Courthouse in February 1988.

The men tried to do most of the work themselves, and they found themselves working in a hole where they planned to pour cement for a footing when an elderly man dressed in a suit walked past several times over the course of a few days, he said.

One Saturday, Sartini said, he approached the man and asked if he could help. The man told him he was Rupinski's father.

"He said, 'Well, a lot of people have a cemetery or a stone to go to pray for their dead sons and daughters. We have nothing. Now you're giving us something,'" Sartini said. "While he was saying that, the tears were coming down his face and down mine and my people in the hole, down their faces. They always said that memorial was built out of cement, steel and tears."

After 20 years of service, Piatt retired from the Navy in 1985 and settled down in Jacksonville, Fla. But he would come back to South Wilkes-Barre, his hometown, to visit his mother once or twice a year.

During the trips, he would go on casual runs to stay in shape. After the wall was built, he recognized two names on it: Pfc. George Ayers, who had lived next to Piatt at Parrish and Brown streets and Rupinski, whom he did not know.

But a boyhood friend of Piatt's, Dr. George Volpetti, would frequently ask if he knew Rupinski whenever Piatt came back to visit, Piatt said.

"The name stuck with me," said Piatt, who is now 70 and lives in Ponte Vedra, Fla.

Curiosity took hold and Piatt decided to find out what happened to Rupinski.

"The whole thing really was my intense curiosity and my ability to go on the Internet," Piatt said. "It was kind of reuniting with someone who wasn't here."

Piatt searched online, finding sketchy details about Rupinski's disappearance and presumptive death.

Rupinski was aboard a McDonnell-Douglas Phantom II fighter that was shot down over North Vietnam on June 16, 1968. The pilot in the two-seat jet, Walter E. Wilber, ejected and was captured by the North Vietnamese Army, Piatt said.

Rupinski, however, was never heard from again.

"The plane was engulfed in flames and my brother never was able to eject from the plane because of the intensity of the heat and fire, from what we understand," said Rupinski's sister, Alice Naylis, 71, of Edwardsville. "He obviously went down with the plane."

Searching online, Piatt also found an article written in Vietnamese that had the name Rupinski in English. He paid a company $160 to translate it. He found out that the pilot of the MiG-21 that shot Rupinski's plane down had taken down several other planes as well, he said.

Piatt tracked down Naylis in Edwardsville and spoke to her to learn more about her brother.

He learned Rupinski's wife had come to America from Sweden when she was a young lady and that they married and had a baby girl. Rupinski was shot down when the child was less than a year old.

Piatt said he decided to write about Rupinski to reinforce the meaning and intent of Memorial Day.

Through the years, Rupinski's family has attended memorial services for him and kept him in their hearts. The news that someone wanted to do something to help preserve his memory was touching, Naylis said.

"He (Piatt) called me out of the clear blue. â¦ I was blind-sided when he called," Naylis said. "It actually will be 45 years this year that my brother was shot down, and how would you even comprehend somebody calling you 45 years later? As far as I'm concerned, it seems like yesterday and certainly the heartache is still very fresh. But for someone to call you 45 years later and tell you that he would like to do a story on your brother was pretty shocking and yet I was very touched by it.", 570-821-2058