Bringing a Hero Home: A Decade-Long Quest Ends With a Pilot’s Third Burial

‘Mayday!’ came the frantic call from inside a tiny U.S. attack helicopter after a rocket-propelled grenade lopped off its tail rotor and forced it to crash-land in the desert 20 miles northwest of Baghdad.

A fierce firefight soon broke out as insurgents headed toward their prize: the downed AH-6 Little Bird chopper and about 20 U.S. soldiers, including members of the secret Delta Force who had landed afterward to protect it.

But then, much as the cavalry used to ride to the rescue, Air Force Major Troy Gilbert miraculously appeared from over the horizon, piloting an F-16. The militants were too close to civilians and friendly forces for bombs, so Gilbert screamed in fast and low–200 ft. above the desert–and shredded a truck full of bad guys with the six-barreled Gatling gun tucked into the left side of his F-16. He roared into a tight right turn and opened up again, his eyes glued to the second truck. But at 500 m.p.h., he stuck to his target a second too long, flying his plane into the ground even as he desperately pulled back on the stick.

At the cost of his own life, Gilbert’s daring helped save his fellow Americans on Nov. 27, 2006. But by the time the clash ended and U.S. troops made it to the wreckage, Gilbert was gone. U.S. officers had seen, via a video feed from a drone far above, al-Qaeda fighters pull Gilbert’s body from the wreckage, roll it up in a carpet and stash it inside a truck. The Army stormed five nearby buildings where they suspected Gilbert’s remains had been taken, but came up empty.

Advances in identifying remains, and a paucity of major battles, have shrunk the number of U.S. troops declared missing in action in recent wars. With Gilbert’s return, there are no American MIAs remaining in Iraq or Afghanistan. There are 126 MIAs from 14 Cold War clashes (most involving shoot downs over water); 1,618 from Vietnam; 7,780 from Korea; and more than 73,000 from World War II.

Since that day a decade ago, Gilbert had come home twice–but only in bits and pieces. This month, his full body will finally be laid to rest. He will be the first person, according to the records of Arlington National Cemetery, ever to be buried in the nation’s most hallowed grounds three times.

Gilbert’s death is a story of heroism, tempered by sorrow and horror. But most important, it’s a story about coming home. It’s a powerful testament to the Defense Department’s pledge–embraced by everyone wearing a U.S. military uniform–never to leave a comrade behind. While many of the details of Gilbert’s case remain classified, the story that follows has been gleaned from official and unofficial military accounts, Gilbert’s family and members of the U.S. military who believe it is one worth sharing. “The lesson for everybody who hears this story is that we don’t give up,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James tells TIME. “We bring them home.”

Troy Gilbert, age 34 when he died, was the son of Air Force Senior Master Sergeant Ron Gilbert, an enlisted man, and his wife Kaye. He was born on an Air Force base in Louisiana and always wanted to fly. In one treasured family photo, taken when the family lived at a training base in Del Rio, Texas, he’s the only member of his Little League team not staring at the camera. He was craning his 10-year-old neck, transfixed by a T-38 jet trainer overhead. “Anytime we were outside, his eyes were always up looking at the sky,” his younger sister Rhonda Jimmerson says. “His favorite movie growing up was Top Gun.”

He married Ginger, his college sweetheart, after their Texas Tech graduation in 1993. During his 12 years in uniform, he was what the service calls a “fast burner,” training Air Force pilots in Arizona and helping keep Air Force One flying as a logistics officer. He was also tapped to attend the Army Command and General Staff College in Kansas after his Iraq tour. He picked up his call sign–Trojan–while flying F-16s out of Aviano, Italy. By the time he shipped out to Iraq in September 2006, he and Ginger had five kids, including identical twin daughters born six months earlier. The couple discussed his decision to volunteer for the assignment. “If something happens to you, we’re never going to forgive ourselves,” she told him. “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he assured her. “I am a pilot.”

Gilbert and his wingman had been flying for about three hours when the Army chopper went down just after noon. It was Gilbert’s 22nd Iraq mission. The helicopter’s two crew members belonged to the Task Force 160 Night Stalkers, the same outfit that would take Navy SEALs for their final rendezvous with Osama bin Laden five years later. It was one of six helicopters seeking to kill or capture a local al-Qaeda leader near Taji. Troops from the other helicopters landed to come to the pilots’ aid and to protect the unflyable Little Bird. But after the wounded pilots had been flown to safety, the rescuers soon found themselves under heavy attack from al-Qaeda-linked militants. Mortars, RPGs and rounds from antiaircraft guns and AK-47s began raining down. There was no place for the troops to hide. The surviving chopper returned to the air to fight.

The airwaves crackled with radio calls from the ground seeking more help as Gilbert arrived on the scene in his F-16. “We had called our people, our command, and requested tank support, helicopter support, anything to help us, because we were being overrun,” the radioman on the ground–the last person ever to speak to Gilbert–said, according to Gilbert’s father. “‘Nobody would help us. They couldn’t get in because it was too hot,'” Ron Gilbert recalled the Delta Force commando’s telling him three years ago during a visit to Delta Force’s secret Fort Bragg, N.C., compound.

From his cockpit, Gilbert spied a pair of trucks outfitted with machine guns and RPG launchers threatening the stranded Americans. Running on both jet fuel and adrenaline, Gilbert rolled in on his first strafing run and targeted the lead truck. He held in a steady dive from 1,300 ft. to 900 ft. as he fired, before beginning to climb at 200 ft. Betty, as the cockpit warning system is called, blared, “Pull up!” into Gilbert’s headset as warnings flashed on his heads-up display. In pilot parlance, Gilbert had “padlocked” onto his targets, so intent on completing his mission that he ignored danger to himself. “He had to act quickly, within a matter of seconds,” says his oldest child, Boston, now 19 and a freshman at Southern Methodist University. “Knowing him, there was no other option.”

Gilbert circled back for another pass, firing two bursts at the second truck while diving from 1,000 ft. to 700 ft. Again, warnings sounded inside the cockpit. A fifth of a second after releasing the trigger, he began pulling as hard as he could on the control stick to regain altitude. But it was too late: he had run out of sky. The F-16 was pointing up when it slammed tail first into the ground less than a second later. The impact–with a force up to 795 times that of gravity, 10 times what is survivable–threw the plane’s engine nearly a mile.

“This motivation to immediately support friendly forces under fire produced a series of decisions and flight parameters that left little room for recovery on the first strafe pass, and no possibility of recovery on the second pass,” the official Air Force investigation into the crash concluded. Gilbert died, it added, because of his “excessive motivation to succeed.”

The grunts appreciated his sacrifice. “We were in a very vulnerable position on the ground and in great danger of having heavy casualties inflicted upon us,” an Army officer wrote to Gilbert’s commander. “It was obvious to all of us on the ground that he was single-handedly breaking apart the enemy forces.” Delta Force acknowledged its debt. There’s a plaque in his honor inside that Delta Force compound, and the Air Force posthumously awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor.

Because of the fighting, U.S. forces didn’t get to the crash scene for eight hours. “No body was found by those securing the crash site,” the Air Force investigation said. “We searched and we searched and we searched,” one soldier said. “We beat ourselves up hard when we couldn’t locate his body.” Fellow pilots took it hard. “I knelt by this pool of blood and prayed for the family,” says one who arrived on the crash site the next day. “I knew he was gone.” That same day, a search dog found the carpet used to carry Gilbert away, but not the man.

Daughter Bella, now 13, was bouncing on a trampoline in the backyard of the Gilberts’ Phoenix home when Ginger heard a knock on the front door. “There was this whole sea of Air Force uniforms, and I think, That’s strange, for about a second, and then you think that cannot be what they’re here for because that wouldn’t happen,” she says. They delivered the grim news. Within hours they had discovered enough–just fragments of skull and tissue–to know that Trojan hadn’t survived. The Pentagon changed Gilbert’s military status from DUSTWUN–duty status whereabouts unknown–to killed in action.

But 99% of his remains could not be found.

Gilbert’s first burial took place at Arlington on Dec. 11, 2006. About 300 mourners said their final goodbyes accompanied by military ritual: a horse-drawn caisson, taps and an F-16 flyover. “I remember walking behind the caisson with my little kids and feeling like, I know he’s not in there,” Ginger recalls. “Everybody knew he wasn’t in there, except my children. I mean, there was one small, tiny, tiny little piece, but I didn’t want them to know, because how do you explain that to your little kids?”

More sad and bitter moments were still to come. Six months after his death, Ginger and their sons traveled to Arlington to be with him on their wedding anniversary, the same week as Memorial Day. “I couldn’t think of any place else I was supposed to be at that time of year,” Ginger says. Then, on the first Sept. 11 after his death, an al-Qaeda website posted a video of Gilbert’s body, along with footage from the crash scene. While it didn’t show his face, it showed his pristine ID card. “They were using his body as propaganda and as a war trophy,” his sister Rhonda says. The video blamed President George W. Bush for dispatching Gilbert and “thousands of American soldiers to the incinerator in Iraq.”

But there were brighter spots too. In 2008, Ginger married Jim Ravella, a retired F-15 pilot who had lost his wife to breast cancer. Ravella adopted Troy’s five children on Memorial Day 2009. The Gilberts credit their evangelical Christian faith with sustaining them during the fruitless years of searching. Ginger and Jim now work for Folds of Honor, a nonprofit that provides scholarships to the children of those killed in war.

Meanwhile, a 20-member team of retired Special Forces and intel analysts was spending years vainly scouring Anbar province. “We devoted thousands of hours attempting to find him,” one military searcher wrote the Gilberts. “Someone out there knows where he is buried.” The U.S. government, he said, offered a “hefty” but classified cash reward for information leading to his return. It broadcast frequent TV commercials seeking his whereabouts. One 2011 mission involved dispatching 160 soldiers and cadaver dogs in 24 vehicles, along with a backhoe and Predator drone overhead, to a farm where a half-dozen disturbed-soil sites were vainly dug up in 104˚F heat. “Any one of my team, including myself, would gladly go into the worst parts of Iraq and face any threat in order to get Troy back,” the military searcher added. “It was our job, and it’s what we owe to every American.”

But the military bureaucracy kicked into high gear as it prepared to pull out of Iraq at the end of 2011. It let the family know the search for Gilbert would end at the same time. “The Air Force told us, ‘He has been accounted for, we have his remains, he has been identified, and he has been buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery. So there is nothing more to do–the case is closed,'” Rhonda recalls. But she adds that the “heart-wrenching and crushing” al-Qaeda video showed otherwise. “I was able to use that video and say, ‘No, he’s not accounted for, and here’s the proof.'”

The Gilberts met with their Congressman, Mac Thornberry, a senior Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee. “We told him they wouldn’t listen to us,” Ron recalls. “He got really mad and said, ‘I’ll tell you what: They may not listen to you, but they’ll listen to me.'” (Thornberry declined to be interviewed.) “As a mother, I carried the whole man inside of me,” Troy’s mom Kaye says. “I raised the whole man for 17 years. And he was a whole man when the Air Force took him to Iraq. I wanted a whole man back.” Soon enough, the Pentagon did an about-face. “His family deserves nothing less than our best effort to recover his remains and return them to his loved ones,” then Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said in February 2012.

It was ultimately an Iraqi who provided Gilbert’s second set of remains. In late 2012, he turned over bones from the tip of each toe of Gilbert’s right foot to the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, which handed them over to the U.S. It appeared that Gilbert’s body was being shifted–maybe even stolen–between tribal leaders in western Iraq. “We would get close to finding him, and somebody would move him,” Ginger says. “Those would have been the first things that broke off in moving a skeleton.”

Once the bones were confirmed as Gilbert’s, the military spent nine months searching for the rest of him before telling the Gilberts what they had found. The Iraqi “led them on a wild-goose chase of grave sites saying that he knew where Troy was,” Ginger’s husband Jim says. “They didn’t want to inform Ginger because they thought they were going to get all of Troy.” But once again, the trail went cold.

Ginger told her children about their father’s fate as they grew older. But she hadn’t told the 7-year-old twins when the toe bones came home in 2013. Unsurprisingly, they were confused: “They were like, ‘What? We’ve already buried him.'” On Dec. 11, 2013, about 150 people returned to Arlington as a small box carrying those bone fragments was placed alongside the original casket, buried exactly seven years earlier. Ginger and the children placed red roses next to the box. A bagpiper played “Amazing Grace,” and a bugler sounded taps for Major Gilbert for a second time.

The odds of bringing Gilbert home faded. The 150,000 U.S. troops who had been swarming all over Iraq in the three years after the crash had dwindled to mere hundreds after the U.S. pulled out in 2011. But as more Americans returned to Iraq to battle ISIS–there are over 5,000 there now–one Iraqi shared a critical piece of intelligence. He reported that a tribal chieftain near Fallujah was saying he was the latest local leader to have custody of an American pilot’s body. Ron said, “He was like a trophy, going from tribal leader to tribal leader.”

U.S. troops, including members of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, paid the chieftain a discreet visit. They demanded proof of his claim, and he turned over a jawbone on Aug. 28. Ten days later, the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware confirmed that it was Gilbert’s.

On the night of Sept. 30, a 29-member team, including members of Task Force 160–the same unit that Gilbert died protecting–paid the chieftain a second visit. “We knew we couldn’t fumble this mission. They could have been sucking us into a trap,” says a U.S. Central Command officer. “So we had to go in big”–with enough firepower to persuade the Iraqi to surrender Gilbert’s body. They demanded that the chieftain turn over the remains, but he initially refused. “They said he didn’t have a choice, and if he didn’t give them the body, he’d regret it,” Ron says. After considering his options, the chieftain relented. “They went and dug him up, along with his flight suit and part of the parachute.”

Bella was a toddler playing on a trampoline when the family learned her father had gone down 10 years before. In October, she was a teenager competing in a volleyball tournament when her mother got the phone call that ended the family’s quest. “They’ve found Troy,” Air Force General Robin Rand, a family friend, told her from a quiet corner of the Air Force Academy’s Falcon Stadium (where the Air Force football team was beating Navy, 28-14). “Did they get all of him?” she asked from inside her SUV in San Antonio, where the family now lives. “Because you know it’s just never been over.”

“All of him,” Rand told her. In fact, her late husband and the father of their five children had been placed aboard a C-130 cargo plane that had been standing by in Baghdad and was headed for Germany, and ultimately home, within hours of his recovery.

At twilight on Oct. 3, Major Troy Gilbert landed at Dover Air Force Base aboard a C-17, where his family and top Air Force officials welcomed him home. Included in the solemn gathering was James, the Air Force Secretary, as well as four-star General David Goldfein, who as Chief of Staff is the service’s top officer. A decade ago, as a one-star brigadier general, he had led the investigation into Gilbert’s crash. Six airmen in battle fatigues, combat boots and white gloves moved the casket from inside the cavernous cargo plane to a waiting hearse.

After nearly a decade, the Gilberts are finally able to awaken from their nightmare. “It’s really hard to go through three funerals,” said his mother, who was at Dover when her only son finally came home. “I know that.” Even so, she is looking forward to saying her final goodbye during his third burial at Arlington, on Dec. 19 at 1 p.m. “It is going to be,” she says, “a joyous day.”