ARLINGTON, Va. – Billy Mall was 10 when the letters stopped.

He would eagerly read the letters chronicling his cousin Chuck’s stories of military life and his visions of soon barreling down on the Japanese. Often, there would be an Army Air Corps patch or two.

But one day in April 1944, instead of a letter, there was a tersely worded telegram addressed to Billy’s aunt Mildred: Tech. Sgt. Charles L. Johnston Jr. of Pittsburgh, her son, was missing in action.

MIA meant there was hope, and that was something Mildred McGann Johnston never lost.

“She believed until her dying day that he was going to come walking back through the door,” her nephew remembers.

It would be 70 years before he would learn the truth about what happened to his cousin and boyhood hero.

This is Tech. Sgt. Charles Johnston’s story.

Joining up

Chuck was one of the older cousins, but he didn’t leave out the little ones when the extended family got together on Pittsburgh’s North Side. He always included Billy when the older boys would joke around or play touch football in his parents’ yard on Perrysville Avenue.

“He was the one guy who paid attention to me,” said Mr. Mall, now 82.

Hazel-eyed and handsome, Chuck Johnston caught the attention of at least one pretty girl, someone named Diana who’d had a photo taken with him that relatives still have today. Across the back, she wrote in stylized cursive, “I am always thinking of you.”

Chuck liked going on fishing trips to Canada with his father and brother Robert, seven years younger, and was known in high school as “one of Perry’s super basketball men,” according to his yearbook.

The same yearbook said Chuck wanted to become a coach or a steamfitter like his father, who had worked at Pittsburgh’s Sauer Inc., at the time a small plumbing contractor. He took up the trade for a year, but World War II was raging and soon there was no question where he was headed: the military.

Everyone in the family was involved in the war effort in one way or another — buying war bonds, collecting scrap metal and selling stamps. But Chuck wanted to do more.

It was Nov. 7, 1942, exactly 11 months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Chuck had just turned 19.

It was time to enlist, joining the Army Air Forces.

His first stop was Wendover Field, Utah, where a medical officer declared him fit for duty. Soon he shipped off for training at Fort Meade, Md.; Miami Beach; Sioux Falls, S.D.; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; Hamilton, Calif. and Fairfield, Calif., War Department records show.