PERU MISSIONARY RELIVES PLANE TRAGEDY

GARNER, N.C. -- When he got off the plane that brought him to North
Carolina, Jim Bowers wondered aloud to his mother if he could ever get the
images out of his mind.

The smoke from the guns of a Peruvian Air Force A-37 that shot through the
small aircraft carrying his missionary family. The screams in Spanish of
the Cessna's pilot: "They're killing us! They're killing us!" The blood on
his infant daughter. His wife slumped over in her seat.

More than a year has passed since a single bullet took the lives of Bowers'
wife, Roni, and his daughter, Charity, in the sky over the Amazon River. A
Baptist, Bowers credits his faith with sustaining him and his 7-year-old
son, Cory.

He says he's forgiven the U.S. and Peruvian officials who mistook his
family's plane for a drug smuggler's. The two governments have acknowledged
errors were made, and President Bush has called him to express regret.

But Bowers still longs for an apology from the CIA, who officials said
hired the surveillance crew that first told the Peruvians about the flight
- -- then never explicitly stopped them from shooting.

"From the very beginning I wasn't expecting anything except for someone to
admit they did something wrong and to be punished for it," Bowers said
recently from his mother's home in this Raleigh suburb. "Then I realized as
the months went by that there wasn't going to be anybody punished.

"It doesn't matter how much you forgive a person. When they do something
wrong, they should still suffer the consequences."

After the Peruvian plane shot at the missionaries, a U.S. program to force
down or shoot down airplanes suspected of carrying drugs in Latin America
was halted.

On Thursday, a senior Bush administration official said the program is
expected to resume. The timing of President Bush's decision to restart the
program remains uncertain, said the official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity.

Bowers, 39, has made dozens of speeches about his experience at Bible
colleges and churches in the Americas and Europe.

A book, "If God Should Choose," and a dramatic video about the family are
now serving to meet the Bowers' calling: evangelism and encouraging others
to become missionaries.

"God has chosen Cory and me to represent him in a bigger way, a lot bigger
than I would have imagined," he said at a memorial service for Roni and
Charity last year.

Jim and Roni Bowers worked in relative anonymity for five years along the
Amazon in northeastern Peru, spreading the Christian gospel among the
riverside villages and training ministers through the Association of
Baptists for World Evangelism. The Bowers lived with their children aboard
a houseboat that sailed up and down the river.

On April 20, 2001, the family, flown by fellow-missionary Kevin Donaldson,
was returning from the Colombian border where they had picked up a
permanent resident visa for Charity. CIA personnel aboard a surveillance
plane spotted the aircraft and alerted Peruvian officials. A Peruvian
interceptor arrived and shot the aircraft as the CIA crew debated whether
the plane fit a drug smuggler's profile.

Roni Bowers and Charity, who had been adopted in Michigan only a few months
earlier, were dead. Cory and Jim Bowers weren't injured. Donaldson was shot
in the legs, but still managed to land the pontoon plane on the river. They
reached land and got help.

In the months after the shooting, government reports blamed errors by the
Peruvian military, procedural mistakes and the poor language skills of
personnel from both countries for misidentifying the plane.

"They had no reason to suspect us," Bowers said.

Jim Bowers brought the bodies back to America and settled in Garner, a town
of 20,000 south of Raleigh, where tobacco fields are giving way to suburban
subdivisions. There, he and Cory moved in with his mother, Wilma.

Bowers took a job at Bethel Baptist Church in nearby Cary, leading Spanish
Bible studies and church services for the area's growing Hispanic population.

He said he's not bitter, though he does have strong words for the people
involved. "It was an accident," he said. "It was terrible negligence and
stupidity but it wasn't malicious."

Roni Bowers' parents have a more pointed assessment.

"It was the United States and Peruvian governments that murdered our
daughter," Roni's father, John Luttig, said in an interview from Pace, Fla.

An $8 million settlement from the U.S. government was reached this spring
with the crash survivors, Roni Bowers' parents and the Bowers' missionary
agency. The government didn't admit liability or assign blame to the CIA as
part of the settlement.

When asked whether the CIA would apologize to the family, an agency
spokesman referred to the White House statement released in March that
said: "The United States government and the government of Peru deeply
regret this tragic event and the resulting deaths."

All of the beneficiaries say they will give the money to support Christian
ministries. Peru also has agreed to replace the missionary agency's plane.

With few answers about why this all happened, he leans on the positives
that have come out of the tragedy, including the growth of his own faith.

"I got Roni stripped away from me. Basically, my main thing in life was my
relationship with her," he said. Now, "God has seemed to be much more real
and close to me."

On the Net:

Association of Baptists for World Evangelism: http://www.abwe.org

Jim and Cory Bowers: http://www.jimbowers.org