newbie needs help: can I "order by" before "grouping"?

[Michael Winston]

I'm having trouble ordering my results before grouping them.  I don't 
want to go into too much detail, so my simplified query without any 
grouping or ordering results in:

+--------+-----------+------------+
| jobnum | milestone | shipdate   |
+--------+-----------+------------+
| 96-655 |         4 |            |
| 96-655 |         2 |            |
| 96-655 |         0 | 2003-12-04 |
| 98-308 |         0 | 1973-05-11 |
| 98-308 |         4 |            |
| 98-316 |         0 | 1973-06-11 |
| 98-316 |         4 |            |
| 98-500 |         2 |            |
| 98-327 |         4 |            |
| 98-327 |         0 | 1973-08-11 |
+--------+-----------+------------+
when I add "group by jobnum order by milestone" I get:

+--------+-----------+------------+
| jobnum | milestone | shipdate   |
+--------+-----------+------------+
| 98-308 |         0 | 1973-05-11 |
| 98-316 |         0 | 1973-06-11 |
| 96-655 |         4 |            |
| 98-327 |         4 |            |
+--------+-----------+------------+
 but what I really want is this:
+--------+-----------+------------+
| jobnum | milestone | shipdate   |
+--------+-----------+------------+
| 98-308 |         0 | 1973-05-11 |
| 98-316 |         0 | 1973-06-11 |
| 96-655 |         0 | 2003-12-04 |
| 98-327 |         0 | 1973-08-11 |
| 98-500 |         2 |            |
+--------+-----------+------------+
Clearly, mysql is grouping first and then ordering.  I suppose that's 
reasonable, but I really want to order the results internally first 
and then group so that the displayed row from each group is the 
smallest value (and then maybe do some more sorting on shipdate, but 
that's another issue).

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks,
Michael
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