The family of U.S. Army Pacific Command Sgt. Maj. Frank Leota is giving thanks today for closure of a war wound that occurred 60 years ago when Leota’s uncle, Army Pfc. Jimmie Jimenez Gaitan, was captured in Korea in 1951, forced to march 300 miles to the north and died in a prisoner of war camp.

That’s where definitive family knowledge of Gaitan previously ended, with the 21-year-old counted among the more than 7,900 missing from the 1950-53 war.

But Leota, who is based at Fort Shafter, was able to escort his uncle’s remains home to Texas Tuesday after the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command recently made a positive identification.

Gaitan had been buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl as an "unknown" since 1956.

Research by a former U.S. Marine whose unit re-took the town where Gaitan was captured, along with advances in technology, made the recovery and identification possible.

All of this is making for a noteworthy Thanksgiving for Leota’s family.

The top enlisted soldier for the Army in the Pacific said about 300 relatives and friends are taking part in a Thanksgiving celebration and Saturday burial at a family plot in San Antonio.

The San Antonio Express-News said Gaitan had 11 siblings. A brother, the Rev. Raymond Gaitan, is traveling to Texas from Rome to conduct the services.

"It’s closure for the family," Leota said. "A lot of my aunts and uncles are very fragile. They are in their 80s, so for them, not knowing the whereabouts of their brother for the last 60 years, (this return brings) a lot of meaning for this Thanksgiving."

Leota said he’s been getting phone calls, email and texts as he prepared to escort his uncle’s remains on a flight to Texas.

"A lot of my cousins that I’m in dialogue with, a lot of them are former veterans themselves, so they are infantrymen, they’ve been medics, paralegals, officers — the whole gamut, so yeah, I’ve got strict guidance (about the escort duties)," he said.

Gaitan was a medic attached to the 17th Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division. Chinese soldiers captured Gaitan on Feb. 13, 1951, near Hoengsong.

Gaitan and about 700 other POWs were marched north 300 miles to camps along the Yalu River. Exhausted and ill, Gaitan died May 24, 1951, at Camp 1 at Changsong and was buried by fellow POWs on a hillside.

In 1954 during Operation Glory, North Korea repatriated 2,944 remains. Those that could not be identified and other unknowns from South Korea — a total of 848 individuals — were buried in 1956 at Punchbowl.

The remains were treated with formaldehyde in Japan before coming to Hawaii, which destroyed DNA, a primary means of identification. Experts used dental records and a new method comparing collarbones and vertebrae to old chest X-rays to identify Gaitan.

Ron Broward, a California resident and combat Marine from the Korean War who for decades has helped the U.S. military identify those missing from the war, gathered dental information on Gaitan that started the ball rolling on his eventual disinterment and identification.

"I know the town where he (Gaitan) was captured," Broward, who was in Hawaii, told Leota Tuesday at JPAC headquarters at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. Broward’s unit re-took the town a week after Gaitan and others were captured.

"Thank you, all of you," Leota told Broward and JPAC team members who worked on his uncle’s case. "This is closure 60 years in the making."

Leota later helped wrap his uncle’s skeletal remains in a green Army blanket, a military tradition dating to the Civil War.