Hundreds of burial markers stretching across Section U of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl, each about three feet apart, bear the same inscription: "U.S. Unknown, Korea."
On Friday two casualties from the 1950-53 war were moved a step closer to home.
The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command — tasked with investigating, recovering and identifying America’s missing war dead — exhumed two caskets with the expectation of making identifications.
The accounting command, known as JPAC, is putting increased emphasis on the identification of the Korean War unknowns at Punchbowl, which once numbered 867.
Since 1999, 26 caskets have been exhumed, with 22 identifications made, according to the command. One set of remains was reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery and resides at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Typically, JPAC disinters about five Punchbowl Korean War unknowns a year, officials said. But with the hiring of additional researchers to work on the cases — including three historians brought on in about the past year — the command said it is stepping up its efforts.
Debra Prince Zinni, a JPAC forensic anthropologist, said seven sets of remains have been exhumed this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.
"We’re hoping that we’ll have some more in June, also," Prince Zinni said.
The exhumations come with JPAC facing increased pressure to make identifications as the siblings of U.S. service members missing from World War II and the Korean War themselves age and die off.
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office in Washington, D.C., announced Thursday that the remains of Army Pfc. Richard E. Clapp, 19, will be buried Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery after he was exhumed from Punchbowl last year.
On Sept. 2, 1950, Clapp and C Company of the 1st battalion, 27th infantry Regiment out of Schofield Barracks came under fire near Yulchon, South Korea, and Clapp was killed in action, according to the Defense Department.
The Army was unable to identify his remains at the time, and he was buried as an unknown in a military cemetery on the Korean peninsula. In 1951 the remains of Clapp and other unknowns were moved to Punchbowl.
At Kokura, Japan, the remains were processed by a U.S. Army unit using formaldehyde as a preservative, not knowing that the treatment damaged the DNA sequence, which become a testing method 40 years later.
Scientists at JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory used circumstantial evidence and forensic identification tools such as X-ray comparisons and dental records to finally identify Clapp, the Defense Department said.
Sixty-one years after her brother was killed by enemy fire, Beverly Chase, now 78, will attend his reburial at Arlington National Cemetery next week, the Kitsap (Wash.) Sun newspaper reported.
Chase and her brother grew up in Washington state.
"I am very, very, very pleased," Chase told the newspaper. "I think my parents would be pleased, too. You always wonder about those kinds of things. This puts closure on it, and I’m just sorry my parents weren’t around to see this."
Five soldiers and a Marine, each wearing white gloves, served as pallbearers Friday as they carried the disinterred and earth-covered, rusting caskets from the Punchbowl graves to a truck for transportation to JPAC’s lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
Prince Zinni said, "It’s really rewarding work to bring some answers to families."
Marine Cpl. Stephen Rich, 22, who is based at JPAC and served as one of the pallbearers, said it was a "surreal experience" to be part of the exhumation.
But Rich said it reinforced the pact that the U.S. military makes with its troops that "if you die in combat, one of your fellow soldiers or Marines, whoever you are with, will bring you home."
