Nearly 75 years after he died aboard the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor, Petty Officer 1st Class Vernon T. Luke finally received a burial with full military honors Wednesday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.
Six uniformed sailors carried his American flag-draped casket and meticulously folded the flag into a triangle for presentation to his now 78-year-old niece, LeeAnn Michalske.
Three volleys rang out from a seven-member firing party, and a bugler played taps on the blustery day.
The 43-year-old machinist’s mate from Green Bay, Wis., was among 393 men from the battleship buried as “unknowns” at Punchbowl in heavily commingled graves.
That changed Wednesday. Luke’s casket was lowered into the ground and topped by a stone marker that, for the first time, noted his name and sacrifice for the nation. It reads:
Vernon T Luke
MM1 US Navy
USS Oklahoma
World War II
Aug 22 1898 Dec 7 1941
K.I.A. Pearl Harbor
The burial fulfilled the military’s promise to leave no man behind — and to return the fallen to families when possible.
Michalske and Marilyn Gardner, the widow of Luke’s nephew, were flown out by the Navy from Wisconsin for the burial. Both tossed lei into Luke’s grave.
The event impacted both emotionally, and the Navy said neither was up to talking to the press.
In coming years, the burial played out Wednesday will be repeated across the country as more Oklahoma dead are identified and returned to families.
The Pentagon announced last year that it was taking the unprecedented step of exhuming all the Oklahoma unknowns at Punchbowl.
The move came amid mounting pressure from Congress for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which searches for, recovers and identifies Americans missing from past wars, to increase its identifications to at least 200 a year. In fiscal 2015, DPAA made 80 IDs.
Research conducted by Kahala resident Ray Emory, a Pearl Harbor veteran who manned a .50-caliber machine gun on the USS Honolulu on Dec. 7, 1941, led to one USS Oklahoma casket being unearthed in 2003.
Using military records, Emory determined the identities of 27 men killed on the Oklahoma. The Pentagon positively identified five men. But incomplete sets of bones of more than 100 other men also were found, complicating further identifications until all the remains were recovered.
The last of the remaining 388 sailors and Marines were disinterred in November, and identifications continue to be made.
“Just think. It’s been what, 75 years, before they finally caught up with (Luke) and got him buried,” Emory, 94, said after attending the burial service.
The former Pearl Harbor chief petty officer understands the strong desire by some families to see relatives recovered for proper burial — even after more than seven decades.
“If it was my father or brother, if he was missing (in action), I’d sure as hell like to know where the hell he was,” Emory said. “I mean, there are people that feel that way. There are others that don’t care. That was long ago and it doesn’t mean anything to them. You’ve got the one side or the other, and it doesn’t seem like there’s anything in between.”
The DPAA said the first five Oklahoma crew members to be more recently identified are: Luke; Chief Petty Officer Albert E. Hayden of Maryland; Ensign Lewis S. Stockdale of Montana; Seaman 2nd Class Dale F. Pearce of Kansas; and Chief Petty Officer Duff Gordon of Wisconsin.
Luke is the first to be buried from the group.
Stockdale’s funeral will be March 18, also at Punchbowl. Hayden’s family will bury him in Maryland, the DPAA said. The other two families had yet to schedule burials, the agency recently said.
Emory added that “there’s eight more I understand that have been identified (from the Oklahoma),” with the names expected to soon be released. “So they are making progress.”
A total of 429 USS Oklahoma sailors and Marines were killed in the Dec. 7, 1941, attacks. The battleship was hit by seven to nine Japanese torpedoes and rolled in the harbor, trapping hundreds of men inside, according to the National Park Service.
Between 35 and 36 crew members were subsequently positively identified and buried, the U.S. military said.
From June 1942 to May 1944, during salvage operations, the remaining service members’ remains were removed from the ship and initially interred as unknowns in Nuuanu and Halawa cemeteries.
In 1947, all remains in those cemeteries were disinterred for attempted identification. Twenty-seven unknowns from the USS Oklahoma were proposed for identification based on dental comparisons, but all of the proposed identifications were rejected.
By 1950, all unidentified remains associated with the ship were re-interred as unknowns at Punchbowl, leaving them the single largest group of buried unknown servicemen from Pearl Harbor.
