Bolden, Cpl C.G.

The Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced today that the remains of a U.S. soldier, missing from the Korean War, have been identified and will be returned to his family for burial with full military honors.

Army Cpl. C G. Bolden, 23, of Shirley, Ark., will be buried Feb. 21 in Clinton, Ark. In January 1951, Bolden was assigned to Company C, 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division. His unit engaged enemy forces near Hoengsong, South Korea, when they were attacked by Chinese forces which forced a withdrawal south to a more defensible position. Bolden was reported as missing in action Jan. 5, 1951.

In late 1953, during a prisoner of war exchange, known as Operation Big Switch, a returning U.S. service member told U.S. debriefers that Bolden was captured by Chinese forces and had died from malnutrition in April 1951while in enemy control. His remains were not among those returned by communist forces during Operation Glory in 1954.

Between 1991 and 1994, North Korea turned over to the U.S. 208 boxes of human remains believed to contain more than 400 U.S. servicemen who fought during the war. North Korean documents, turned over with some of the boxes, indicated that some of the remains were recovered from the vicinity where Bolden was believed to have died.

To identify Bolden’s remains, scientists from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) used circumstantial evidence, dental and radiograph comparison, and two forms of DNA; mitochondrial DNA, which matched his sister and brother and Y-chromosome Short Tandem Repeat DNA (Y-STR) analysis, which matched his brother.

Today, 7,855 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Korean War. Using modern technology, identifications continue to be made from remains that were turned over by North Korean officials or recovered by American recovery teams.

For additional information on the Defense Department’s mission to account for Americans, who went missing while serving our country, visit the DPAA web site at www.dpaa.mil or call (703) 699-1169.