March 2006

The really big item for all of us is the continuing effect of not having teams in North Korea. Later this year, maybe, we honestly don’t know. But for now, even with other unrelated work around the world, we have a few extra anthropologists at hand. That means more table work and more identification. Three categories: Of the 867 official Unknowns from the Korean War, one is at Arlington.  Of the 866 from the Punchbowl, seven have now been exhumed, of whom 2 have been identified. Both are Marines who died in the Chosin Reservoir campaign. Requests are now in work to exhume 2 others.

Meanwhile, of the 208 caskets returned by the North Koreans during 1990–1994, 16 have now been identified. From Chosin Reservoir: 2 men; one, Cpl Edwin C. Steigerwalt, was a short-term POW who died en route to Kanggye. Five other POWs from the Suan POW Camps have been identified: Cpl Leslie Ray Heath, SFC Walter Leroy Hood, PFC Ross William Katzman, Cpl Arthur Leo Seaton, and PFC John Morris Washington. Also identified are 2 men from the area above the DMZ, 4 aircrew members from a B-29 bomber, 2 men in the Unsan battle zone, and 1 POW working north from Death Valley to Camp 5, SFC Richard Joseph Cabrel.

Between 1996 and 2005, we recovered over 220 sets of remains from throughout North Korea, of whom 26 have been identified: 10 from the Unsan battle zone, 8 from around Kujang, 1 from around Kunu-ri, and 7 from Chosin. We have also identified 1 pilot whose remains were recovered from the Yalu River in Dandong, China. Two of the men from near Unsan were short-term POWs: Cpl Richard Celestine Wasinger from the Unsan battle itself, and Sgt Mitchell Allen Wallace who was a Kunu-ri POW working through the area when he died at a nearby village.

The long and the short of it is that we are not just collecting and identifying battlefield deaths. A total of 9 men who died as POWs have now been sent home to their families, and we hope that many others will follow.

JPAC is launching a team to South Korea in March for a month of investigations. Chief Warrant Officer Keith Davis, who you remember from the 2004 reunion in Ft. Mitchell, will be leading the investigations. Our hope is to identify sites for recovery operations at a later date. We are also planning to go back to South Korea in August to conduct recoveries and additional recoveries. We currently have two scheduled for excavation in August and our investigations will hopefully add more sites to our recovery list.

We are also developing a lead on a South Korea burial location for a short-term POW. I can give you more information on this case later as things unfold.

Phillip also mentioned that, Mr. Bob Newberry was appointed Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs in January 2006. A new man and a good man, we’ll miss those who have come before, but we’ll be doing great things with him on board.