YONGSAN GARRISON, South Korea — Remains unearthed during the fifth and final joint recovery mission this year to North Korea will be repatriated Friday at a Yongsan Garrison ceremony, officials said Tuesday.
An indeterminate number of remains believed to be those of U.S. soldiers missing in action from the Korean War will be honored at the ceremony before being flown to a military lab in Hawaii for identification, officials said.
The ceremony, set for 10 a.m. at Knight Field, will include Brig. Gen. W. Montague Winfield, commander of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), which conducts the recovery missions.
Also on hand will be Adrian Cronauer, the former Air Force disc jockey immortalized in the movie “Good Morning, Vietnam” and now a special assistant to the director of the Pentagon’s POW/MIA office.
The remains, recovered by two teams of U.S. specialists operating with North Korean soldiers, will be repatriated over land across the Demilitarized Zone, JPAC officials said. Before this year, the remains had to be flown out of North Korea, usually to Yokota Air Base in Japan.
The new agreement was reached after lengthy negotiations with the North Koreans; U.S. officials have said that returning the recovered remains to American control on the Korean peninsula, where the soldiers fought and died, is appropriate symbolically.
The first U.S. recovery team operated near the Chosin Reservoir, where the 1st Marine Division and Army’s 7th Infantry Division fought pitched battles with Chinese forces in November and December 1950. The fighting in that area alone left more than 1,000 U.S. servicemembers unaccounted for, JPAC said.
The second team worked in Unsan County, about 60 miles north of Pyongyang. The 1st Cavalry Division and 25th Infantry Division fought in that area in November 1950.
Of the 88,000 U.S. servicemembers missing in action from all conflicts, more than 8,000 are from the Korean War, the Pentagon says.
Since 1996, 32 joint U.S.-North Korean recovery operations have taken place, with more than 200 sets of remains found.
