An undated photograph of U.S. Marine combat photographer Robert H. Mosier standing next to a unit assistant known only as Kim during the Korean War. (Robert P. Mosier)
More than 70 years after the Korean War, the son of a late Marine combat photographer is searching for a Korean man who, as a teenager, accompanied his father while he documented the conflict.
Robert H. Mosier arrived in Korea in 1951 as a technical sergeant. While covering the front lines, he met a Korean boy known only by his surname, Kim, at a refugee camp in what is now North Korea.
Kim, then about 15, eventually became an assistant to the Marines and stayed with Mosier, accompanying him on assignments documenting the war, according to an Aug. 5 news release by South Korea’s Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs.
Mosier came to regard the teenager as a son, he later wrote in a 1953 National Geographic article about the war’s impact on Korean children.
Now his own son, Robert P. Mosier, is trying to learn what happened to Kim — and, in the process, more about the father he lost when he was 17.
Robert H. Mosier served during the Korean War as a technical sergeant and combat photographer for the U.S. Marine Corps from 1951 to 1952. (Robert P. Mosier)
“I never really got to know him as a man, which is what prompted the effort to locate Kim,” Mosier said in an Aug. 28 email to Stars and Stripes.
Mosier, 63, first learned about Kim years after his father’s death when he discovered the National Geographic article, “The GI and the Kids of Korea: America’s Fighting Men Share Their Food, Clothing, and Shelter with Children of a War-Torn Land.”
He has been searching for Kim since the early 1990s. Little information survives that could help identify him.
The veterans ministry estimates Kim was born between 1935 and 1937, which would put him in his late 80s or early 90s if he is still alive.
Kim’s father had died by the time of the war, and his family was displaced from their home in Hongcheon, 64 miles east of Seoul, after a bombing in the area, according to the ministry.
What became of Kim after the war remains unknown.
The elder Mosier returned to the United States in 1952 and retired as a master gunnery sergeant after 30 years in the Marine Corps. He died July 26, 1980.
Robert P. Mosier is searching for a Korean man who as a boy assisted his Marine veteran father during the Korean War. (Robert P. Mosier)
His son, now chief deputy of the Loudoun County, Va., Sheriff’s Office, recently turned to South Korea’s veterans ministry in hopes that its government and veterans network could help with the decades-long search.
The ministry publicized the effort in an online video July 27 and issued a news release on Aug. 5.
“Kim, whether you realize it or not, we’re brothers in a sense,” Mosier said in the video. “Even if you are a Korean and I am an American, we share so much in common.”
The ministry has received several tips but none that confirms Kim’s identity or whereabouts, a ministry spokeswoman told Stars and Stripes by email Sept. 16.
The ministry is working with the community in Hongcheon, where Kim and his family lived, and plans to expand its search to neighboring areas, she said.
Some South Korean government officials must speak to the media on condition of anonymity.
For Mosier, meeting Kim could provide a final connection to a largely unknown chapter of his father’s life.
“It would answer the question about the rest of the story,” he said.
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