Nelson A. Pryor: Guest Columnist
The families of thousands of Americans still missing from the Korean conflict received a jolt of hope when President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, signed a joint statement in Singapore, which included a promise to recover and repatriate all American war dead in the North.
“We must have hope that this agreement will finally bring peace to the peninsula and help bring closure to thousands of families,” Keith E. Harman, national commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars, said in a statement, to the Saturday, June 16, 2018, “New York Times,” p. 11a, under the above title. “Now,” he says, “the hard work to bring the initiative to fruition begins.”
Trump Vindicated
After the summit meeting in Singapore, our President said in a news conference, “The remains will be coming back - they’re going to start that process immediately.”
North Korea turned over the remains of 4,167 Americans in 1954, and others a few at a time since then, but has never come close to allowing the full accounting that the families of the missing yearned for.
The Coalition of Families of Korean and Cold War POW/MIAs is headed up by Richard Downes, whose father, Air Force Lt. Hal Downes, was in a bomber that went down over North Korea in 1952. Mr. Downes, who was three years old when his father’s plane crashed, said: My whole life, it has remained an open wound-we never knew what happened to him,” and “I half expected him to walk through the door at any moment.” Downes is now 69.
Things Happened Fast
The swift Communist offensive encircled and overran outnumbered American positions, leaving heaps of dead in places like the Chosin Reservoir that American burial details never had a chance to record and inter. More than 1,200 Marines remain missing from the Battle of Chosin alone; researchers say many were probably left in the foxholes where they fought and died.
The advancing Communists also captured thousands of prisoners, who were marched north to camps near the Chinese border and kept in conditions that a report by the RAND Corporation later called “fiendishly squalid.”
In the first year of the fighting, more than a third of the captured Americans died from starvation, exposure or disease, according to the RAND Report.
Mrs. Mary Helen Hoff, Viet Nam
Those black standards with the submissive head bow of a prisoner of war, was conceived by Mrs. Mary Helen Hoff, and became the POW/MIA flag, which was officially adopted by Congress in 1990 “as the symbol of our Nation’s concern and commitment to resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in South Asia…”
Virginia Fuller, of Tallahassee, and Nelson Pryor, of Lee, embrace the breakthrough POW/MIA agreement, just arranged by President Donald J. Trump.
The POW/MIA Viet Nam era Flag was conceived by a North Florida lady, Mary Helen Hoff, of Orange Park, while awaiting the return of her husband, Lt. Cmdr, Michael Hoff.
President Trump Understands
The Veteran isn’t always the one who wears the uniform, but sometimes, it’s those who stand and wait, who share that hard time as well.