No Longer Unknown

By Marna Neal and William Rowland

Visit any of the approximately 150 national military cemeteries in the United States, and collectively you will find nearly 1,000,000 headstones marking the final resting place of U.S. Military personnel killed in battles beginning with the Civil War to the present. Spend an extra few minutes reading the names on the headstones, and you will find representatives of every ethnic, religious, geographic, and societal group existing in America today. Their names, dates of birth and death, their military rank and last unit, and their home state are clearly carved in stone.
That's only half the story. Lift your eyes, look around, and you will see other identical headstonesidentical in shape and size but different in that these stones bear no name except Unknown.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499074826

Marna Neal

William Rowland served twenty years in the US Army. The first five were in Graves Registration and are the basis for this book. He maintained his writing skills with a weekly humor column for the unit newspaper. The remaining fifteen years were served with the Armed Forces Radio and TV Service writing, producing, and voicing news and entertainment programs in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Hollywood, California, where he became an advisor for the Combat TV series. Following his retirement, he was employed by a Washington, DC, lobby as director of information. His final civilian employment was manager of product publicity for Chiquita Banana, a branch of United Fruit Company in Boston, Massachusetts. He now resides in Keysville, Virginia. Marna Neal was raised in New York State and holds a master’s degree in education from the University of Mississippi. Along with teaching, she has been employed by several medical offices and served as program coordinator/office manager for the Southside Area Health Education Center in Farmville, Virginia. Her most recent employment was at the University of Virginia HOPE Cancer Center. She has traveled extensively in the United States and overseas, with special ties to Jyvaskyla, Finland. She is coauthor of the book Common Bottles for the Average Collector. She currently resides in Dover, Pennsylvania.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Along with countless other TV news junkies, I watched with half an eye and listened with half an ear as a revered network news presenter, unofficially elected the man they most trusted to bring them their daily ration of news, began his wrap-up with a video of an annual fall event. It was November 11, 1949. President Truman was seen performing the time honored duty of the day, placing a wreath at the foot of the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery. The firing squad, followed by Taps, followed by a silent prayer—it was a fine tradition, perfectly executed, well reported, and instantly forgotten as the TV stations went to commercial breaks and their viewers to other more-pressing pursuits.

I, for one, went from the TV to the refrigerator to learn that I should have gone food-shopping several days earlier. In spite of the fact that on that November day in 1949 I was an active-duty army staff sergeant assigned to the second-in-size US army information office at 90 Church Street in New York City (only the Pentagon’s chief of information’s office was larger), I had not given a minute of thought to the ceremony.

Apparently, no one else had either. I had spent the day fielding routine telephone calls, mostly about signing up, which I referred to the recruiting office, or answering mail requests for information needed by students, journalists, and the usual ration of prank callers: Who is buried in Grant’s tomb on the Upper West Side of Manhattan?

Assembling an eclectic collection of leftovers and a beer, I too forgot about the event at the tomb and reached for the TV guide.

Seven months later, on a very warm August day, I answered an incoming call on our direct connection with the Pentagon. That was unusual. More unusual was the caller’s question, Do you have a Sergeant Rowland working in your office?

Yes, I replied. I’m Sergeant Rowland.

This is Colonel Barnes. I’m with the Office of Quartermaster General, and our personnel records indicate that you once worked part-time at a funeral home. Is that true?

Yes, sir, I replied.

Good. The colonel’s voice tone changed from absolute authority to one similar to the unctuous mellow used by an undertaker to grief-stricken next of kin. Your skills are desperately needed in Korea right now.

In Korea? I practically shouted. I’ve been telling the public and the media that Korea is just a UN police action and that the US will be out any day now as soon as the UN musters its forces.

Well, you are absolutely correct, Sergeant, informing the public with that information. The colonel settled into a semimilitary/semiundertaker voice. The truth of the matter is that the UN seems to be dragging its feet. As I’m sure you know, the Quartermaster Corps is responsible for dealing with postmortem personnel. That’s not my field. I’m chief of personnel here, and our records show that you have worked in the field part-time while you were in the service. Is that true? he asked again.

Yes, I replied again.

Fine. You’ll be getting priority special orders in a week or so. I’ll call your CO over on Governors Island and clue him in. In the meantime, it was nice talking with you, Sergeant. I wish I could tell you more, but all I can do is wish you good luck and hope that this mess is over within the time frame the info people are releasing.

I thanked him for his call and headed for the file room, which contained material about every phase of army activity since June 14, 1775, the day General George Washington founded it.

It didn’t take long to prove Colonel Barnes correct. Early in the Civil War, someone figured out that the Quartermaster Corps’ wagons carrying food and supplies to the Union Army in the field could be used to bring back the dead for identification and burial in newly established cemeteries. Other files contained a wealth of information about the afterlife handling of battlefield casualties in 1812 and 1916–17 and WW II. All of it was quietly carried out by a tiny branch of the enormous tree that was the Quartermaster Corps. Everything a soldier might need, from shoelaces to table salt to a casket, was supplied by the QMC.

Early in my information office career, I learned that military history files always contained much more than one needed to know. The corollary was that what desperately was needed was often not there. If the army had morticians during the war, where did they go when peace broke out?

I stayed at the office late that night, looking for anything that would give me an inkling of what to expect. Eventually, I learned that the tiny branch of the QM tree in peacetime became a twig or even just a bud. Their peacetime mission was to serve the needs of peacetime casualties-accidental death, childbirth complications, heart attacks—the ordinary events civilian undertakers depended on for their living.

Shortly after the June 1950 start of the Korean police action, our office registered an increase in the number of civilian phone calls. They ranged from Are we at war again? Do I have to get out the blackout curtains? or My draft number is low, will I have to go? or Where the hell is North Korea? We gave each caller the approved answer, The president has declared this just a police action, and it should be over in a week or two.

It was a lie. Ignorance rather than deception was the motivating force. If more information was requested, we turned to our second page of the official response, We have been asked by the United Nations to provide military assistance to the South Korean army. This is only a police action, and our forces are capable and willing to help.

Willingness, yes. Capability, not so much.

CHAPTER 2

Virtually nothing was known about the North Korean army and its capability. But within six days of the incursion across the border, American forces were committed. General Douglas MacArthur selected units from the 24th Infantry Division, stationed in the suburbs of Kokura, Japan, to meet the invaders and shove them back across the 38th parallel. Later quotes from the battlefield showed that overconfidence and arrogance ruled the day. We thought they’d back off as soon as they saw American uniforms, a lieutenant was heard to say. That sentiment was echoed by another junior officer: I regarded the episode as an adventure that would probably last only a few days. Not really words to live by.

The first encounters with the bandits, as the North Korean army was called, was a brutal wake-up call to Washington since the encounter revealed just how much American military readiness had deteriorated. Slashed defense budgets, the peace dividend as it was called, and the soft occupation of Japan had softened our reserve. Despite the vaunted nuclear supremacy we cherished, America was unprepared to fight a conventional war.

At general headquarters in Tokyo, the First Battalion of the 24th Division was selected to go to Korea first. And they did, taking with them their Japanese houseboys, cooks, and in some cases, maids disguised as men. None of the enlisted men or junior officers had seen combat, all having joined the army after WWII, and they were at less than full strength where manpower was concerned. Within days, a quarter of the unit was dead and almost as many were wounded. General MacArthur responded by ordering the entire Eighth Army into battle to try to hold the North Korean forces back until the UN could send their multinational and, in some instances, better trained forces to help.

As the news grew grimmer, my phone seldom stopped ringing. A call I had not expected came in. This is so-and-so at the records section of the Pentagon.

Yes, what can I do for you? I asked. Our—or rather your—records show that at one time, you worked in a funeral home. Is that correct?

Yes-s, I worked for an uncle in Upstate New York. Why?

And what exactly are you doing in your present assignment? the Pentagon voice continued.

Well, mostly answering questions for which we have no answers. My flippant side emerged.

Ever hear of the Graves Registration Service? The voice continued without waiting for a reply. There’s a priority out for people with your experience. You can look for reassignment orders shortly. The Pentagon voice was cold, but I did notice what sounded like a breath of relief also come over the secure, in-house line. Whoever he was, he had found someone he had been looking for. Me.

Among the many perks that came with the information office assignment was the abundant information available if one was patient enough to look for it. It was in a large windowless back room containing every manual ever published together with three or four green file cabinets. They contained an index for everything else in the room. Cards, yellow with age and written in no-longer-in-vogue cursive script, led me to a subsection relating to graves registration. It was dated post–Civil War and revealed that the recovery of casualties was one of the functions of the Quartermaster Corps.

The Quartermaster Corps was founded during the Civil War to supply food, ammunition, and other supplies to the frontlines. Horse-drawn wagons were employed, taking needed material to the frontlines and taking wounded soldiers back to the field hospital. The war was not too old, and troops who were fighting in familiar areas like their own backyards were, in some cases, close enough to be treated in private homes. Why not, thought an unknown savant, take home the dead along with the wounded? The wagons coming back from the frontlines were empty and had to be washed down before being reloaded with food anyway, and finally, it was demoralizing to stumble on your neighbor decomposing in the field beside you. Most units in that war were made up from volunteers and conscripts from the same towns, counties, and cities. Identification was easy during the War between the States. If you didn’t know the poor soul, someone else did.

I learned that Britain and France were quite a bit more creative in honoring the dead. Giving the devil his due, France got off the mark first because almost all their casualties were on their own soil. In addition, France had completed the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and had buried an unknown soldier below the arch, adding an eternal flame at the close of WWI. Victory ceremonies were always centered around the Arc. Some Bastille Day events took place there, and the remains of honored Frenchmen were passed under the Arc as part of state funerals.

Reading on through the files, I learned that the British had joined their neighbors, honoring their fallen soldiers by having them lie in state in the center aisle of Westminster Cathedral. At the conclusion of WWI, the Brits created a crypt about halfway along the aisle and buried their Unknown there. By long-forgotten tradition, any piece of land upon which a British soldier died, that little piece became British soil. Therefore, not only is an unknown buried there, but so is a shovel full of now-British soil.

The military importance of handling the grim results of war ended there. Not much remained in my office concerning the selection and disposition of the remains of American soldiers. There were, however, references to newspaper and magazine articles written on the subject.

New York City was a treasure trove of libraries, newspaper morgues, and museums, so researching the history and origins was not hard. In a short time, I learned that the National Cemetery in Arlington started out as a Union slap in the face to the Confederates. The Custis-Lee Mansion in Arlington was already in Union hands and casualties began to mount from nearby battles. I recalled seeing the newspaper photos of DC residents riding out to watch the battles in Northern Virginia. A nameless individual decided to bury half a dozen Union soldiers in the mansion’s front yard.

Those stories and the ancient etchings that allowed newspapers to print depictions of what was happening were forgotten or at least overshadowed by the press coverage of the public outcry following Armistice Day 1918. Why do we not have an honored unknown? Why can’t we have our fallen sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers brought home? What kind of country is this that leaves their heroes buried on foreign soil?

The hue and cry caught congressional ears and wheels ground slowly until November 11, 1921, when the Unknown Soldier from the war that was to end all wars was brought home and buried. The 1921 burial did not stop the compassionate juggernaut from rolling on. In 1926, the Tomb of the Unknown (singular) was dedicated, the remains reburied, and the first guard posted. I spent many of the days before reporting to the Port of Embarkation in Seattle, learning more than I really wanted to know about the Unknown. I learned in great detail how he was chosen, by whom he was chosen, when and where it all took place—everything but who the Unknown was.

That question haunted me from the moment I joined one hundred other soldiers aboard a crammed military airlift plane that hopped from island to island across the Pacific to Tokyo. During this