In honor of the men and women who serve our country, we will be posting stories and articles this Memorial Day weekend to remember and celebrate the heroes of our nation. ~ Ms Sparky & Forseti
The flag covered casket of Artie Hodapp is carried down the center of St. Joseph Catholic Church during funeral services in Freeport, Ill., Wednesday, May 25, 2011. More than half a century after he died in Korea, the bones of the young soldier, Artie Hodapp, are returned after being matched with relatives' DNA. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)
JOHN O’CONNOR – (AP)- May 27, 2011 – For 60 years, Artie Hodapp’s family agonized over a heart-rending mystery: Where had the young man, known for his rollicking sense of humor, come to rest after dying in the Korean War?
They couldn’t know that the answer was among 17 boxes of remains that the North Koreans turned over nearly two decades ago. Nor could they know that the DNA the Army collected from his surviving siblings several years ago would finally help solve the riddle.
Hodapp’s long journey home came to an end this week at a Catholic cemetery in northern Illinois, where he was buried with full military honors beneath a grave marker his sister bought despite not knowing where he was.
“We waited all this while,” said Frances Meyers, 88, remembering her parents and siblings who died without knowing Hodapp’s fate. “The rest are all gone, but I’ve got to feel good about it for them too, the rest of the family. Everybody wanted him back but there was nothing we could do about it.”
Six decades later, Hodapp is no longer a forgotten soldier of the so-called Forgotten War, but an example of the U.S. Defense Department’s stubborn efforts to account for young men lost in long-ago battles. Through a review of Army reports and the memories of a fellow POW tracked down in New Jersey, The Associated Press was able to reconstruct the conditions under which the young man – called a “spitfire” and the “life of the party” – starved to death in a prisoner of war camp.
The story of Arthur Leon Aloysius Hodapp comes partly from a soldier held in the same camp, who described the pasty cattle feed given to prisoners, the agonizing dysentery and the “give-up-itis” to which some men succumbed. Other clues surfaced in a cousin’s chance meeting with a former POW in Minnesota who had Hodapp’s name and date of death scratched in his boot. Finally, U.S. military scientists were finally able to link his siblings’ DNA to Hodapp’s dental records.
Army officials announced the identification just shy of 60 years after Hodapp’s April 23, 1951 capture by Chinese Communists in heavy fighting 40 miles north of Seoul. He died July 3, 1951, in or near the POW camp, which his family didn’t know until the war ended two years later.
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