News-Info-Alerts

Re: Waiting For Years, Hoping For Closure

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: September 18, 2003

"Families waiting for years hope MIA meeting will lead to closure

By RON HARRIS Post-Dispatch

This weekend Dorothy Beseda will attend a government update on the status of her brother, Army PFC William Craig.

Dorothy Beseda sits in the living room of her Lemay home and gingerly fingers the four small, yellow pieces of paper she has taken from the box where they are stored for safekeeping. It is the last letter from her younger brother, Army Pfc. William E. Craig.

It was Nov. 13, 1950, according to the letter, and Craig, still a boy at 17, was hunkered down in a foxhole in Chungjin Reservoir, Korea, 7,000 miles from home. Just over the ridge was an army of thousands of enemy Chinese soldiers.

"I sure hope they don't start anything," Craig wrote, "for Honey if they do, which I think they will, it is sure going to be rough, and I may not be able to get home safe. I am afraid that the people are going to be without many husbands, and sons, brothers, everything. Now don't you go and tell mom that, for she will only worry about me."

Two weeks later, Craig was dead, killed in a bloody battle for which he was awarded posthumously the Silver Star for "superb personal bravery" and "gallantry in action."

That letter, some medals and a few photographs of Craig in uniform are all that Beseda has left of her brother. His body was never found.

Beseda's story is similar to that of J. Page Rosenbach, a retired insurance agent whose son Maj. Robert Page Rosenbach was lost in the south China Sea during the Vietnam War, and Carter Harris, whose father, Wayne Eugene Harris, served in the Korean War and has been missing since Nov. 2, 1950, and Olivia Reiter, whose son Lt. Dean W. Reiter was lost in a helicopter crash in Vietnam and is still missing.

Beseda, Rosenbach, Harris, Reiter and dozens of other Missouri and Illinois families will gather Saturday in downtown St. Louis with Defense Department officials in the hopes of learning what happened to their family members declared missing in action during either World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War or the Vietnam War.

It is part of a $103 million-a-year program to return the remains of more than 88,000 servicemen and women reported missing from World War II to Desert Storm. Only one serviceman, Navy pilot Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher, is believed to still be alive. Speicher's plane crashed Jan. 17, 1991, 100 miles southwest of Baghdad on the first night of the ground war of Desert Storm.

But the Department of Defense considers returning the remains of the men and women who died during war a "sacred mission," said Jerry Jennings, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Prisoner of War-Missing in Action Affairs.

"The government intrudes in our lives in various ways," Jennings said. "The government can tell you it's going to charge you various taxes or take away your land or move a neighborhood. But the most intrusive way the government can come into your life is by having your son or daughter wear the uniform and then have government put them in harm's way.

"Our promise to the families of the missing is that we're going to account for that soldier, sailor, airman or Marine, and we're going to bring him home - alive or dead."

About 600 people in the department are working around the globe searching for remains of American military personnel, Jennings said. Many of the sites where the military personnel have fallen are in dangerous or difficult locations. Consequently, search and investigation teams routinely rappel into jungles in Southeast Asia and on Pacific Ocean islands where helicopters cannot land, search under oceans for missing sailors and pilots, and dredge and divert rivers that may cover sites where Americans have fallen.

In 1994, a team crossed a Himalayan glacier on horseback and on foot to return the frozen remains of two U.S. airmen killed in World War II.

Through cooperation with North Korea, Vietnam and other countries, the remains of servicepeople are recovered each year. About 200 remains were recovered last year, and the Defense Department is routinely discovering remains from Papua New Guinea, where more than 1,200 airmen are missing from World War II. The biggest problem is identification.

To help with identification, the agency is trying to get DNA samples from families of the missing servicepeople. So far, however, they have received DNA samples from the families of only about 40 percent of those missing. And that presents a problem, Jennings said, because family members of World War II and Korean War veterans are rapidly dying off.

On Saturday, local families of those missing in action will hear about the agency's efforts. What they most want to hear, and what officials have promised to supply them, is information about their own family members, what progress has been made, what efforts are under way, how close the government is to bringing back their remains.

For the family members, the return of their loved ones all comes down to one word - closure.

"I don't know if that will happen on Saturday, but that's why I'm going," said Reiter, of St. Charles. "I really don't know what would bring closure. I'm leaving that up to the Lord."

Beseda, 74, just wants her brother's remains returned home.

"I want them out there with his headstone, (at Acutt Cemetery), so it wouldn't be an empty piece of ground," she said. "I'd like something to show that he existed over there."

Richard Russavage of Stanton, Mo., will finally be able to do that. Next month, almost 53 years after his father was killed at Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, Russavage will lay his father's remains to rest at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery.

The remains were initially handed over to the United States by the North Koreans in 1993, and two years later, Russavage, his brother, John, and his sisters, Babbette Lee and Linda Roberts, were told that the military believed it had recovered Master Sgt. Leo Paul Russavage's remains.

"That was something," said Russavage, 57, whose father received the Silver Star and Purple Heart. "I was shocked to find out that they even thought they had his body."

But it would take another eight years before the remains could be positively identified through DNA matching.

The burial will bring to an end a long family odyssey, Russavage said.

"It's great to know that he's back on his own soil," he said. "He was a war hero, and he needed to rest here, not 10,000 miles away in some frozen ground."

POW-MIA events

TODAY:

POW-MIA Recognition Day

10:30 a.m. in downtown St. Louis: St. Louis Fire Chief Sherman George and other dignitaries will light a torch from the American Legion eternal flame at Memorial Plaza, between Pine and Chestnut streets across 14th Street from Soldiers Memorial Military Museum. The torch will be driven to O'Fallon, Mo.

7 p.m. in O'Fallon, Mo.: O'Fallon Mayor Paul Renaud and others will lead a ceremony with the torch to light an eternal flame recently built as a part of the Veterans Memorial Walk, 800 Belleau Creek Road. From Interstate 70, take T.R. Hughes Boulevard (Exit 219), which becomes Belleau Creek Road at Veterans Memorial Parkway.

SATURDAY:

POW-MIA family meeting

Discussions between government officials and families of those missing in action at St. Louis Marriott Pavilion Downtown, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Reporter Ron Harris
E-mail: rharris@post-dispatch.com "