News-Info-Alerts

Re: Keeping Watch for the Missing

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: November 23, 2003

"Relatives keep watch for missing soldiers

Emmanuel Lozano/The Arizona Republic


When Mermon Stepp turned 17 in 1950, he asked his parents' permission to join the Army.

He shipped out to the Korean War near Christmas of that year. Within weeks of arriving, he disappeared in battle.

"We'd kind of given up that they would ever find his remains," said his younger brother, Watson Stepp, of Glendale. "We'd always hoped for it, but pretty much we'd given up after all these years that anything would turn up."

Four or five years ago, the U.S. government contacted him for a DNA sample to match with remains found in Korea and rekindled his hope. So far no match has been made.

Stepp is one of more than 130 people who will meet with Defense Department specialists in Tempe today to hear what advances have been made in locating the remains of prisoners of war or soldiers missing in action.

The Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office visits a different city each month. This will be the 88th such meeting and the first in Arizona since a Tucson gathering in 1999. It is not open to the public.

The specialists will present an overview of their efforts then meet with individual families from within a 300-mile radius of Phoenix.

They'll meet with people such as Kimberly Madden, who has inherited the search for her great-uncle, Robert Carpenter, who was captured in Korea in 1951.
Carpenter's mother had asked her grandson, Madden's father, to keep up the search. And he passed the torch to Madden.

Madden, who also lives in Glendale, recently found a witness who had seen her great-uncle in captivity after the battle in which he went missing. She will report that information to Defense Department officials, because it means he could be reclassified as a POW instead of MIA.

Madden is certain Carpenter perished, but she wants to know how.

"It makes us feel a little more at ease to know what happened," she said. "Never knowing what happened is a sad thing."

88,000 missing

The government lists more than 88,000 servicemen as POWs or MIAs from World War II, Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts.

Seventy-two unaccounted for servicemen are listed from Arizona, though the families meeting with specialists in Phoenix may be looking for relatives who disappeared when the family lived elsewhere. Stepp was from Virginia, for example, and Carpenter from Oklahoma.

"Government can do many things. It can tax you. It can take your property to build a highway. But by far the most dramatic they ever do to any family in America is take their sons and daughters and put them in harm's way," said Jerry Jennings, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs, who will attend today's meeting.

"We're unique in the whole world because our government takes it more seriously than any other government on the planet in terms of recovering those remains, searching for the POWs if they're alive and bringing them home," he said.

Jennings' office has a $103 million budget and more than 600 employees dedicated to locating the remains of missing servicemen.

There are 78,773 still missing from World War II, 8,100 from the Korean War; 1,875 from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; 126 from the Cold War (mostly planes that went down); and three from the first Gulf War.

"We are bringing them home every month," Defense Department spokesman Larry Greer said.

Fewer left behind

Fewer are left behind on the battlefield in each war because of advancing communications and transportation technology.

And forensic technology, especially DNA science, has improved the chances of identifying remains.

The other main tool of recovery is diplomacy. Jennings' agency even operates in North Korea and Burma, among other countries at odds with U.S. policy. Each trip to those countries must be negotiated.

But hope carries each mission.

Jennings recalls a woman in her 80s who broke down speaking about her son who had been lost in Korea.

"This is a son that's been gone for 50 years," Jennings said. "Mothers' love does not diminish with the years. She wants him brought home."
Nor perhaps does a brother's love.

"I've always held out a little bit of hope," said Kevin Lemon of Scottsdale, who still wears an MIA bracelet bearing the name of his brother, Jeffrey, a pilot whose jet went down on a bombing mission over Laos in 1971.

Lemon remembers the bad-news phone call from his father as if it were yesterday.

"It was the only time in my life I've ever heard my father cry," he said, and his voice cracked from the memory.

His mother served on the board of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, an organization dedicated to finding servicemen lost or imprisoned during the Vietnam War.

"She never fully accepted that there weren't some people left alive over there," Lemon said.

When his mother died last May, Lemon inherited the search for his brother.

"My hope is not only that they account for my brother but also account to as many families as they can," he said. "Of course the hope is that there is some chance of survival. Realistically that's not likely. But just to be able to tell the remaining family members that, yes, his site and his remains have been identified.

"We want to know what happened."

Contact the reporter at michael. kiefer@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8994"