News-Info-Alerts

Re: The Long Ride Home

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: July 26, 2003

"Korean War: Last ride home
Virginia woman unknowingly accompanied her brother's casket on train

Angie Riebe Mesabi Daily News

VIRGINIA — It wasn’t until Dolores Pietz had stepped off the train that she realized she had been so near to her older brother on his last journey in the physical world.

She was on her way from Minneapolis to Northern Wisconsin to attend the burial service for her brother — Pfc. Harlan R. Cockerham, of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines — when she saw a casket being removed from the train.

“Unbeknown to me at the time, it was my brother’s casket,” said Pietz, of Virginia. “I had accompanied him part of the way home on his last ride.”

However, the finality of that last ride never became a reality for their mother, Hannah Cockerham. Until the day she died in 1984, the mother of seven clung to hope that her eldest son was still alive. And she held just as firmly to the last letter written by the 23-year-old soldier.

Harlan Cockerham’s final letter home was written in July 1953 from a military hospital in Korea. He had been wounded and awarded the Purple Heart medal.

But he was returning to the front lines, he wrote. He asked his mother not to worry. He told her: “I’ll be fine.”

Within a week, on July 25, 1953 — just as the combat ended in Korean War — Harlan’s family received word that he was reported missing in action. Some time later, he was reported to have been killed in action on that date. It wasn’t until March 1955, however, that his casket was sent home.

Still, Hannah Cockerham refused to believe her son was deceased. She kept his last letter close to her at all times. “She carried it with her for years,” and she never used the word “killed” when referring to Harlan, said Pietz, who has one of mother’s journals. In the July 25, 1978, entry, her mother wrote: “25 sad years ago today our Harlan was lost in Korea.”

Her mother, who always called her son “Our Harlan,” believed he had been taken prisoner — that he was only “lost,” not dead. She continued to believe “he would return to her.”

“My mother never believed he was in the casket” that Pietz had accompanied on the train, she said.
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Harlan Cockerham’s death “was very hard on our family,” Pietz said.
His military service was difficult for the Cockerhams from the day Harlan enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1951. After boot camp at Camp Pendleton, Calif., Harlan was sent to Korea in the spring of 1952, leaving his parents and siblings “very fearful” for his welfare.

Pietz’s uncle — her mother’s youngest brother — had been killed in at Pearl Harbor, and they knew well the dangers of war.

Pietz does not know for sure why her brother decided to enlist, but she figures it was because “there were no job opportunities in our area.” The family lived on a small farm in Dairyland, Wis., a tiny rural community 35 miles south of Superior — basically a “blip in the road,” Pietz said.

Dairyland was so small it didn’t have a high school, and Pietz, who was 16 years old when her brother was in Korea, attended school in Webster, Wis., 35 miles south of her home. Webster had a few small stores, and Pietz’s mother often asked her to buy candles after school to send to Harlan in Korea.

He was always requesting candles, said Pietz, who wrote to brother weekly. She remembers him writing about how wet and cold it was in Korea and how the soldiers used Sterno canned heat to keep warm.

Pietz said Harlan was a “good brother” to her, writing often from Korea. He ended each letter with a line from the “Bob and Ray” radio show: “Hang by your thumbs.”

While she still has a few military photos her brother — a young man who liked to hunt — the letters he wrote home, along with his Purple Heart, were destroyed in a fire at the family farm in 1970, said Pietz, who moved to Virginia in 1972 with her husband, Andrew, when he took a job at Minntac.

Pietz didn’t realize the full extent of the war as a teen-ager, she said. But in years since, she has taken an interest in learning more about war that took her brother’s young life.

Harlan Cockerham “was only 23 years old when he gave his life for his country,” she said.

Their father, Porter Cockerham, who died in 1958, “was a big strong guy,” Pietz said. “The only time I ever saw him cry” was when he learned Harlan had been killed.

Harlan was buried with full military honors in the spring of 1955 at Riverhill Cemetery in Dairyland. Pietz remembers taps being played at the service.

Later that year, another of her older brothers, George “Maynard,” was sent to Korea after being drafted into the U.S. Army. It was another blow to her mother who wondered “how can they send another son” overseas, Pietz said. But the fighting was over by then, and Maynard returned safely home.

Pietz said she recently heard someone mention that “only 33,000” soldiers died during the Korean War. But they all had loved ones who suffered from each loss of life, she said. “A lot of young guys gave their lives so we could live in freedom.”

There are many other people throughout the country — much like Pietz — who still hold onto black and white photographs of young men, frozen in time at tender ages, looking out from black and white pictures captured some 50 years ago in Korea.

Pietz wonders from time to time what sort of man her brother would have become. She thinks about “what he would have done with his life if he had lived and come home.”

Today Harlan Cockerham would be 78 years old. "