News-Info-Alerts

Re: 50 Years and Still Waiting

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: July 26, 2003

"Korean War: Fred Verant of Chisholm: MIA

'It killed our mother. She cried and cried and cried'

Sheila Dianoski Mesabi Daily News

CHISHOLM — Soldiers shouting in the darkness for more grenades to hold off the advancing enemy, wondering if they’d live through the night.

Soldiers hunkering down in the trenches they’d driven the communist Chinese forces from, staring desolately at the small cache of enemy ammunition that fueled their last hope to hold their position.

Soldiers grimacing in the night, their young faces illuminated briefly in the darkness by the explosions that are growing ever louder with the enemy’s advance.

The enemy, finally washing over the American troops in the morning light.
The enemy, overrunning their position and surrounding the desperate American forces.

The enemy, fighting every step the Americans take in their dash to link up with friendly lines.

Were any of those the last sights, sounds or thoughts of Cpl. Fred Louis Verant? Or were none of them? Nobody knows for sure, and it’s that not knowing that is the worst part of the tragedy for his family.

Fred Verant was listed as missing in action in the Korean War on Oct. 11, 1951.
“It killed our mother,” said Betty Harwood, one of Fred Verant’s sisters. “I moved home from the Cities, she was so bad. She cried and cried and cried.”
Harwood thought her return to the family’s Chisholm home would help her mother deal with the heartache of a child missing in war. Her mother, though, fell into a depression — something not openly talked about in the 1950s — and nobody could pull her out of it.

“She died of a broken heart,” said Verant’s only brother, Jerry Verant. Though their mother lived until 1977, all of her surviving children agree that she was never the same after the fall of 1951.

More than 50 years after Fred Verant was lost in battle, his three siblings are still looking for closure. They have each given DNA samples in the hope that their brother’s remains might finally be found and identified.

All the government has been able to offer them, though, is a Purple Heart and a three-page packet detailing the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office’s best guess at what happened to him during his final battle.

When Verant was lost, the Korean War was already considered a stalemate, the DPMO packet says. Peace talks were underway between the U.N.-allied South Koreans and the Chinese-backed North Koreans by early October of 1951.

Both sides, though, battled viciously for bits of land to strengthen their defensive positions or to use as bargaining chips in the negotiations.

Verant was last seen during one of these border skirmishes.

A letter Harwood received from one of Verant’s fellow soldiers shed some light on her brother’s situation. It said Verant had had a safe position typing casualty reports, but he wasn’t happy there. So the Army put him in a company that usually didn’t see any action.

He was placed in the heavy machine-gun section of D Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division.

But his machine-gun section was selected to join the A, or “Able,” and C, or “Charlie,” companies for an attack, according to the DPMO. The target was a Chinese position near where the Imjin River meets the present-day boundary between North and South Korea.

What happened to the 23-year-old Chisholm native after joining the battle remains a mystery. Verant’s siblings have heard many versions of their brother’s disappearance.

“We got letters from a few soldiers,” Harwood said. “One was heartbreaking. It said he remembered the day he (Fred) didn’t come back. It said he was on a hill, wounded so bad that he said just to go on, to leave.”

Frances Motta, another of his sisters, was married to a man in the FBI and she went to the Pentagon to read her brother’s files after the war. She learned that he went out with four other soldiers in the heavy machine-gun section, and three of them were taken prisoner.

“They don’t even know what day he died,” she said. “First they were saying the 13th, then they changed it to the 11th.”

Since then, a fire has swept through the FBI files on Verant and many others, destroying any answers they could hope to find there, Motta said.

But the DPMO report lays out the battle and what they believe happened to Verant.

The Americans’ attack started late in the morning of Oct. 11, 1951, the same date the DPMO lists as the official day that Verant was lost. The assault lasted until mid-afternoon, when the American forces captured the Chinese-occupied front-line trenches.

About 135 American soldiers survived the initial attack uninjured and set up defensive positions, preparing for the counter-attack that came at 11 p.m. About 200 communist Chinese soldiers advanced to throw grenades at the American positions, but retreated from the Americans’ answering fire, the DPMO report says.

The night continued with a series of enemy advances and retreats, but a constant barrage of mortars and heavy artillery from dusk to dawn took its toll on the entrenched American forces.

They were quickly running out of ammunition and their supply train was also under fire, unable to reach the trenches. By sunrise, the American troops had even depleted a cache of enemy grenades they had found in the trenches.

Then the communist forces launched their fourth attack of the battle.

Outnumbered and out-gunned, the Americans were overrun and had to fight the enemy hand-to-hand. Chinese forces flanked them and set up positions behind their lines. The surrounded Americans abandoned the trenches to fight their way back toward friendly lines.

Only half of the soldiers survived.

A World War II veteran himself, Jerry Verant knows the horrors of war, and its uncertainties.

“For many years, I figured he would come out of it,” Jerry Verant said about his brother. “He was a strong kid and a smart kid. But over the years, well, no one’s going to be walking around Korea for 52 years.”

According to the DPMO report, Cpl. Fred Verant “may have died during the first combat assault at 11 p.m. on 11 October — some unknown survivor(s) reported that he was lost in that first assault. We don’t believe he was taken prisoner, because the communists did succeed in taking three prisoners that night, including one of the men in Cpl. Verant’s heavy machine-gun section. Only one of the three men survived captivity, but the one survivor — from Charlie Company — had never seen Cpl. Verant as a prisoner. Given all of the artillery, mortars, and grenades that hit the American positions, it is certainly possible that Cpl. Verant could have been killed in the heavy fighting of 11 October 1951.”

In Harwood’s house, a Purple Heart rests inside a box worn by years of constant opening and closing by a mourning mother.

In the wallets of Verant’s siblings are black-and-white pictures of the young man with a grin on his face.

“He was 24. Never married,” Harwood said.

Jerry Verant suspects his brother left behind a girlfriend, though, because flowers kept showing up mysteriously at his memorial stone in the Chisholm cemetery.

“They were always pink. I remember that,” Motta said.

They have many vivid memories of their brother. Fred and Jerry Verant’s bond extended beyond being brothers. They were great friends, and Fred was the best man at Jerry’s wedding.

“He was just a nice individual,” Harwood said fondly about his brother. “Back in those times, he started working in the mines. My mom didn’t have an electric stove. He bought her one. He would do anything for his parents.”

Harwood also remembers him sending her money for a new graduation dress.

Verant’s siblings remember him as being principled and honorable. While he was working in the underground mines, a new worker was taking timber off a conveyor belt and accidentally hit Fred in the face with one of the boards.

“He stayed home for four days,” Motta remembered. When he went back to work, Verant was told to fill out an accident report and one question asked how he would prevent the problem in the future.

“He wrote, ‘Slow down the belt and train your new men,’” Motta said. “When they asked him to change it, he said no, and they laid him off. He turned it in to the union.”

He eventually got the wages he was due, then left the mine.
“He believed very much, right is right is right,” Harwood said.

Before working in the mines, Verant spent about five years in the Merchant Marines. He graduated from high school in 1945 and joined the Merchant Marines right away, attending maritime school in New York City.

“He was in England, the South Pacific, all through the Caribbean,” Motta said. “He traveled a lot.”

But when Verant quit the Merchant Marines in 1950, he was no longer immune to the military draft.

He went to his brother with his worries.

“He didn’t know what to do,” Jerry Verant said. “I said, ‘Why don’t you join the Navy?’”

When Verant visited the recruiter’s office in Virginia, though, he learned that he would have to promise two years’ service to the Navy.

“He said, ‘What the heck, I’ll take my chances (with the draft),’” Jerry Verant said. “That was one mistake he made.”

He thought that the Korean War would be no big deal, that there “wouldn’t be anyone over there” because World War II had just ended and all of the military guys were home, Jerry Verant recalled.

He was soon drafted into the U.S. Army.

“Do you think they’d put him in the Navy? No,” Jerry Verant said. “They put him in the Army and gave him a gun. After that, you know what happened. He was only there (in training and active duty in Korea) for six months.”

Harwood has a clear window back to the spring day her older brother left for military training. She was keeping a diary at the time, and the last thing she wrote that day was, “Our house is very sad.”

Her parents were saying good-bye to their son. Jerry Verant was watching his younger brother and good friend go into war. Motta and Harwood were bidding farewell to an older brother they looked up to.

Then one day, about six months after they last saw Verant, a knock came at the door.

“When the telegram came, I had to read it to Pa,” Jerry Verant said. “Ma couldn’t read it.”

He remembers having difficulty trying to explain to his father how his son had died. The telegram said that the enemy had overrun the American forces in the October battle, and his father couldn’t understand the wording.

“How they runned over-a Fred-a?” Jerry Verant remembers his father struggling to understand, his misunderstanding of the language and heavy accent confusing the issue.

“That was it,” Jerry Verant said. “There was one life shot right there.”

Verant’s sisters and brother are keeping him alive through their memories, though. Every time the DPMO has a convention about her brother and other MIAs, Motta attends. And Harwood makes sure her children and grandchildren learn about the uncle they never knew personally.

“All of my grandkids know about Fred,” she said. “If we’re in church and they have nothing to pray for, I tell them to pray for him.”

“One day they’ll find him,” Motta said, as if sending a prayer of her own. “There’s always a little hope.”

But Jerry Verant is not so sure. He has his own theory about his brother’s death.

“I think he was killed by the Chinese,” he said. “I’d say he died in a prison camp somewhere, probably in China. Who’s going to go dig up China?”

The third page of the DPMO report, though, shows a map of the area where the government believes Fred Verant’s remains rest. The spot is in a demilitarized zone along the present-day boundary between North and South Korea — the only battlefields the DPMO hasn’t received clearance to search. "