Area family buries dad killed in Korea
BY DAVID HAMMER
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The recent identification of the remains of a Cincinnati soldier killed in the Korean War and his burial this week at Arlington National Cemetery helped his family unearth some buried feelings.
It allowed his oldest daughter's dying wish to be fulfilled; his youngest daughter to write a note to a father who died when she was 5; and his ex-wife to tell the family more about the fun-loving man who died at age 26.
As it turned out, Master Sgt. Robert V. Layton was, like hundreds of others in his Army battalion, killed by a single gunshot to the chest and buried in a mass grave by Communist Chinese forces at the Chosin Reservoir some time between Nov. 27 and Dec. 1, 1950.
"If it was a single gunshot wound, I thought, at least it was quick," said Layton's daughter, Judith Saylor, 61, of Millersville, Pa.
The search for Layton began in 2000, when his oldest daughter, Geraldine Meurer, and her son, Raymond, started sending information to the Pentagon's POW-MIA office. A DNA sample was needed from Layton's lone surviving sibling, his sister Jean Thomas of Vandalia. Thomas died of cancer before they could get the sample, but the hospital drew one just in time, Raymond Meurer said. Six years later, that sample was crucial to making a positive match this summer, just two weeks after Geraldine Meurer died at age 63.
Raymond Meurer, 45, of Bethel, promised his mother he wouldn't stop looking for her father and would bury her with him. On Monday, at the funeral home, he sneaked her ashes into Layton's casket, he said.
"I fulfilled my wish to her," he said.
Saylor thought she had distanced herself from the pain of losing her father. Really, she said, she had just suppressed it. So, she pored over histories of the Korean War when she learned that her father's remains had been found.
She learned that his battalion at Chosin Reservoir was outnumbered 6 to 1, was trapped in a snowy mountain pass and cut off from retreat. Hand-to-hand combat raged for days. When some managed to retreat on Dec. 2, they listed most of their fallen brothers as missing-in-action.
That led Saylor's mother, Helen Ryan, 83, of Amelia, to believe that even though they had divorced and she had remarried, Layton would someday walk through her front door.
For Saylor, it was all just impersonal history until the viewing at the funeral home this week. Layton's nearly complete skeletal remains were wrapped in an Army blanket and rested under a neatly folded uniform in the ornate casket. Saylor was shocked by how connected she suddenly felt.
She wrote her father a note and dropped it in his casket.
Layton's combat boots, his canvas and leather billfold with a 1944 newspaper clipping announcing a Bronze Star he'd earned, his uniform buttons, dog tags and some keys - all came back intact.
Why had the children and grandchildren never known Layton had served in World War II? Ryan's explanation to Saylor was simple: "Hell's fire, I was working so much, you couldn't worry about the past, you had to pay the bills and live for the future."