Soldier killed in Korea comes home
POW’s remains to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery
CHICAGO — Not long after her father disappeared during the Korean War, Carol Elkin spotted then-Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in downtown Chicago and asked him to bring her dad home.
On Tuesday, Elkin, now 76, will be at Arlington National Cemetery to bury the remains of Army Maj. Stephen Uurtamo, nearly seven decades after he was taken prisoner by the Chinese and died.
It is a chance to say goodbye to her father, watch as his remains are laid to rest with the dignity and honor he deserves, and watch her children and grandchildren see that their history is linked to that of their country.
“This tells my family they are part of something,” Elkin said. “I just think that these kids might think we went from World War II to Vietnam and they don’t even know there was a Korean War.”
The service comes as questions about the whereabouts of those who never returned from the 1950-53 war have pushed their way into the news, with the commitment by President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to recover the remains of as many of the nearly 7,700 U.S. troops still unaccounted for as possible.
For the Uurtamo family, the service is the final chapter of a story that began in late 1950 when the 32-year-old career soldier was declared missing in action after fierce fighting in one of the bloodiest battles of the war near the Ch’ongch’on River in North Korea.
He was declared dead after several returning U.S. prisoners of war reported that Uurtamo had been captured and died at a war transient camp where prisoners who survived came home with stories of watching their buddies starve.
“He died from malnutrition and pneumonia,” Elkin said.
The whereabouts of his body remained a mystery for decades. Then, in 2005, a joint U.S. and North Korean military recovery team recovered 32 sets of remains from a burial site. About eight years later, Elkin went to a Chicago hotel for one of the events the Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency holds around the country in which people like her are updated about their missing loved ones and given a chance to provide DNA samples for comparison with DNA from recovered remains.
The match came last September and with it, Uurtamo’s name was taken off the list of Americans unaccounted for from the Korean War, which now stands at 7,697 names. He was added to the list of 459 people whose remains have been identified since 1982. And, according to the POW/MIA agency, a rosette to indicate he has been accounted for will be affixed near his name on the Courts of the Missing at the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
Elkin said she, her husband and more than 30 relatives will attend the burial. In the casket will be his remains, dress uniform and his medals, she said.
Elkin said it is a chance to be openly proud of her father, whom she rarely talked about because he died in a war few seemed to care about.