For sixty years, Jorja Elliott-Reyburn has lived without a clear idea of what happened to her father, a U.S. soldier who disappeared during the Korean War.
But no month has been as difficult for the 65-year-old Ms. Elliott-Reyburn as this July.
As officials in Washington and Seoul commemorated the 60th anniversary of the armistice that ended hostilities in 1953, and as North Korea staged a lavish “victory celebration,” Ms. Elliott-Reyburn was busy getting ready to confront the Pentagon with documents and questions about what happened to her father, James H. Elliott.
During the desperate battle for control of the so-called Pusan Perimeter, Mr. Elliott went out on patrol one night in August 1950 and never came back. U.S. military documents say that he may have died in 1951 in a prisoner-of-war camp.
But one of the battlefield captain’s logbooks reports that Mr. Elliott’s body was retrieved from the battlefield the day after he disappeared in August 1950 – a scenario that Ms. Elliott-Reyburn says has been borne out by testimony from two soldiers who were there.
Ms. Elliott-Reyburn assumes her father’s remains are either buried somewhere in the U.S. under another soldier’s name, in a shared military grave in Hawaii for unidentified remains, or — if he indeed was taken prisoner – in North Korea.
In her quest for a conclusive answer, Ms. Elliott-Reyburn is far from alone.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense, the country has about 7,910 service members unaccounted for from the Korean War, which lasted between 1950 and 1953 — nearly five times the number of U.S. service members unaccounted for during the U.S.’s much longer involvement in Vietnam.
The hopes of families of these missing soldiers for answers took a further blow after a pair of recent government reports lambasted the work of the U.S. unit in charge of tracking prisoners of war and missing-in-action soldiers, known as the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.
In early July, the Associated Press reported on an internal Pentagon document that cited widespread dysfunction at the military-run group, known as JPAC. Days later, a second, public report by the Government Accountability Office, added to the criticism, highlighting “longstanding leadership weakness and a fragmented organizational structure” at JPAC.
None of this is a surprise to Ms. Elliott-Reyburn and others who have been trying for years to independently account for U.S. soldiers lost in the Korean War – and getting little help from the U.S. government, she says.
“We have invested a lot of time and money, which we don’t mind doing, to try and find answers about what happened to our father,” says Ms. Elliott-Reyburn, who lives in Star, Idaho, a suburb of Boise. In recent years, she has flown all over the U.S. to interview her father’s former comrades.
But the varying stories, and the government’s unwillingness or inability to clear them up, is what frustrates the family.
“I’ve requested information on numerous occasions for several years, and they’ve never been forthcoming,” she says.
Even after the United Nations Command signed its armistice with North Korea in July 1953, North Korea didn’t repatriate all of the prisoners of war under its custody.
In the case of South Korea, an estimated 24,000 soldiers were kept in the North after the end of hostilities, and one group in Seoul estimates there are at least 113 South Korean POWs still alive in the North today. Few escaped, though Yoo Young-bok, who The Wall Street Journal profiled last month, managed to flee the North in 2000.
Independent researcher Mark Sauter and John Zimmerlee, the son of a missing-in-action U.S. Air Force serviceman, argue in a new e-book, that U.S. incompetence, combined with a desire to downplay the issue amid on-again-off-again negotiations with North Korea, have trumped the military’s “no man left behind” imperative.
The two men also say that there is some evidence that American soldiers may still be alive in North Korea today, based on what Mr. Sauter calls recent “credible sightings” by North Korean defectors.
In remarks to the press on July 9, shortly after the Associated Press revealed the first internal report criticizing JPAC, Pentagon press secretary George Little promised a more thorough review of the system overseeing U.S. POWs and MIAs, though he said there was “no reason to believe” that any living captured U.S. soldiers remain in North Korean hands. (Some U.S. soldiers that defected to North Korea are thought to still live in the country.)
In a Congressional confirmation hearing on July 18, General Martin Dempsey, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate that he would “get to the bottom of it,” calling the internal report “discouraging,” and acknowledging that the situation appeared to be “moving rapidly toward disgraceful.”
Despite the pledges of action, family members of unaccounted-for soldiers, like Ms. Elliott-Reyburn, remain skeptical. And a weekend of commemorations of the war’s end has only served as a frustrating reminder of how little information these families have about what may have become of some of these service members.
“When the effort first began, my brother and I were hoping that we would find our father’s remains and bring him home in her lifetime, but we’re wondering if we’ll be able to do that in our lifetimes,” she says.
Next week, Ms. Elliott-Reyburn, her mother and her aunt will fly to Washington for the Department of Defense’s annual “family update,” where she says she plans to confront the officers with information she has recently gathered.
“They present the Powerpoint presentations, and from year to year they present the same thing,” she says. “I think they’re playing a waiting game, hoping that everyone will die off and that the problem will go away.”
She adds: “But we’re not going to let this lie.”