Official Telegram

One day last August, a spry, 78-year-old Wetumka, Okla. farmer named J. M. Carter excitedly handed a copy of a local newspaper to his wife Martha Ellen. Their son, 19-year-old Pfc. James Madison Carter, said a news dispatch from Korea, had been decorated with the Silver Star, for helping to destroy an enemy tank. He had also been wounded in the action. Proud, worried, but in a way relieved in knowing that he would be out of danger in a hospital, they wrote asking him for details. This month their letters began coming back stamped: "Deceased--verified."

Since they had received no word from the Army in the two months since the action described in the paper, the Carters assumed that the letters had been mistakenly stamped in Korea. Wetumka's Postmaster Bill Nicks, irate at what seemed like mishandling of the mail, fired an airmail complaint off to Oklahoma's Congressman Tom Steed. Steed checked up. He discovered that the field headquarters of young Carter's outfit had evidently been overrun by the enemy and its records scattered.

Finally, however, its casualty report was sent on to the Pentagon. The news story, not the Army postal stamp, had been wrong. Last week the Army dutifully sent the Carters a telegram officially informing them of their son's death.

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