Unsung Service

According to map coordinates, the wrecked plane lay about 700 yards in front of the U.N. lines. A Korean farmer who crossed to safety in allied territory had told where the plane was, said that it had evidently crashed months before. A team of the U.S. Army's Graves Registration Service, covered by riflemen of the nearest combat unit, went out into no man's land to find the wreck. They found it--a jumble of twisted and melted metal. There were no dog tags, and nothing was left of the pilot but a charred skeleton.

Working quickly, the G.R.S. men placed the airman's remains in a rubber-lined, zippered pouch. An aircraft expert combed the wreck, snipped off bits of metal bearing serial numbers. Then the party scrambled back to its own lines. By last week, the plane had been identified as a light L19 spotter, and in the G.R.S. laboratory at Kure, Japan, the pilot's skeleton had been assembled, his height determined, dental chart plotted. If the data obtained from this work checks with a name listed on a unit roster, another U.S. fighting man's name will be transferred from "missing in action" to "killed in action." In the fighting lull, the unsung men of Graves Registration were busy trying to bridge the gap between the 11,000 U.S. troops listed as missing, and the mere 3,000 names of persons on the lists handed over by the Reds.

Clues & Proof. Combing old battlefields from the Pusan beachhead to the present battlefront are hundreds of officers, soldiers and civilians with special skills--fingerprint experts from the FBI, men with detective experience, trained undertakers, X-ray technicians, doctors, dentists, chemists, anthropologists, clerks. At Kure, the lab staff looks for clues in laundry and dry-cleaning marks, scars, teeth, old bone fractures, even tattoos.

Dog tags are not always found, and even when they are, they are not taken as certain proof of identity. Fingerprints which can be checked against the FBI's master file in Washington are considered certain proof. Not until identity has been established beyond doubt are the next of kin notified and the remains sent home.

Graves Registration's job is grim, difficult and dangerous. Sometimes the teams have followed the fighting so closely that they have had to fight themselves; their men have been killed and wounded, some by guerrilla bullets, some by mines.

Candy for Dog Tags. Korean farmers, who in winter go into the hills and woods for firewood, have been a great help. The G.R.S. drops leaflets from planes asking Koreans for information. Last week a searching crew, following up a leaflet drop, was led by a white-robed farmer to a hillside grave, from which the searchers recovered a moldering body--obviously an American killed early in the war. There were no dog tags. The farmer said he had given them to his six-year-old daughter. She, in turn, tearfully pleaded that she had lost them. The sergeant in charge of the G.R.S. searchers had run into such situations before. He produced a dozen candy bars and the little Korean girl dug up the missing dog tags from a cranny of the mud-walled barn.

The great question for the G.R.S. is when, if ever, it will be allowed to comb the sites of the late 1950 fighting between the present battlefront and the Yalu, where it believes hundreds of U.S. bodies lie. Up to this week the matter had not even been mentioned at Panmunjom.

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