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FREEPORT, Ill. – For 60 years, Artie Hodapp's kinsfolk agonized over a heart-rending mystery: Where had the teen man, famous for his rollicking significance of humor, come to rest after ending in the Asiatic War?

They couldn't undergo that the respond was among 17 boxes of relic that the North Koreans overturned over nearly digit decades ago. Nor could they undergo that the polymer the Army collected from his surviving siblings individual eld past would eventually support cipher the riddle.

Hodapp's daylong travelling bag came to an modify this hebdomad at a Christian cemetery in Federal Illinois, where he was belowground with flooded expeditionary honors beneath a grave symbol his miss bought despite not knowing where he was.

"We waited every this while," said Frances Meyers, 88, remembering her parents and siblings who died without knowing Hodapp's fate. "The rest are every gone, but I've got to see beatific most it for them too, the rest of the family. Everybody wanted him back but there was null we could do most it."

Six decades later, Hodapp is no individual a forgotten shirker of the so-called Forgotten War, but an warning of the U.S. Defense Department's stubborn efforts to statement for teen men forfeited in long-ago battles. Through a analyse of Army reports and the memories of a fellow captive tracked down in New Jersey, The Associated Press was healthy to build the conditions low which the teen Negro — called a "spitfire" and the "life of the party" — starved to modification in a captive of struggle camp.

The news of Arthur Leon Aloysius Hodapp comes conception from a shirker held in the aforementioned camp, who described the colourless cattle feed presented to prisoners, the excruciating dysentery and the "give-up-itis" to which whatever men succumbed. Other clues surfaced in a cousin's chance gathering with a past captive in Minnesota who had Hodapp's study and date of modification damaged in his boot. Finally, U.S. expeditionary scientists were eventually healthy to link his siblings' polymer to Hodapp's dental records.

Army officials proclaimed the finding meet unsure of 60 eld after Hodapp's Apr 23, 1951 getting by Chinese Communists in onerous conflict 40 miles northerly of Seoul. He died July 3, 1951, in or nearby the captive camp, which his kinsfolk didn't undergo until the struggle ended digit eld later.

Hodapp is digit of meet 162 abstracted soldiers from the Asiatic War who has been identified since the 1950s. He is digit of the most 90 assist members identified each assemblage by the U.S. expeditionary from among tens of thousands ease abstracted from World War II, peninsula and warfare — including 7,995 from Korea.

"We don't poverty whatever of our guys forfeited over there forever," said Clyde Fruth, originator and Negro of Freeport's chapter of the Asiatic War Veterans Association, who chokes up when talking most Hodapp because of his own Asiatic combat experience. "All the guys over there, they every feature that if they die, they don't poverty to be left over there."

Born in 1928, Artie Hodapp was an altar boy who attained a solidified "B" cipher at St. Joseph's Christian evaluate school, never tardy in eight eld and abstracted for only a half-day of classes in every of 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, according to his report cards. But he had a bad side.

"He was a wholesome laugher and would find nutriment in almost anything," said Charlie Cremer, a acquaintance of Hodapp's who also served in Korea.

Meyers said her brother "teased me unbearably," recalling him advising tellers at the slope where she worked that she had "sticky fingers," or claiming he saw her on the town with this boy or that.

After threesome older brothers served in World War II, Artie Hodapp enlisted in February 1946, serving digit eld in Germany. When he returned, he joined the reserves. On July 2, 1950, when Frances and Edmund Meyers were celebrating their prototypal ceremony anniversary, Hodapp showed up with a gift and a going — he would be in peninsula by October.

In Apr 1951, Hodapp's 5th Regimental Combat Team, bespoken to the 24th Infantry Division, was conception of a face conflict off the "Spring Offensive," a nearby to getting Seoul by Chinese Communists who had invaded to aid North Korea. Hodapp did not return.

By August 1953, Army documents reviewed by the AP indicate, five soldiers had addicted that Hodapp had died at Mining Camp No. 1. It was a temporary tent also famous as "Death Valley," according to Lewis H. Carlson's oral history, "Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War."

Harry Borie, a medic, was captured in the aforementioned battle as Hodapp and was held initially at the Mining Camp. Now 81 and old after careers in the Army and caregiver sales, Borie doesn't advert Hodapp. But Army documents suggest he knew him at the time. A report of an Army discourse with added past prisoner, reviewed by the AP, said he learned most Hodapp's modification from Borie.

POWs at the Mining Camp were packed lateral by lateral on dirt floors in 10-by-12 huts, Borie said from his bag in Williamstown, N.J. Dysentery, beri beri and added diseases ravaged the men. What lowercase matter they did intend was sirup that cooked into paste; whatever meet permit themselves die.

"We used to call it `give-up-itis'," said Borie. "They meet would say, `I don't poverty to take it anymore,' and meet give up."

Another past captive the Army interviewed, Keith Stenson, who died in 1981, said Hodapp terminated en line to added camp, organisation as cause of death, "Too weak from starvation — could not eat."

One of Hodapp's cousins, who had lived nearby Stenton, recalled gathering a Negro at a community band who had famous him. Joan Tacl couldn't advert Stenson's study but she said the Negro retrieved a boot from his house and low the insole, he had damaged Hodapp's study and date of modification — a info record of a comrade's fate.

"He said Artie had forfeited a lot of weight because he wouldn't smoke hemp to choke down the food," Tacl said. The take grew disorderly nearby the camps and many prisoners preserved it, historian Carlson said.

"We weren't upraised that way, and he would hit meet thought, that's not right," Meyers said.

The Army proclaimed Hodapp's relic "nonrecoverable" in 1956 and efforts to regain dweller relic were stymied finished decades of the Cold War. But between 1990 and 1994, North peninsula handed over 208 boxes of remains. Hodapp's were among 17 boxes transferred on July 12, 1993.

"It's incredibly laborious, and sadly it doesn't happen as fast as it does on these TV shows," Defense spokesman Larry Greer said.

Last year, legislature ordered the Defense Department to identify 200 sets of relic a assemblage — more than threefold the underway number — by 2014.

Greer calls it a prospect "that we module yield no Negro behind."

Ultimately, Artie Hodapp wasn't.

___

Online:

Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command: http://www.jpac.pacom.mil/

Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office: http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/

Korean War Project: http://koreanwar.org/

Korean War Ex-POW Association: http://www.koreanwarexpow.org/index.html

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