
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, July 25, 1995                   TAG: 9507250094
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

KOREAN WAR MIA KIN END SILENCE

An enduring truth about the Korean War, which ended 42 years ago this week, is that when the fighting stopped, so did most of the U.S. government's efforts to find its missing servicemen. Relatives of the thousands of missing were left to grow up, or grow old, not knowing the full truth.

Now, with almost no national attention, more and more families of the missing from Korea are demanding answers to hard questions that have lingered for four decades.

What really happened to their loved one? Where was he buried, and can't the remains be returned? Why hasn't the American government done more to find out?

Many of them will be in Washington on Thursday, along with veterans who survived the war, to attend a formal dedication of the Korean War Veterans Memorial honoring the 5.7 million Americans who served, including 54,246 who lost their lives. The three-year conflict ended with an armistice on July 27, 1953.

Monday, the Pentagon said a set of remains returned voluntarily by North Korean last fall had been identified as those of an Army private, John M. Washington, of Columbus, Ga. That reduced the official list of unaccounted-for servicemen to 8,168 - only five fewer than shortly after the war ended.

Halbert Unruh was an Air Force captain and the pilot of a B-26 bomber that was shot down over northern Korea on April 5, 1951. His fate was never determined. The government in December 1953 declared him presumed dead.

``All of us were, I don't know if you would use the word `complacent,' but we thought, well, whatever our government tells us, you believe,'' said his sister, Darlene Ticehurst of Los Alamitos, Calif.

For Ticehurst, the complacency is over. It ended when she read an Associated Press story in September 1993 that her brother was among dozens of American servicemen whose names appeared in the files of a Soviet aviation unit that fought in Korea. The implication: The Soviets might have held these men captive.

Ticehurst tried to learn more through the Pentagon's Defense POW-MIA Office. She said her inquiries fell on deaf ears.

``I don't feel bitterness, but if there is information out there that the families aren't being given, my gosh, it is such a crime,'' Ticehurst said. ``All any of us wants is the truth.''

Because there was no peace treaty, but only a truce, to end the Korean War, the U.S. government told families it was not politically possible to directly search for U.S. remains in communist North Korea. In 1993, Washington and Pyongyang said they would work toward a formal arrangement for recovering and returning remains, as is done in Vietnam, but so far that has not happened.

For years, the main focus of the Pentagon's attention to POWs and MIAs has been the Vietnam War. Korean War families think they haven't been given a fair shake.

In September 1993, the Korean War-Cold War Family Association of the Missing was started by three daughters of men missing from Korea. It now has 600 members.

Pat Dunton, of Coppell, Texas, is president. Her father was lost on a B-29 mission over northern Korea on April 12, 1951, and was later presumed dead.

``The families have never forgotten,'' she said. ``It never has gone away. It just doesn't.''

by CNB