III. Body Matters---He Could be Alive Because I Do Not See His Body
The policy of bringing all dead soldiers’ bodies after their death, together the ability of the advanced forensic techniques, raised the expectation of the American public---they would not accept the death of their beloved ones without seeing their bodies. A father’s remark that his son’s body is “critical to understanding that his boy had died,” represented the voice of thousands of bereaved families in the early 1950s. Sometimes, when the families were informed that the military could not find their relatives’ remains, they would rather suspect that the soldiers were still alive and detained by the Communist regimes, than believe that they were killed and interred in the remote frozen Korean countryside.
Despite the policy and the new families’ expectation, the U.S. military had to encounter a bitter fact that more than 8,000 servicemen went missing during the Korean War. As described earlier, the U.S. Army suffered a series of debacles in Korea. The fleeing soldiers abandoned thousands of remains and graves to the advancing enemies. What further complicated the body issue were the equally large number of U.S. POWs incarcerated in enemy camps with minimal sanitary facilities and food supplies. The U.S. military suffered the POW mortality …show more content…
Accordingly, they attempted to contact these foreign agencies independently, for example, the USSR supreme leader Nikita Khrushchev, the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, neural states, or the Red Cross. It might be possible that they also wrote to Chinese and DPRK officials. Not surprisingly, almost all correspondence were either redirected to the U.S. or responded with platitudes not very different from that made by the U.S.
The policy of bringing all dead soldiers’ bodies after their death, together the ability of the advanced forensic techniques, raised the expectation of the American public---they would not accept the death of their beloved ones without seeing their bodies. A father’s remark that his son’s body is “critical to understanding that his boy had died,” represented the voice of thousands of bereaved families in the early 1950s. Sometimes, when the families were informed that the military could not find their relatives’ remains, they would rather suspect that the soldiers were still alive and detained by the Communist regimes, than believe that they were killed and interred in the remote frozen Korean countryside.
Despite the policy and the new families’ expectation, the U.S. military had to encounter a bitter fact that more than 8,000 servicemen went missing during the Korean War. As described earlier, the U.S. Army suffered a series of debacles in Korea. The fleeing soldiers abandoned thousands of remains and graves to the advancing enemies. What further complicated the body issue were the equally large number of U.S. POWs incarcerated in enemy camps with minimal sanitary facilities and food supplies. The U.S. military suffered the POW mortality …show more content…
Accordingly, they attempted to contact these foreign agencies independently, for example, the USSR supreme leader Nikita Khrushchev, the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, neural states, or the Red Cross. It might be possible that they also wrote to Chinese and DPRK officials. Not surprisingly, almost all correspondence were either redirected to the U.S. or responded with platitudes not very different from that made by the U.S.