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Lost in Korea, soldier will rest in peace

After a 1950 battle, Sgt. Dougall H. Espey Jr. was gone, but not forgotten.

Army Sgt. Dougall H. Espey Jr. was MIA in North Korea.
Army Sgt. Dougall H. Espey Jr. was MIA in North Korea.Read moreCourtesy Mariam Espey

Fifty-eight years is a long time to wait for a phone call.

"I was kind of numb," said Mariam "Bobbie" Espey of Mount Laurel. "It came out of the blue."

It was Sept. 27 when a Pentagon official told Espey that the remains of her big brother, Army Sgt. Dougall H. Espey Jr., who was reported missing in action in Korea in November 1950, had been identified following DNA tests on hundreds of soldiers' remains.

Almost four months after that call, the identification was announced publicly yesterday by the U.S. Department of Defense.

"I was afraid I would die before it ever happened," said Espey, 78, a retired guidance counselor at John Hancock School in Philadelphia.

A doting little sister, Espey spent decades making sure her only brother rested in peace.

In 1976, she took over her father's duty of constantly contacting the military. "He said there's nothing I can do," Espey recalled.

About 10 years ago, she responded to an ad in a military magazine asking for blood samples so scientists could do mitochondrial DNA tests on remains collected in 208 boxes turned over by North Korea.

Mariam Espey, who also served in the Korean War as part of the Air Force Nurse Corps, mailed in blood. So did one of her two younger sisters.

The family heard nothing until the phone call. The young sergeant - 6-foot-5, exceedingly kind, and just 21 at the time of his death - had been identified.

In November, a military official came to Espey's home and handed her a box with two dog tags recovered from Korea.

"It was strange," she said. "The funeral will be more emotional, probably."

On April 3, Espey will do her final duty. Along with her sisters, she will bury their brother, on what would have been his 80th birthday, at Woodlawn National Cemetery in Elmira, N.Y., where the family lived at the time of his death.

The remains will be put in a flag-draped coffin and flown, with a military escort, from the Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, to upstate New York.

Of the 200 to 400 servicemen's remains that are estimated to have been collected in the 208 boxes handed over by North Korea in the early 1990s, only 24 have been identified, according to the military.

Espey said she knew of some family members who did not want to reopen emotional wounds by offering their blood for DNA comparisons.

"That's a shame, because the relative deserves closure, the relative deserves to be buried properly," she said.

Larry Greer, spokesman for the Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, said each box from North Korea contained the bone and teeth remains of as few as one, or as many as seven, soldiers.

"They were so commingled by the North Koreans, it's taking years to get to the bottom of each case and try to identify them," Greer said.

Dougall Espey trained at Fort Dix, but lived in Elmira. His little sister is a former Mount Laurel school board member who has lived on Church Road since 1972.

She was just a year younger than her brother, and she said they were "more companions" than siblings.

"We lived in apartments and my parents moved a lot, and we never stayed long enough in one place to establish any friends, so we had each other," she said.

Her brother was in North Korea for just two months.

On Nov. 1, 1950, at a battle near Unsan in an area known as "Camel's Head," Chinese forces surrounded Espy's battalion, according to Greer. After the battle, more than 350 soldiers could not be accounted for.

"The government in their utter wisdom sent us the telegram [saying he was missing] the day before Thanksgiving in 1950," Espey said, bitterness in her voice.

He was declared dead on New Year's Eve in 1953. More than a half-century after that, he will come home from the war.

"I'm happy it finally happened," his sister said. "That's why I did it."