Pearl Harbor casualty in 'unknown' ranks no more

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

The bugler was gone. The honor guard and the family members had withdrawn.

An honor guard carries the remains of Thomas Hembree, an apprentice seaman, to his final resting place at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. It took 60 years to remove him from the ranks of the "unknown" dead.

Marion Price, a niece of Thomas Hembree, thanks Ray Emory, the historian whose perseverance paid off.

Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

Thomas Hembree, an apprentice seaman, was just 17 when he was killed at Pearl Harbor.

Thomas Hembree, the stone said. That was the miracle, the solution to the 60-year mystery.

After years of hard work by survivor/historian Ray Emory, the Army's Central Identification Laboratory here for the first time exhumed and identified remains of an "unknown" serviceman killed at Pearl Harbor. Dental records clinched it.

It brought closure, nieces Marion Price and Beth LaRosa said at burial services yesterday at Punchbowl, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

The miracle was etched in stone:

AS US Navy. World War II. May 17, 1924-Dec. 7, 1941.
Purple Heart.
USS Curtiss.

An apprentice seaman from Kennewick, Wash.

He had been at Pearl for seven days. His shipmates barely knew him.

A Japanese bomb killed him in the first minutes of the attack.

Hembree was 17.

His mom signed so he could enlist like his brothers.

His face, mirrored in those of family at the grave, beamed boyishly from a funeral program photo.

It made you think, Navy Capt. Don Wilson said, how Hembree might have used those 60 years if he had not given them and all the life they contained for his country on that day.

It made you marvel, Wilson said, at the same kind of sacrifices being made today in the mountains of Afghanistan by U.S. troops not much older than young Tommy Hembree.

Reach Walter Wright at wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8054.