Unusual MIA case among Pentagon family briefings
By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer
When Pentagon officials meet tonight with relatives of Hawai'i servicemen missing in action from the Korean and Vietnam wars, they'll bring files on U.S. Army Pfc. Chan Jay Park Kim, whose incredible case sounds as if it came out of a spy novel.
The closed-door briefing at the Hilton Hawaiian Village is part of routine updates by the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office. Relatives of 13 MIAs from Hawai'i are expected.
Kim's case is anything but routine.
Kim was captured by North Korean forces on July 8, 1950, and his family knew little about what happened to him except that he was in a POW camp with a brutal warden. In 1999, however, Pentagon investigators obtained the memoirs of a Russian emigre who claimed that 22 American servicemen from World War II and the Korean War were detained in Siberian labor camps.
Kim, who used the alias George Leon, was the only person who could be matched with a missing American serviceman. Soldiers who knew him have said Kim used that alias because he was of Korean descent.
The memoirs have not led to any further revelations, recovery of remains or repatriation of missing servicemen. Still, Kim's nephew, Gordon Kim, believes the memoirs are true.
"It is not improbable," Kim said. "In fact, I think it could have happened pretty easily. For that one name to be on a list and for members of his unit to connect it to him ... How do you make up a name like George Leon?"
Kim does not think that his uncle will ever be found, however.
"I think that if he went to this gulag place we will probably never recover his body," he said. "I don't think he could be alive. That's my gut feeling. But if he ended up buried somewhere in a battlefield, in that case, I have confidence that his remains could be recovered some day."
The Army private was the youngest of five children, two of whom are still alive. His fate is not something family members discuss often, his nephew said. And yet, Gordon Kim would like to give his uncle's two surviving siblings a bit of closure in the waning years of their lives.
"For my dad and my uncle, I wish they could put it to rest," he said. "Either find his remains and bring them home or at least know for sure what happened to him."
The briefings will take as long as required tonight with each family receiving one-on-one discussions tailored to their case, said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office.
The briefings, which have been done nationwide since 1995, give family members who cannot travel to the Pentagon a way to learn about their missing loved ones.
"We assure them that their cases continue to be worked on daily," Greer said. "We have 88,000 total MIAs from four conflicts — World War II, Korea, the Vietnam War and the Cold War — and none of them is on a dusty shelf somewhere."
The Siberian labor camp memoirs are intriguing. Even though they have not yielded much, military officials cannot dismiss them, Greer said.
"It's like a 50-year-old detective case," he said. "We're not discounting any of it. There is a match, tenuous though it may be."
Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8012.
