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Updated at 8:37 a.m., Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Hawaii team helps ID missing Korean War soldier

Advertiser Staff

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing in action from the Korean War, have been identified and returned to his family for burial with full military honors.

Army Sgt. Frank Bunchuk, of Medina, N.Y., will be buried Thursday in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.

In November 1950, Bunchuk was assigned to Company L, 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division then occupying a defensive position southwest of Unsan, North Korea, near a bend in the Kuryong River known as the Camel's Head. On Nov. 1, parts of two Chinese Communist Divisions struck the 1st Cavalry Division's lines, collapsing the perimeter and forcing a withdrawal. In the process, the 3rd Battalion was surrounded and effectively ceased to exist as a fighting unit.

Bunchuk was one of the more than 350 servicemen unaccounted for from the battle at Unsan.

In 2002, a joint U.S.-Democratic People's Republic of North Korea team, led by the Hawai'i-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), excavated a burial site south of Unsan near the nose of the Camel's Head formed by the joining of the Nammyon and Kuryong rivers. The team recovered human remains.

Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used mitochondrial DNA and dental comparisons in the identification of Bunchuk's remains.

For additional information on the Defense Department's mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO Web site at www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call 703-699-1420.