Sergeant Max Harris comes home

Back in June, Hondo told us that Sergeant Max Harris’ earthly remains had been identified after he was recovered from North Korea, The Journal & Courier reports that he’s expected to return home to Monticello, Indiana this week.

According to Hondo, he was assigned to L Company, 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, US Army, and he was lost in North Korea on 12 December 1950;

[Patsy] McCall hadn’t seen her brother, who was nine years older than she was, since he left their Monticello home in the mid-‘40s to go to Lexington, Kentucky, to work as a jockey and eventually enlist in the U.S. Army. She was only 13 by 1951, the year the Army listed that Harris had died, his body unaccounted for, as a prisoner behind North Korean lines.

“I didn’t let it go,” McCall said. “It was always in your mind that maybe someday he will return – that he could be in a prison camp or something. I don’t know, but you hope. I thought, you know, one day, he may return – one way or another.”

Late Friday night, McCall will surround herself with her sons and some extended family to wait for a military procession, flanked by motorcycles of the Indiana Patriot Guard Riders, carrying her brother’s remains nearly 66 years after he was declared dead.

On Sunday, after a noon visitation and 2 p.m. funeral at Springer-Voorhis-Draper Funeral Home, 202 S. Illinois St., Max Harris will be buried next to his mother, Lela Harris Skaggs, in Riverview Cemetery near Monticello.

“I’ve just been so happy ever since they came to tell me they’d found Max,” McCall said. “All my family is gone, only except for me. I said that God must have left me here for a reason. And this has to be the reason – to put him with my mom.”

Category: We Remember