Major Stephen Uurtamo comes home

USAF Retired sends us a link to the news that Army Major Stephen Uurtamo of Headquarters Battery, 82nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division is coming home finally after being held as a prisoner of the Chinese Army since late 1950. His 76-year-old daughter, Carol Elkin, will be there to say ‘goodbye’;

For the Uurtamo family, the service is the final chapter of a story that began in late 1950 when the 32-year-old career soldier was declared missing in action after fierce fighting in one of the bloodiest battles of the war near the Ch’ongch’on River in North Korea.

He was declared dead after several returning U.S. prisoners of war reported that Uurtamo had been captured and died at a war transient camp where prisoners who survived came home with stories of watching their buddies starve to death.

“He died from malnutrition and pneumonia,” Elkin said.

The whereabouts of his body remained a mystery for decades. Then, in 2005, a joint U.S. and North Korean military recovery team recovered 32 sets of remains from a burial site. About eight years after that, Elkin went to a Chicago hotel for one of the events the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency holds around the country in which people like her are updated about their missing loved ones and given a chance to provide DNA samples for comparison with DNA pulled from recovered remains.

Hondo told us that his remains had been identified last year.

Category: We Remember