Waiting on a promise to come home
by
Alison Walker-Baird
News-Post Staff
FREDERICK - Red silk roses rest at the corner of a modest flat marble stone in Frederick's Mount Olivet Cemetery. The ground beneath waits for a young Frederick soldier who never came home.
Catherine Smith, sitting at her kitchen table in Martinsburg, W.Va., on a warm Thursday morning in June, rubbed a 1951 newspaper clipping of her brother's photo. The black and white image is faded from the years she's carried it with her.
U.S. Army Master Sgt. Ira Miss Jr., a handsome man in his early 20s, leans against a railing in front of his Fort Lewis, Wash., barracks, his jet-black hair forming a tendril on his forehead. He would have turned 80 this year.
Military records show Miss, called "Junior" by his family, died in a North Korean prison camp on June 1, 1951, at age 23. The U.S. Department of Defense sent his father, Ira Miss Sr., a telegram three months earlier notifying the family Miss was missing in action. His remains have never been identified.
Smith, now 81, frail and her memory fading, has held on to hope her only sibling survived.
She remembers playing with him in a double swing and oak tree in their Frederick yard. Friends teased that the two were so close they were like boyfriend and girlfriend, she said.
When their mother, Lillian, died in March 1948, the loss was a blow to Miss. He enlisted in the Army.
Deployed to Korea in 1950, an enemy bullet struck Miss in the hip in late November. He recovered in an Army hospital in Japan and returned to the front lines in South Korea by January 1951.
In early February, Miss and other soldiers in the 3rd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment fought bitterly to protect Highway 29 in South Korea, a vital communication line. On Feb. 11, Chinese Communist Forces attacked, overwhelming the soldiers and blocking the highway.
During the evening of Feb. 12, survivors fought their way through the roadblocks to Hoengsong. More than 320 soldiers - including Miss - were unaccounted for.
Communist soldiers took Miss prisoner Feb. 13, 1951. He died less than four months later.
Records from the military's Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office in Washington state four fellow captives who served with Miss said they witnessed his death and burial at Camp No. 1 in Changsong on the Yalu River.
Miss is not among the 74 Korean War troops whose remains the military has identified through excavations or turnovers to the U.S. government. About 8,100 who served in the Korean War remain unaccounted for.
A Baltimore newspaper article printed just after the war's end listed Smith's brother among POWs. But she has never believed he is dead.
"It was the last thing he said to me," she said. "Before he left, I said, 'Junior, you just might get hurt.' He says, 'Sis, I'm coming home, I'm gonna come home.'"
On Memorial Day, Smith visited her brother's empty grave in the family plot next to Lillian's "Mother" stone to leave the silk roses and pray. An encircled cross has been engraved above Miss' name, his date of birth and presumed date of death, and his Army rank.
Smith said not knowing how her brother spent his last days continues to haunt her.
"All kinds of thoughts are running through my mind, whether he died naturally, whether he was killed," she said. "He had my dad's temper - if they tried to rough him up he would fight back. That's something I'd like to know. But maybe, then again, it's just as well I don't."
Miss' cousin, Pat Dinterman of Marion Station on the Eastern Shore, has started searching for his four fellow captives to help answer the family's questions. She also posted an inquiry for information on the website of the Korean War Project, a nonprofit corporation that looks for families of missing service members.
"I've exhausted everything - I just don't know what else to do," Smith said, tears welling in her eyes. "I just don't want to die before I can get my brother's remains and bring him home."
The loss has haunted not only Smith but Miss' daughter, Linda Easter, who was weeks old when her father left for Korea.
Easter, who lives in Frederick, has described feeling like she was "hatched," Smith said. As a young girl, she couldn't resist approaching hitchhiking soldiers.
"She would run up and ask, 'Are you my daddy?'" Smith said.
Not many keepsakes have survived the decades since Miss' capture. Easter has a few photographs of her father and his Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster.
Smith and her husband James' home near Harpers Ferry, W.Va., burned to the ground in December 1988, leaving her only the small newspaper photograph of Miss, a larger print of the photo and a military-issued certificate that marks his date of death.
The larger photograph, the one of Miss as a handsome young man posing outside his barrack, rests on the night table next to Smith's bed.
"I see him the first thing when I wake up and the last thing when I go to bed," she said. "He was always grinning like that."
