MOUNT VERNON, Ill. — The remains of an American soldier who died in a Korean prisoner-of-war camp in the 1950s will be buried July 11 at Bethel Memorial Cemetery in Mount Vernon, Illinois.
Army Sgt. Howard Malcom, a native of Mount Vernon, was reported missing in action from the Headquarters Company, Ninth Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division on Dec. 1, 1950, when his unit withdrew from Kunu-Ri to Sunchon, North Korea, according to a news release from the U.S. Army. He was 23 when reported missing.
In 1953, several prisoners of war who had returned during a military operation said that Malcom had been at Prisoner of War Camp No. 5, and he had died in Aug. 1951, the Army said in the release.
During "Operation Glory" in 1954, North Korea returned remains that had been recovered from Prisoner of War Camp No. 5, but Malcom's name was not on any of the lists the United Nations Command received, and none of the remains were associated with him. In Oct. 1955, Malcom was determined as "non-recoverable."
In July 2018, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency proposed that 652 Korean War "unknowns" would be disinterred from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as "Punchbowl", in Honolulu.
In 2019, a set of unknown remains from Prisoner of War Camp No. 5 that had been recovered in Operation Glory were disinterred and sent for analysis.
On Oct. 25, 2022, Army Sgt. Howard Malcom was accounted for after his remains were identified using chest radiograph comparisons, and dental, anthropological and mitochondrial DNA analysis, the Army said.
Malcom's name was recorded, along with others still missing from the Korean War, on the American Battle Commission's Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of Pacific.
More than 7,500 Americans are still unaccounted for from the Korean War, the Army said.
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