Published Sunday April 26, 2009
POW to get his due at Arlington, 58 years late
LINCOLN — On Friday morning, they will gather around a freshly dug grave, look down at a white marble headstone that reads "Sgt. 1st Class Patrick James Arthur" and remember a man they never quite forgot.
Click to Enlarge
Sgt. 1st Class Patrick Arthur of Broken Bow, Neb., died in North Korea in 1951. The three Purple Hearts, Silver Star and more than a dozen other medals — lovingly kept by his nephew Francis Arthur, below — surround his photograph.
A retired assistant principal from Lincoln will be there at Arlington National Cemetery. Francis Arthur will be there because he remembers a day during the Depression when Uncle Pat counted out his life savings and treated everyone to ice cream.
A retired bank employee from Enders, Neb., will be there. Kaye Einspahr will be there because she can't forget the day her uncle waved goodbye and left for Korea. Don't cry, he said. I'll be back.
An aging veteran from California will be there. Obie Wickersham will be there because sometimes in his nightmares, he sees "Pop" Arthur die that same godforsaken death, again and again and again . . .
It will be a small funeral.
It's for a man who lived simply, never married, made it his life's work to fight enemy soldiers, died half a world away from the farm near Broken Bow, Neb., and disappeared from memory a little more every day for 58 years.
But still, it will be a funeral, the culmination of decades of searching, researching and ultimately moving one Nebraska soldier from a shallow grave in North Korea to a pristine patch of land in Arlington.
For the first time, younger relatives will hear the whole story of his life and his death. They will hear about his jokes, his generosity, his sacrifice.
They will hear about how he was lost and then finally found.
"We had given up hope," Einspahr said. "But now he's back with us. He's back where he should be."
* * *
Francis Arthur remembers that all of Uncle Pat's war stories had punch lines.
The day Uncle Pat got shot during World War II turned into a situation comedy, his first Purple Heart a prop.
Patrick Arthur had retreated with the rest of the men that day in 1941, pushed back by a ferocious Japanese attack on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal.
But then the young infantryman noticed a machine gun the Americans had abandoned, ripe for Japanese capture.
He grabbed it, ran over a knoll and surprised the enemy. The return fire chased him back over that knoll, sprinting at top speed.
A bullet tore sideways through his back, grazed off his holstered knife and deflected out his side, nicking his kidney.
"He'd say 'Well, that was the fastest 100-yard dash ever run,' " Francis Arthur remembers. " 'Too bad there was no one there to clock it.' "
Uncle Pat never told Francis about how he had contracted malaria or spent more than a year in an Indiana hospital recovering from his wounds.
Never mentioned how he got well just in time to help in the liberation of France and the invasion of Germany, where he was wounded again and earned a second Purple Heart.
He never spoke about how many friends died, how many foes he killed.
"He never talked about the war in a serious way," Francis Arthur says. "It was a joke. Always a joke."
But then again, maybe Patrick Arthur needed the punch lines. His entire life had been pockmarked by tragedy.
He was born in 1914, the ninth of 11 children.
Things worked out fine until his mother got sick. Cancer, the doctor said. She died when Patrick was a teenager.
He quit school after the eighth grade to help out on the farm, but the Great Depression hit, and so did the Dust Bowl, and soon there wasn't enough work or money to go around. Patrick ended up at an older brother's house near Ord, Neb., whittling away winter evenings with his nephew Francis.
Uncle Pat taught Francis to shoot. He helped him trap raccoons and sell the pelts for spending money.
One day, the extended family met in Broken Bow. Uncle Pat rounded up his dozen or so nieces and nephews in the town square and handed each one enough money to buy an ice cream cone.
This Francis remembers well.
"He couldn't have had much money," he says. "But that was the kind of guy he was."
Patrick Arthur was the kind of guy who slipped a dollar into his sister Alice's apron when she wasn't looking, so she and her children — the oldest was Kaye Einshpahr — could go to a movie.
When Arthur finished the harvest as a hired man in 1939, he quietly signed up for the Army.
When he got back from World War II, he stuck around for a couple of years and then re-enlisted, serving in the occupation of Germany.
When he got back, Arthur hung around for a couple of months, bunked at the Arrow Hotel in Broken Bow, drank beer at the bowling alley, caught the Saturday matinee if it was a Western.
And then he signed up a third time. At age 36, he prepared to ship off to Korea.
Francis Arthur thinks about these things now and wonders.
Why didn't Uncle Pat use the GI Bill to finish high school and go to college for free?
Why did he insist on combat, again and again, instead of farming or a railroad job?
What were those jokes hiding?
"When it comes to Uncle Pat," he says, " I have more questions than I have answers."
* * *
Obie Wickersham remembers the first time he worried about Pop Arthur.
It was May 1951, and they had walked side by side for weeks, trudging up and down the mountains of North Korea as prisoners of the Chinese. They were partners in one of the worst forced marches U.S. troops have ever endured.
The day that part of the 38th Infantry Division was captured, the Chinese tied the soldiers' hands behind their backs, pushed them into a ditch, aimed a machine gun at them . . . but didn't pull the trigger.
From then on, platoon sergeant Wickersham and squad leader Arthur moaned to each other of hunger and thirst and pain. Their captors fed them mostly birdseed and barley powder. They scooped up any water they could find. It gave them dysentery.
But Wickersham didn't notice the 36-year-old soldier everyone called Pop weakening until late in the second week. That's when he saw the small signs. Pop's pace slowed. His shoulders slumped. He looked a little worse than the other 500 soldiers marching north.
They had no doctor, or medical supplies, or anything else that Sgt. Wickersham could use to stop the slide.
"It's just hard," he said. "It's hard when you can't do something more for a guy who has been by your side the whole time."
Arthur and Wickersham had been near each other for most of 1951. Wickersham would give an order to deactivate a tripwire, or advance north toward Seoul, or bed down. Arthur, one of his three squad leaders, would carry it out wordlessly.
At first, Wickersham wondered why Arthur, the platoon's most experienced member, wasn't in charge. But then he realized: Pop chose not to be.
"He wanted to be a soldier, and that's what he was. He was just an everyday guy that did his job."
They were captured May 16, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops overran the "No Name Line" that the U.S. forces had held.
And then they marched at gunpoint every night under cover of darkness. By day, they bedded down in forests, foraged for bugs to eat, talked about home and how good a steak would taste.
Then Pop started to slide, and soon they were helping him along. A couple of days later, he could barely walk.
When he couldn't walk at all, someone put Arthur onto an ox walking with the prisoners.
This is the image stuck in Wickersham's mind, the one he still sees nearly six decades later when he closes his eyes at his home in Yuba City, Calif.
Pop is propped up on the ox. It is raining. He's partly covered by a tarp. He's almost falling off.
His mouth is open, and he's not talking, and Wickersham knows it's coming.
He sees this every time he thinks of Korea.
"It just really broke my heart," Wickersham says. "It still does."
Sometime in July — no one knows the day — Wickersham and a fellow soldier, Sgt. Fred Liddell, buried Pop in an 18-inch-deep grave at a makeshift prison camp south of Pyongyang. Liddell placed Pop's dog tag into his mouth so that one day he might be identified.
Wickersham and Liddell looked at each other and vowed that if Pop Arthur ever had a proper burial, they would be there.
"Not long after that, we left," Wickersham says. "We continued to march."
* * *
Kaye Einspahr remembers the candy.
Patrick Arthur was standing in the doorway, and he was holding two bags for Kaye and her brothers and sisters.
A bag of Necco candy wafers. A bag of black licorice.
He was about to catch a train to Fort Lewis, Wash. From there, he was bound for Korea.
The candy was his way to say goodbye.
"I remember my mother started to cry," Einspahr said. "I remember him saying 'Don't cry, Alice. I'll be back.' "
Arthur's return home has taken 58 years — a journey delayed by geopolitics and the difficulty of positively identifying decades-old remains.
Alice Trotter began searching after a Western Union telegram on June 14, 1951, notified her that the U.S. government considered her brother missing in action. She wrote dozens of letters — to Obie Wickersham's mother, to a recently returned soldier from Red Cloud, Neb., to anyone she could think of — seeking information.
On July 13, 1953, a letter from the Department of Defense removed any doubt: "Information has been obtained from personnel recently recovered from hostile forces that your brother was captured on 18 May 1951 and died of malaria in a village near Pyongyang North Korea."
Trotter eventually received letters from Arthur's Army buddies that detailed the circumstances of his death and the location of his remains.
But no search could take place because North Korea wasn't about to let the Americans in. Decades passed. Memories of Arthur faded.
Then, in 1991, the North Korean government shipped the United States 208 boxes believed to contain the remains of as many as 400 soldiers.
In one box, a researcher at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii found a dog tag that read "Patrick J Arthur." But the remains weren't his.
At one point, a government letter led Trotter to believe that her brother was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. A younger relative checked the registry during a visit to Washington, D.C. No Patrick J. Arthur was buried there, he reported back.
That's when Francis Arthur got interested. He took over as his uncle's official next of kin.
With the help of the Nebraska Veterans Administration, he petitioned for Arthur's military records. They had burned in a fire in the 1970s, came the reply.
He painstakingly worked to get Arthur's service medals, eventually enlisting the help of U.S. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, who helped him receive Uncle Pat's three Purple Hearts, Silver Star and more than a dozen other campaign medals.
And then Francis Arthur opened a veterans magazine one day and saw his uncle's name included in a list of Korean War soldiers still missing in action. Accompanying the story was the phone number of an Army officer working to identify remains.
Francis Arthur called.
"What we're going to need is some DNA," the officer told him.
That's how Trotter, by then in her 80s, helped find her long-lost brother just before she died in 2004.
The mitochondrial DNA from one of Patrick Arthur's two living sisters allowed the Hawaii researchers to search all the boxes for his remains.
In December, Francis was at home when the phone rang.
"We found your uncle," the voice on the other end said.
* * *
And so they will gather Friday around the new grave, in a place where two U.S. presidents and 300,000 American soldiers are remembered.
Francis Arthur wants to ask other relatives the questions he has about Uncle Pat. He hopes he repaid his debt for the hunting and trapping lessons, for the ice cream cone during the worst days of the Great Depression.
Kaye Einspahr will be thinking about how much this proper burial would mean to her mom. Three of Alice Trotter's daughters will be there.
"She just loved him so deeply," Einspahr says.
Obie Wickersham and Fred Liddell will be there, keeping the vow they made when they dug that shallow grave in July 1951.
Wickersham wants to hear about Patrick Athur as a young man, before his Korean War platoon nicknamed him "Pop."
He wants to answer any questions the family has. He has some things to say, too.
"I want to tell them what kind of man I knew," he says. "I want to tell them that Pop was a good soldier. That he did his job."
Everyone who remembers Arthur agrees he wouldn't have much liked all this hoopla, this celebration of his life.
He would feel as if he didn't deserve it.
On this point, Patrick James Arthur would be very wrong.
POW to get his due at Arlington, 58 years late
LINCOLN — On Friday morning, they will gather around a freshly dug grave, look down at a white marble headstone that reads "Sgt. 1st Class Patrick James Arthur" and remember a man they never quite forgot.
Click to Enlarge
Sgt. 1st Class Patrick Arthur of Broken Bow, Neb., died in North Korea in 1951. The three Purple Hearts, Silver Star and more than a dozen other medals — lovingly kept by his nephew Francis Arthur, below — surround his photograph.
A retired assistant principal from Lincoln will be there at Arlington National Cemetery. Francis Arthur will be there because he remembers a day during the Depression when Uncle Pat counted out his life savings and treated everyone to ice cream.
A retired bank employee from Enders, Neb., will be there. Kaye Einspahr will be there because she can't forget the day her uncle waved goodbye and left for Korea. Don't cry, he said. I'll be back.
An aging veteran from California will be there. Obie Wickersham will be there because sometimes in his nightmares, he sees "Pop" Arthur die that same godforsaken death, again and again and again . . .
It will be a small funeral.
It's for a man who lived simply, never married, made it his life's work to fight enemy soldiers, died half a world away from the farm near Broken Bow, Neb., and disappeared from memory a little more every day for 58 years.
But still, it will be a funeral, the culmination of decades of searching, researching and ultimately moving one Nebraska soldier from a shallow grave in North Korea to a pristine patch of land in Arlington.
For the first time, younger relatives will hear the whole story of his life and his death. They will hear about his jokes, his generosity, his sacrifice.
They will hear about how he was lost and then finally found.
"We had given up hope," Einspahr said. "But now he's back with us. He's back where he should be."
* * *
Francis Arthur remembers that all of Uncle Pat's war stories had punch lines.
The day Uncle Pat got shot during World War II turned into a situation comedy, his first Purple Heart a prop.
Patrick Arthur had retreated with the rest of the men that day in 1941, pushed back by a ferocious Japanese attack on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal.
But then the young infantryman noticed a machine gun the Americans had abandoned, ripe for Japanese capture.
He grabbed it, ran over a knoll and surprised the enemy. The return fire chased him back over that knoll, sprinting at top speed.
A bullet tore sideways through his back, grazed off his holstered knife and deflected out his side, nicking his kidney.
"He'd say 'Well, that was the fastest 100-yard dash ever run,' " Francis Arthur remembers. " 'Too bad there was no one there to clock it.' "
Uncle Pat never told Francis about how he had contracted malaria or spent more than a year in an Indiana hospital recovering from his wounds.
Never mentioned how he got well just in time to help in the liberation of France and the invasion of Germany, where he was wounded again and earned a second Purple Heart.
He never spoke about how many friends died, how many foes he killed.
"He never talked about the war in a serious way," Francis Arthur says. "It was a joke. Always a joke."
But then again, maybe Patrick Arthur needed the punch lines. His entire life had been pockmarked by tragedy.
He was born in 1914, the ninth of 11 children.
Things worked out fine until his mother got sick. Cancer, the doctor said. She died when Patrick was a teenager.
He quit school after the eighth grade to help out on the farm, but the Great Depression hit, and so did the Dust Bowl, and soon there wasn't enough work or money to go around. Patrick ended up at an older brother's house near Ord, Neb., whittling away winter evenings with his nephew Francis.
Uncle Pat taught Francis to shoot. He helped him trap raccoons and sell the pelts for spending money.
One day, the extended family met in Broken Bow. Uncle Pat rounded up his dozen or so nieces and nephews in the town square and handed each one enough money to buy an ice cream cone.
This Francis remembers well.
"He couldn't have had much money," he says. "But that was the kind of guy he was."
Patrick Arthur was the kind of guy who slipped a dollar into his sister Alice's apron when she wasn't looking, so she and her children — the oldest was Kaye Einshpahr — could go to a movie.
When Arthur finished the harvest as a hired man in 1939, he quietly signed up for the Army.
When he got back from World War II, he stuck around for a couple of years and then re-enlisted, serving in the occupation of Germany.
When he got back, Arthur hung around for a couple of months, bunked at the Arrow Hotel in Broken Bow, drank beer at the bowling alley, caught the Saturday matinee if it was a Western.
And then he signed up a third time. At age 36, he prepared to ship off to Korea.
Francis Arthur thinks about these things now and wonders.
Why didn't Uncle Pat use the GI Bill to finish high school and go to college for free?
Why did he insist on combat, again and again, instead of farming or a railroad job?
What were those jokes hiding?
"When it comes to Uncle Pat," he says, " I have more questions than I have answers."
* * *
Obie Wickersham remembers the first time he worried about Pop Arthur.
It was May 1951, and they had walked side by side for weeks, trudging up and down the mountains of North Korea as prisoners of the Chinese. They were partners in one of the worst forced marches U.S. troops have ever endured.
The day that part of the 38th Infantry Division was captured, the Chinese tied the soldiers' hands behind their backs, pushed them into a ditch, aimed a machine gun at them . . . but didn't pull the trigger.
From then on, platoon sergeant Wickersham and squad leader Arthur moaned to each other of hunger and thirst and pain. Their captors fed them mostly birdseed and barley powder. They scooped up any water they could find. It gave them dysentery.
But Wickersham didn't notice the 36-year-old soldier everyone called Pop weakening until late in the second week. That's when he saw the small signs. Pop's pace slowed. His shoulders slumped. He looked a little worse than the other 500 soldiers marching north.
They had no doctor, or medical supplies, or anything else that Sgt. Wickersham could use to stop the slide.
"It's just hard," he said. "It's hard when you can't do something more for a guy who has been by your side the whole time."
Arthur and Wickersham had been near each other for most of 1951. Wickersham would give an order to deactivate a tripwire, or advance north toward Seoul, or bed down. Arthur, one of his three squad leaders, would carry it out wordlessly.
At first, Wickersham wondered why Arthur, the platoon's most experienced member, wasn't in charge. But then he realized: Pop chose not to be.
"He wanted to be a soldier, and that's what he was. He was just an everyday guy that did his job."
They were captured May 16, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops overran the "No Name Line" that the U.S. forces had held.
And then they marched at gunpoint every night under cover of darkness. By day, they bedded down in forests, foraged for bugs to eat, talked about home and how good a steak would taste.
Then Pop started to slide, and soon they were helping him along. A couple of days later, he could barely walk.
When he couldn't walk at all, someone put Arthur onto an ox walking with the prisoners.
This is the image stuck in Wickersham's mind, the one he still sees nearly six decades later when he closes his eyes at his home in Yuba City, Calif.
Pop is propped up on the ox. It is raining. He's partly covered by a tarp. He's almost falling off.
His mouth is open, and he's not talking, and Wickersham knows it's coming.
He sees this every time he thinks of Korea.
"It just really broke my heart," Wickersham says. "It still does."
Sometime in July — no one knows the day — Wickersham and a fellow soldier, Sgt. Fred Liddell, buried Pop in an 18-inch-deep grave at a makeshift prison camp south of Pyongyang. Liddell placed Pop's dog tag into his mouth so that one day he might be identified.
Wickersham and Liddell looked at each other and vowed that if Pop Arthur ever had a proper burial, they would be there.
"Not long after that, we left," Wickersham says. "We continued to march."
* * *
Kaye Einspahr remembers the candy.
Patrick Arthur was standing in the doorway, and he was holding two bags for Kaye and her brothers and sisters.
A bag of Necco candy wafers. A bag of black licorice.
He was about to catch a train to Fort Lewis, Wash. From there, he was bound for Korea.
The candy was his way to say goodbye.
"I remember my mother started to cry," Einspahr said. "I remember him saying 'Don't cry, Alice. I'll be back.' "
Arthur's return home has taken 58 years — a journey delayed by geopolitics and the difficulty of positively identifying decades-old remains.
Alice Trotter began searching after a Western Union telegram on June 14, 1951, notified her that the U.S. government considered her brother missing in action. She wrote dozens of letters — to Obie Wickersham's mother, to a recently returned soldier from Red Cloud, Neb., to anyone she could think of — seeking information.
On July 13, 1953, a letter from the Department of Defense removed any doubt: "Information has been obtained from personnel recently recovered from hostile forces that your brother was captured on 18 May 1951 and died of malaria in a village near Pyongyang North Korea."
Trotter eventually received letters from Arthur's Army buddies that detailed the circumstances of his death and the location of his remains.
But no search could take place because North Korea wasn't about to let the Americans in. Decades passed. Memories of Arthur faded.
Then, in 1991, the North Korean government shipped the United States 208 boxes believed to contain the remains of as many as 400 soldiers.
In one box, a researcher at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii found a dog tag that read "Patrick J Arthur." But the remains weren't his.
At one point, a government letter led Trotter to believe that her brother was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. A younger relative checked the registry during a visit to Washington, D.C. No Patrick J. Arthur was buried there, he reported back.
That's when Francis Arthur got interested. He took over as his uncle's official next of kin.
With the help of the Nebraska Veterans Administration, he petitioned for Arthur's military records. They had burned in a fire in the 1970s, came the reply.
He painstakingly worked to get Arthur's service medals, eventually enlisting the help of U.S. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, who helped him receive Uncle Pat's three Purple Hearts, Silver Star and more than a dozen other campaign medals.
And then Francis Arthur opened a veterans magazine one day and saw his uncle's name included in a list of Korean War soldiers still missing in action. Accompanying the story was the phone number of an Army officer working to identify remains.
Francis Arthur called.
"What we're going to need is some DNA," the officer told him.
That's how Trotter, by then in her 80s, helped find her long-lost brother just before she died in 2004.
The mitochondrial DNA from one of Patrick Arthur's two living sisters allowed the Hawaii researchers to search all the boxes for his remains.
In December, Francis was at home when the phone rang.
"We found your uncle," the voice on the other end said.
* * *
And so they will gather Friday around the new grave, in a place where two U.S. presidents and 300,000 American soldiers are remembered.
Francis Arthur wants to ask other relatives the questions he has about Uncle Pat. He hopes he repaid his debt for the hunting and trapping lessons, for the ice cream cone during the worst days of the Great Depression.
Kaye Einspahr will be thinking about how much this proper burial would mean to her mom. Three of Alice Trotter's daughters will be there.
"She just loved him so deeply," Einspahr says.
Obie Wickersham and Fred Liddell will be there, keeping the vow they made when they dug that shallow grave in July 1951.
Wickersham wants to hear about Patrick Athur as a young man, before his Korean War platoon nicknamed him "Pop."
He wants to answer any questions the family has. He has some things to say, too.
"I want to tell them what kind of man I knew," he says. "I want to tell them that Pop was a good soldier. That he did his job."
Everyone who remembers Arthur agrees he wouldn't have much liked all this hoopla, this celebration of his life.
He would feel as if he didn't deserve it.
On this point, Patrick James Arthur would be very wrong.
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