Thursday, November 30, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The recent identification of the remains of an Ohio soldier killed in the Korean War and his burial this week at Arlington National Cemetery helped his family unearth some buried feelings.
It allowed his oldest daughter's dying wish to be fulfilled, his youngest daughter to write a note to a father who died when she was 5, and his ex-wife to take the time to tell the family more about the fun-loving man they long feared had been captured and tortured to death on a frozen battlefield.
As it turned out, Master Sgt. Robert V. Layton of Cincinnati was, like hundreds of others in his Army battalion, killed by a single gunshot to the chest and buried in a mass grave by Communist Chinese forces at the Chosin Reservoir some time between Nov. 27 and Dec. 1, 1950.
"If it was a single gunshot wound, I thought, at least it was quick," said Layton's daughter, Judith Saylor, 61, of Millersville, Pa. "I'd rather it be quick and nontorturous."
Search
The search for Layton began in 2000, when his oldest daughter, Geraldine Meurer, and her son, Raymond, started sending information to the Pentagon's POW-MIA office. Raymond, a Wal-Mart Stores employee, told his mother that she had to get a DNA sample from Layton's lone surviving sibling, his sister Jean Thomas of Vandalia, Ohio.
Thomas died of cancer before they could get the sample, but the hospital to drew one just in time, Raymond Meurer said. Six years later, that sample was crucial to making a positive match this summer, just two weeks after Geraldine Meurer died at age 63.
Raymond Meurer, 45, of Bethel, Ohio, promised his mother he wouldn't stop looking for her father and would bury her with him. On Monday, at the funeral home, he sneaked her ashes into Layton's casket, he said.
"I never got to tell my mom anything before she died," he said, choking up. "But I fulfilled my wish to her and cleaned my promise and everything for her, even though the Army didn't like it."
Unlike the Meurers, Saylor thought she had distanced herself over the decades from the pain of losing her father. Really, she said, she had just suppressed it. So, she pored over histories of the Korean War when she learned that her father's remains had been found.
Outnumbered
She learned that his battalion at Chosin Reservoir was outnumbered 6 to 1, was trapped in a snowy mountain pass and cut off from retreat. Hand-to-hand combat raged for days. When some managed to retreat on Dec. 2, they listed most of their fallen brothers as missing-in-action.
That led Saylor's mother, Helen Ryan, 83, of Amelia, Ohio, to believe that even though they had divorced and she had remarried, Layton would someday walk back through her front door. At one point, a prisoner-of-war listing for Robert Layton of Cincinnati gave her hope, but it turned out to be a different man, Robert H. Layton.
For Saylor, it was all just impersonal history until the viewing at the funeral home this week. Layton's nearly complete skeletal remains were wrapped in an Army blanket and rested under a neatly folded uniform in the ornate casket provided by the U.S. military. Saylor was shocked by how connected she suddenly felt.
She wrote her father a note on the back of a business card and dropped it in his casket.
"All of a sudden it comes home, you realize all this really happened in live time," she said. "It's not something you're just seeing on TV anymore."
Breaking down
Ryan broke down at the funeral home. She worried that she hadn't written to Layton enough when he was at war or had nagged him too much about getting a job after he came back from World War II. All he wanted to do was dance and play pool, she said, and she wondered aloud if her own focus on hard work had driven him back into the Army and death at 26 in Korea.
"I said, 'You know, Mom, you can't do that; don't remember it that way,'" said Saylor, a dress designer and Lancaster County, Pa., jury commissioner.
Layton's combat boots, his canvas and leather billfold with a 1944 newspaper clipping announcing a Bronze Star he'd earned, his uniform buttons, dog tags and some keys -- all came back in tact. Unfettered memories came flooding back with them.
Why had the children and grandchildren never known Layton served in World War II? Ryan's explanation to Saylor was simple: "Hell's fire, I was working so much, you couldn't worry about the past, you had to pay the bills and live for the future."
Seeing this family come together was also emotional for their Army escort, Staff Sgt. Sohui Chong, who came to the U.S. from Korea when she was 10. It was her first time helping the survivors of a Korean War casualty. She dropped her usual military guard.
"Whatever I could do to bring that memory back and honor Master Sgt. Layton was such an honor for me," said Chong, 37, of Niceville, Fla. "I guess it touched me more because I'm a Korean."