Pearl Harbor Hero Returns Home After 75 Years in an Unknown Grave | National Geographic

I do understand where people think that you should not disturb a grave. But I think it's a personal decision for the family, and for our family, it was the right decision to get him out of there. My grandfather died at Pearl Harbor, but it was not where he needed to be.

Ready about the hero at his burial today, dead for eight years, I've been diligently trying to get my grandfather back. A lot of letter-writing, a lot of red tape with the military; they just don't disinter graves. When I was growing up, I knew very little about him. It was a taboo subject; it was very hard for my mom to talk about. And then once I received all of his belongings, I just found out that he was such a great person and very loved. He was just very much alive.

One of his friends from high school said he was, "When those guys would walk down the hall, everybody would say hi." He would say hi back; he knew everybody. He was class president in all their plays. He didn't like bullying; he would stick up for people. He was just a kind-hearted person.

We know that JC was on his way to the radio room, going on duty at 8 o'clock, up to the radio room, and everybody was either unconscious or flooding. It just chaotic panic took three people up the ladder that was going out to safety and then came down a fourth time and was never seen again. That's why he received the Purple Heart, and the Navy named two ships after him, the USS England.

For someone that meant so much to a family and to just have them in a grave marked unknown, it's heartbreaking. They went on a while just in denial; maybe he has amnesia and he's wandering around Hawaii somewhere, or maybe he's badly hurt. I think they would have liked to have had something to bury of his, even if it was just a skull because then it's real. It just wasn't policy back in those days to send the partial remains.

My great-grandmother would write periodically to see if anything was ever discovered. This is 1946; you are advised that the bodies of personnel aboard the USS Oklahoma were buried in plots in Paloa Naval Cemetery at Pearl Harbor, but they were unidentified. The Navy again extends sympathy to you and your loss.

On the way home one day, shortly before the 50th anniversary, I would be kind of nice to get some flowers and flags at the Pearl Harbor casualties. When I got there, they couldn't tell me where the Pearl Harbor casualties were buried. So I started walking grave site to grave site for many months to check and record their records. Another record finally was able to figure out where they were buried.

There's a list of Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps casualties by states, and each one of these gives the name of the next of kin. I typed in each one of these names with one finger. I wrote letters to DC, and finally, they told me politely to go, you know where… which I didn't.

This looked like telling me to go fly a kite, which I didn't. The only laughs spent a long time when they first were doing the identification processes back in the 40s; all they had was dental records to work with. Now we have DNA that we can use, and so my sister and myself, and my cousin Katie, we all gave the Navy our DNA samples. That's ultimately what positively identified my grandfather.

There will be no more unknown soldiers, and if we have the right family reference samples, we can successfully identify all of the unknowns that we currently have recovered from the Oklahoma as well as other conflicts like Korea or Southeast Asia. No one should be buried without a name.

I consider it to be a moral and ethical imperative to give every unknown that we've uncovered an individual name and to send them home where they belong. When my grandfather arrived at the airport, it really hit me that this is all really happening. They overtook me now, and it was just a wave of relief in a way and a little sadness, but also happy that it was all happening.

I feel, symbolically, it's closure for my great-grandparents and my great-aunt. They didn't have closure; they just continued their life with this great loss, and I don't think they really properly dealt with their pain. They didn't have something to bury; they didn't have a place to go mourn him. They never had a huge funeral where everybody gathered and got together and shared stories.

The sadness for my family draped over the generations. Unfortunately, our mom died in 2002, six years before we found out about her father. I often wonder what her life would have been like if he had not died. I know that she struggled with the heaviness that she was born into. That is why my sister Lisa and I decided to include her ashes in her father's grave as a way to heal the past and bring a long-awaited closure to our family.

There is a story in every grave; every unknown grave has its own personal emotional story. And ours, we just are so grateful that we were able to have our happy ending. My dog Freedom, I can't say he's a pet because that's just, it's not enough. Freedom not just changed my life; he did save my life.