Korean War MIA Soldier Dougall Espey to Be Laid to Rest

After lying in a mass grave for over 40 years, and close to two decades after his unmarked remains were returned to the United States by North Korea, Sgt. Dougall H. Espey, Jr. will receive a military funeral in Elmira, New York. Espey was from Mount Laurel, New Jersey.

Espey served in the Army's 1st Cavalry Division of the 8^th Cavalry Regiment, and was last seen near Unsan, in an area known as "The Camel's Head" on November 1, 1950. That is the date when the People's Republic of China People's Liberation Army made first contact with American troops, having managed to move covertly into North Korea under cover of night and heavy camouflage, marching 18-19 miles a night through mountainous terrain before crossing the Yalu River.

Up until the intervention by China's People's Liberation Army, it seemed a foregone conclusion that the South Korean forces, primarily made up of United States troops with backing from United Nations forces, would overrun North Korea and reunite the country into one nation since the first time since the end of the second World War.

China's 300,000 man army nearly overwhelmed American and United Nations troops on the ground during the following month. Fighting continued for almost four years, until an uneasy truce was arranged, and the heavily guarded and fortified 38^th Parallel Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) was created.

Speculation has it that if the Soviets had backed the Chinese government in their incursion into North Korea, that entirety of the Korean peninsula would be under the totalitarian rule of the North Korean government. Fortunately, the Soviets only gave token air support to the Chinese troops, and supply lines to the PLA were able to be cut off by vastly superior American air strike capability.

The 38^th Parallel bears historical significance, as it is the demarcation line established following World War II by the United States and the Soviet Union when they were carving up the Japanese Empire's holdings on the Asian continent.

Between 1991 and 1994, the North Korean government sent 208 boxes of remains to the United States which had been disinterred near Chonsung-Ri in the Unsan Province. The unmarked remains were accompanied by documents salvaged from the same disinterment, but were not necessarily associated with a particular body.

The United States military continues to work to identify the rest of the remains returned by North Korea, using a painstaking process to match dental records and mitochondrial DNA analysis to match them with particular soldiers who died in the battle.

Sources: US Department of Defense, Wikipedia, The Korean War