One Brick Short

How do others treat enemy combatants? Do they treat them like men with rights and needs in accordance with treaties and conventions or does the milk of human kindness go sour?

What a lesson U.S. Army Pfc. Milton Dinerboiler Jr., deceased, could give us. The Elkhart, Indiana soldier fought hard against the Red Chinese near the Chosin Reservoir, North Korea, from late November to early December 1950 as amember of the Heavy Mortar Company, 32nd Infantry Regiment, then attached to the 31st Regimental Combat Team (RCT), 7th Infantry Division.

His position was overrun and he, and many other Americans, were taken prisoner by the Chinese and marched on a route north of the Chosin Reservoir through the cold winter toward China. He died in mid-to-late April 1951, from poor health and the lack of medical treatment and was buried beside a hill along the route.

He lay there for 51 years. In 2002, a joint U.S./Democratic People’s Republic of Korea team, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), recovered human remains from an isolated grave north of the Chosin Reservoir. The site correlates to a route that American POWs were taken while being moved north to a POW camp. 
 
Another American recently recovered from Korea is U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class W.T. Akins, of Decatur, Ga. He will be buried on June 26 in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.
 
While Dinerboiler was fighting and being captured, Akins was a member of the Medical Company, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division then occupying a defensive position near Unsan, North Korea north of a bend in the Kuryong River known as the Camel’s Head. On Nov. 1, elements of two Chinese Communist Divisions struck the 1st Cavalry Division’s lines, collapsing the perimeter and forcing a withdrawal. Akins was reported missing on Nov. 2, 1950 and was one of the more than 350 servicemen unaccounted-for from the battle at Unsan.
 
In April 2007, the North Koreans, acting through the intermediary of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and former U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Anthony Principi, gave up six boxes of human remains believed to be those of U.S. soldiers they said were excavated in November 2006 near Unsan in North Pyongan Province.