Missing Korean Soldiers from Hamilton and Butler County
Name Date Missing From
Cpl Jack A. Avery Sept. 19, 1951 Butler County
Msg. Robert J. Bunnell Jan. 3, 1951, Warren County
PFC Albert F. Hurtt November 28, 1950 Warren County
Cpl. James K. Tuttle Nov. 2, 1950 Butler County
Doug Avery never knew his biological father, Cpl. Jack Avery, although he’s been told Jack received a leave from the Army to visit Doug in the family’s Hamilton home when Doug was born.
Jackie Brummett remembers that her brother, Cpl. James K. Tuttle, sang her a song the day before he left to join the Army. It’s one of the few things she remembers about her brother, who was 17, seven years older than she, when he left to enlist.
Even though the two have never met, Doug Avery and Jackie Brummett are connected by having family members who fought in the Korean War, and who, more than 60 years later, have never come back.
There are 7,950 Americans still missing in action from the Korean War, according to a Hamilton Journal News/Middletown Journal examination of military records. That number is nearly five times more than Vietnam and includes four people who lived or enlisted in Butler and Warren counties.
Even though the soldiers have a dwindling number of mourners due to the passage of time, work continues to to find and identify the remains of the missing.
This year alone, more than two dozen missing Korean Ware veterans have been accounted for using forensic science, including Army Cpl. Clyde E. Anderson of Hamilton. Anderson’s remains were identified in April with DNA samples provided in 2002 by a niece and nephew.
Anderson, who had been missing since Nov. 28, 1950, was buried in May with full military honors.
Cpl. Jack Avery was killed in the battle of Heartbreak Ridge, a month-long battle in the hills of North Korea where more than 3,700 American and French and 25,000 North Korean and Chinese soldiers were killed.
“My grandfather didn’t accept the MIA designation and spent a lot of time investigating what happened to my dad,” Doug Avery said. “He called everybody he could think to call. He tried to talk to survivors from my dad’s unit. It was a matter he never let settle.”
Doug Avery only became interested in his biological father and his fate in recent years.
“I really never knew that much about my dad,” Doug Avery said. “The stories I heard were that he was the kind of guy who was prone to getting into trouble, someone who couldn’t resist taking a dare.”
Jack Avery joined the Army shortly after marrying Doug’s mother. He was allowed leave when Doug was born but then went to Korea, never to return.
Doug’s mother remarried and the family moved away from Hamilton, first to Florida and then to Kansas City, where Doug still lives. Doug kept in infrequent contact with his paternal grandparents but really only started to learn about his biological father when his aunt Helen died and passed on to him the fruits of Douglas’ grandfather’s investigation into Jack’s disappearance a few years ago.
“There were a lot of letters — correspondence between my father and grandfather prior to my dad leaving for Korea and after he got there,” Doug said. “When my dad first got to Korea, there was a shortage of arms so he had to march to the front lines unarmed before he was finally given a weapon.”
Doug had been under the mistaken impression his father’s body had been returned and was buried in some Army cemetery. Only when reading through his grandfather’s records did he learn no funeral had ever been held for Jack Avery.
“It wasn’t something that was talked about a lot when I was a kid,” Doug Avery said. “I had a dad. It all seemed pretty normal.”
The Korean War claimed 36,568 American lives before it ended in 1953 with the creation of a 2-mile wide demilitarized zone that’s divided the peninsula ever since.
The work to identify the remains of lost soldiers and bring them home is complicated by the fact that the Korean peninsula is still such a volatile place.
“The overall Korean War numbers are high. What it speaks to is the lack of access,” said J. Alan Liotta, the deputy director of the Department of Defense Prisoner of War - Missing Personnel Office or DPMO from 1995 to 2004.
Liotta in 1996 led the first Defense Department delegation to North Korea since 1953, successfully brokering for a series of joint field activities to locate the missing. More than 2/3 of the missing Korean War solders are believed to have died inside North Korean boundaries. The U.S. conducted 33 joint field activities in North Korea between 1996 and 2005, suspending them that year because of security concerns.
After successful talks in Bangkok last fall, the U.S. this year was supposed to have entered North Korea for the first time in seven years to search for the missing, but the missions never took place.
Cpl. James Tuttle left his family in Corbin, Ky., when he was 17 to live with his older brother Richard in Hamilton and enlist in the army in 1951. He had already tried to enlist once and even made it through basic training before it was discovered he had lied about his age and been shipped home, said his sister, Jackie Brummett, seven years his junior.
“We didn’t ever really learn what happened to him,” Brummett said. “My brother Richard, who basically raised James and me with my older sister, he received word that he was missing in action. Later, we were sent a purple heart. All we can assume is he was killed in action.”
Brummett said she doesn’t remember much about her brother and her family found it difficult to talk about him once he went missing in Korea.
“It was difficult because he was so young,” Brummett said. “I think it was especially hard on my older brother and sister. But it was something he had always wanted to do. That’s why he tried to enlist early.”
Although no official funeral was ever held, a headstone memorializing Tuttle is at the cemetery lot in Corbin, near Brummett’s parents.
The thing Brummett remembers most about James is his singing voice.
“James loved to sing,” Brummett remembers. “I remember him singing me a song and it seemed like he left the next day. It was 60 some years ago, so it all becomes a little fuzzy sometimes.”
To recover and identify Anderson’s body, military forensic scientists worked for nearly two decades to identify the skeletal remains that were commingled in 208 boxes of remains returned from North Korea between 1991 and 1994. As many as 400 individual remains were believed to be in the boxes.
In 2002, Anderson’s niece, Carol Snider of Bowersville, along with her brother Dennis Benningfield, 60, of Wilmington, provided blood samples for DNA analysis for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command’s Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii.
According to the identification report, Anderson, then a 24-year-old private first class, was last seen on or about Nov. 28, 1950. He was assigned to the Medical Company, of the 31st Regimental Combat Team, also known as Task Force Faith.
A witness recalled seeing Anderson driving a Jeep in a convoy about 12:30 a.m. Nov. 28, 1950 on the eastern side of Chosin Reservoir. During this time, the convoy was ambushed by vastly superior Chinese forces about seven miles north of the town of Hagaru-ri. His unit came under attack and withdrew to positions near Hagaru-ri, south of the reservoir, according to the Defense Department. Private First Class Albert Hurtt of Warren County also went missing on the same day according to DPMO records.
Avery and Tuttle’s families both hold out little hope of recovering their loved ones remains after 60-plus years.
“After this much time, I’d be really surprised,” Doug Avery said. “I know it is still happening, but it seems like a long shot.”
“I used to hold out hope they’d find his body, but I don’t think so anymore,” Brummett said. “There are just too many over there for them to do. It’s hard sometimes. It would be nice to have the closure, but I think we all realize he’s gone.”
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