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Friday’s story by staff writer Ryan Evans about unknown soldier remains finally being identified packed a lot of mixed emotions into a short amount of space.
It exposed, yet again, an ugly truth about war, particularly the Korean conflict: Despite best efforts, brave people die in battle far from home without leaving enough behind to be identified. That alone paints a stark image of how cruel combat can be, to the warrior and the family left at home.
It also conveyed the persistence of efforts to give such people a finality robbed by such deaths, a steely resolve to keep trying until science and/or good fortune produce an answer to the questions: Who was this hero?
Plymouth Township native James Stryker graduated from Meyers High School in 1948 and enlisted in the army the next year, undergoing basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, before being deployed in our undeclared Korean war — euphemistically dubbed a “police action” when President Harry S. Truman committed U.S. forces to a United Nations military effort against the Soviet-backed North Korean aggression.
Stryker served with Company L, 3rd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry division when North Koreans assaulted his unit near Han’gye in South Korea. He perished, unaccounted for, was declared MIA in May 1951 and declared dead two years later.
Over the years, Korea became the land of unidentified remains, a haunting notion in it’s own right, with names turned into numbers to be interred, ultimately, in the “punchbowl” crater — an extinct volcano cone — of Honolulu, Hawaii, in National Military Cemetery of the Pacific. One of those numbers: Unknown X-1373.
Officials disinterred X-1373 in 2017, 66 years after the remains were first discovered. The impetus: a family requested the remains be compared to see if it was soldier who went MIA in the same area as Stryker. It was not a match. But a new opportunity was not ignored, and further research offered enough clues to justify disinterring disinterred X-1373 again in 2018. More tests and research ultimately determined it was Stryker, formally declared “accounted for” in August of last year.
There is valor in this story, of Stryker and countless others like him. There is commitment, of military in battle, of those who support them, of those left behind, and of those who toil endlessly to find and identify the Missing In Action. There is hope, for the families of MIA. There is a lesson in the human value of complex science, in developing technology and methodology to identify the unknowns. And there is closure
Now, 70 years after his death, a young man from the streets of Plymouth Township can be laid to rest. He voluntarily traveled some 6,900 miles to fight for his nation in 1950, vanishing as a person and emerging as unidentified remains. Seven decades later, he stopped being a number, and will be buried in San Antonio, Texas, with his name restored.
Who was this hero?
James Stryker, son of Maurguerite and Adonis Stryker, brother of Battle of the Bulge survivor Gordon Stryker who died in 2012, former congregant of the West Nanticoke Methodist Church, and a member of the Meyers Mohawk nation.
Godspeed, James Stryker.
— Times Leader