Missing PoW’s remains returned to widow 63 years after his death
For 63 years, the Korean War veteran was missing in action and presumed dead, but Clara Gantt, 94, held out hope and never remarried.
By: Samantha Schaefer Los Angeles Times, Published on Fri Dec 20 2013
LOS ANGELES—Army Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Gantt told his wife to remarry if he didn’t come back from the war. She told him no. He was it.
For 63 years, the Korean War veteran was missing in action and presumed dead, but Clara Gantt, 94, held out hope and never remarried.
On a cold, dark Friday morning on the Los Angeles International Airport tarmac, the widow stood from her wheelchair and cried as her husband’s flag-draped casket arrived home.
“I am very, very proud of him. He was a wonderful husband, an understanding man,” she told TV reporters at the airport. “I always did love my husband, we was two of one kind, we loved each other. And that made our marriage complete.”
Joseph Gantt joined the army in 1942 and served in the South Pacific during the Second World War. He met his wife on a train from Texas to Los Angeles in 1946 and they married two years later. They had no children.
In the Korean War, he was assigned as a field medic when he was taken prisoner by North Korean forces in December 1950. He died in March 1951, it was learned later, but his remains were only recently returned to the U.S. and identified, said Bob Kurkjian, executive director of USO Greater Los Angeles Area.
Clara Gantt bought a home in Inglewood, Calif., and got a gardener so that her husband wouldn’t have to work in the yard when he returned — he could just go fishing and do whatever he wanted, she said.
“I bought a home for him. And I am in that home now,” she said.
In her bedroom, she keeps a shrine with her husband’s awards, including the Bronze Star with Valor, awarded posthumously for his combat leadership actions while defending his unit’s position, and a Purple Heart, Kurkjian said.
Joseph Gantt will be buried later this month.
An honour guard met the plane as it touched down from Honolulu, where the Joint PoW/MIA Accounting Command and forensics labs are located.
“It’s a holiday homecoming for the Gantt family to finally be able to close that chapter and move forward knowing with certainty that their husband, uncle, great-uncle is finally home,” Kurkjian said.
Posted in the Toronto Star:
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/ ... death.html
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