Fort Polk Soldier reaches through time to bring home fallen Family member

Photo By Patricia Dubiel | Couvertier  

FORT POLK, LA, UNITED STATES

07.02.2019

Story by Patricia Dubiel 

Fort Johnson Public Affairs Office

On June 13, 1944, Cpl. Ralph L. Bennett and his brothers-in-arms were holding a position along the Mogaung Road, a vital route leading into the strategically important city of Myitkyina, when the enemy engaged them with small arms and indirect mortar fire. Bennett was killed in the attack.
Because of limited resources and fast-moving operations, Bennett and other Soldiers had to be buried in the vicinity of where they fell. No one could have guessed that his remains would eventually be returned to his home soil, nor that the Soldier escorting him home 75 years later would be one of his own relatives.
Sgt. Justin Couvertier of Fort Polk’s 1st Battalion, 5th Aviation Regiment, first heard the story about Bennett (his third cousin) from his grandmother in 2017.
“When my grandmother sent me the documentation that she received from Charlene Mullin (Bennett’s niece), I immediately contacted the (Past Conflict Repatriations Branch of the Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Branch) to start the process for providing the escort,” said Couvertier.
“I’m in a (medical evacuation) unit, and bringing home a brother or sister that you fight alongside with is something that I hold near and dear — for that person to also be a Family member makes it just that more important.”
According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency research, after the burial in Burma, it was up to the U.S. Quartermaster Corps to keep a record of the burial and the Adjutant General’s Memorial Division was tasked with providing Families back home with information about their Soldier’s final resting place. No such message came for Bennett’s Family. His sister, Neoma McMillen (mother of Charlene Mullin), wrote to military officials asking for information about his final resting place. She said that one of his friends, who had also served in Burma, claimed to have visited the grave twice and that it was well marked at a cemetery in Myitkyina.
In June 1947, McMillen received word that her brother’s remains were not discovered there, but that the American Graves Registration Service would continue searching the area until they were found. The task proved to be complicated and lengthy — there were eight temporary cemeteries and numerous isolated burial sites in the Myitkyina area, holding the remains of 795 service members. They were disinterred and transferred to a military cemetery in Kalaikunda, India in 1946.
Among them was a singular set of unidentified remains, which had been designated as X-1 Myitkynia. Once transferred to India, the remains were redesignated as X-48 Kalaikunda.
In 1948, all the remains in Kalaikunda were transferred to a newly built mausoleum in Honolulu, Hawaii, and X-48 Kalaikunda was reinterred in 1949 at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Section F, grave 812.
On July 16, 2018, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency disinterred X-48 Kalaikunda and began a series of tests in the DPAA laboratory that included family DNA samples. The lab deemed it “historically feasible” that the remains were Bennett’s.
More than a year later, Bennett is finally going back to Ames, Iowa to be laid to rest in his hometown. Couvertier was able to secure the special escort mission and will travel to Hawaii at the end of July to bring his Family member — and fellow Soldier — home for his funeral.
“This mission hits close to home for me (because I think of) those that never made it home,” he said. “Charlene has also told me that individuals on that side of the family have known about him through the years and are glad to get this closure.”
About 30 family members are expected to attend the funeral.
Editor’s note: This is part one in a two-part series about a Fort Polk Soldier that is escorting a Family member’s remains home 75 years after he was killed in action.

• Date Taken: 07.02.2019
• Date Posted: 07.02.2019 15:17
• Story ID: 330116
• Location: FORT POLK, LA, US