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<\/a><\/center><\/p>\nUSAF Retired sends us a link to the news<\/a> that Army Major Stephen Uurtamo of Headquarters Battery, 82nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division is coming home finally after being held as a prisoner of the Chinese Army since late 1950. His 76-year-old daughter, Carol Elkin, will be there to say ‘goodbye’;<\/p>\n For the Uurtamo family, the service is the final chapter of a story that began in late 1950 when the 32-year-old career soldier was declared missing in action after fierce fighting in one of the bloodiest battles of the war near the Ch’ongch’on River in North Korea.<\/p>\n He was declared dead after several returning U.S. prisoners of war reported that Uurtamo had been captured and died at a war transient camp where prisoners who survived came home with stories of watching their buddies starve to death.<\/p>\n “He died from malnutrition and pneumonia,” Elkin said.<\/p>\n The whereabouts of his body remained a mystery for decades. Then, in 2005, a joint U.S. and North Korean military recovery team recovered 32 sets of remains from a burial site. About eight years after that, Elkin went to a Chicago hotel for one of the events the Defense POW\/MIA Accounting Agency holds around the country in which people like her are updated about their missing loved ones and given a chance to provide DNA samples for comparison with DNA pulled from recovered remains.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n