66 years later, a Korean War vet and prisoner of war reaches his final resting place

They gave Cpl. Wayne Minard an honor guard sendoff on Saturday.

The U.S. Army and his family buried him in a remote, rural cemetery outside unincorporated Furley, Kansas, 66 or so years after he left home. And his family told his story.

They laid him beside his mother, Bertha, who died of a broken heart nine months after Minard starved to death in a North Korean prisoner of war camp in 1951.

Bagpipes. Flags. Taps.

Nieces and nephews and kids from his family said goodbye, standing beside him; some had tears in their eyes.

The family felt lucky to be here, members said; an American military search and recovery team had found Minard’s remains in North Korea in 2005, and used DNA testing to identify them earlier this year.

“I never thought this would happen,” said one of his nieces, Janet Stubbs.

The Army honor guard folded the American flag that had draped his casket.

Inside the flag, one of the honor guard soldiers, wearing white gloves, carefully placed three spent shells from the rifles that had just fired a 21-gun salute over the grave. Three shells, one each for “duty, honor, country.”

Minard was one of those soldiers who stood on the ramparts, when no one else would, to protect his people, an Army chaplain had said at his church service.

At the graveside, a soldier knelt and handed the folded flag to Stubbs.

She told afterward what she knew about the family.

Bertha Minard, her grandmother and Wayne Minard’s mother, had lost her farmer husband, Wayne’s father, in 1947, a year or so before Wayne Minard volunteered for the Army.

“They were poor and struggling,” she said. “My grandmother tried to take care of nine kids.”

Bertha, a grieving widow, never forgave herself for letting Minard join the Army while still a teen, Stubbs said.

Minard had suffered from polio as a child, years before he joined the Army, Stubbs said.

But like many young men of that era, he fought as an infantry soldier in battles fought in Korea before November 1950.

He was shot in the hand, sent off to recover, then joined his combat unit again. In a letter home, he made fun of the North Korean soldiers who had failed to kill him. Poor shots, he wrote.

After the Chinese Army intervened in November 1950 to help the North Korean Army, Minard’s unit was surrounded and battered in a battle in far northern North Korea. He was captured.

In the prison camp, the Koreans gave their prisoners little food. Many starved in temperatures far below zero in the winter.

“He was not one of the strongest kids around, because of the polio,” said Stubbs, his niece.

Minard lasted three months, and died in February 1951.

Bertha died that Thanksgiving, nine months later.

“My grandmother swore that she knew the moment when he died,” Stubbs said.

“He came to her in a dream.”

This story was originally published November 12, 2016 at 4:24 PM with the headline "66 years later, a Korean War vet and prisoner of war reaches his final resting place."