Catherine Rusoff
More than 70 years after an American teenager disappeared while fighting overseas in the Korean War, modern forensic medicine has finally allowed the United States military to identify his remains.
John A. Spruell, a U.S. Army soldier from Cortez, Colorado, was declared missing in action on Dec. 6, 1950, the military said in a statement. Press release. He disappeared in the middle of a brutal battle that lasted more than two weeks in a remote, frozen mountain range in North Korea, and although the remains of some killed in that area were returned to the U.S., for decades no one knew whether Spruell’s murder body was between them.
Presumed dead, the 19-year-old was officially listed as lost and missing by the Army. Remains that military scientists did not confirm belonged to him until 2023 were buried in a grave labeled “unknown” at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
Days before Spruell was declared missing, his unit, a field artillery branch, fought in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, a notoriously violent conflict that American historians have since dubbed the “a nightmare.” It marked a turning point in the broader war, when hundreds of thousands of troops from the newly embroiled People’s Republic of China launched an unexpectedly massive attack against the US and its allies as they tried to expel United Nations forces from North Korea.
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The Battle of Chosin Reservoir is remembered as one of the most treacherous on record, because the freezing weather and rugged terrain in which it unfolded were so extreme and because there were many casualties. Military officials say Spruell disappeared after heavy fighting near Hagaru-ri, a North Korean village at the lower end of the reservoir where U.S. forces have established a base.
It was unclear what exactly happened to Spruell after the battle, since “the circumstances of his loss were not immediately recorded,” according to the military, and there was no evidence to suggest he had been captured as a prisoner of war.
Later, an international agreement allowed U.S. authorities to recover the remains of some 3,000 Americans who had been killed in Korea, but none of them could be definitively linked to Spruell.
In 2018, the unidentified remains of hundreds of fallen soldiers were unearthed from Honolulu’s buried military cemetery, also called Punchbowl, and were re-examined using advanced methods that did not exist until long after the Korean War.
Spruell’s identity was confirmed in August. He will be buried in Cortez on a date yet to be defined, according to the military. The announcement about Spruell came around the same time the military confirmed another American teenager had been found after being declared dead in the Korean War in December 1953. Forensic tests identified the remains of Richard Seloover, a U.S. Army corporal from Whiteside, Illinois, in January. Seloover was 17 when he was killed.
The U.S. military stated that about 2,000 Americans who died in the Korean War were identified in the years immediately following, and about 450 more were identified over the following decades. Around 7,500 people are still missing and the remains of at least several hundred are considered impossible to recover.
