Marine dead for 68 years to be buried

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NEW KENSINGTON, Pa., Sept. 12 (UPI) -- The remains of a U.S. Marine killed in a 1944 plane crash are being returned to his family for burial in western Pennsylvania, the Defense Department says.

Cpl. John D. Yeager, usually known as Jack, will be buried Saturday with full military honors in New Kensington, Pa., the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

Yeager and six other Marines were listed as missing when their PBJ-1 bomber failed to return from a mission and officially determined to be dead a year later. The wreckage of the plane was eventually located on Espiritu Santo, an island now part of Vanuatu, and remains believed to be Yeager's were conclusively identified recently.

Family members say that Yeager, then newly married, enlisted soon after Pearl Harbor. He became a tail gunner in a bombing crew.

His parents, sisters and widow, who later remarried, have died since 1944. But at least one person in the next generation still remembers him, and others have read his letters home.

"He was a smiling, handsome guy," Yeager's nephew, Bernard Smith, who was 6 when his uncle died, said. "And he was so generous. When he came home on leave from the service, he'd say to me, 'I'd brought you something, and it's down by the mailbox.' There would be ice cream or candy."

Marilyn Hendricks Claasen was born in 1945. Her parents asked her uncle's widow to be her godmother.

"I think I know my Uncle Jack as well as I knew my father, mom and brother," she said. "He sent lot of letters while he was in the service -- wonderful letters. And in every letter, he wrote 'Don't worry about me.' "