{"id":23783,"date":"2024-09-01T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-01T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/remains-of-soldier-mia-in-korean-war-come-home-to-cortez\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T04:41:55","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T04:41:55","slug":"remains-of-soldier-mia-in-korean-war-come-home-to-cortez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/remains-of-soldier-mia-in-korean-war-come-home-to-cortez\/","title":{"rendered":"Remains of soldier MIA in Korean War come home to Cortez"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cpl.
Cpl. John Spruell<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

A Cortez soldier who was labeled missing in action during the Korean War has had his remains identified<\/a> and returned to his family.<\/p>\n

Cpl. John Albert Spruell, uncle of Cortez city councilman Dennis Spruell, was born on Aug. 4, 1931 in Eva, Okla. Cpl. Spruell, a member of Battery B, 57th Field Artillery Battalion, 7th Infantry in the Korean War, went missing during a battle at the Chosin Resevoir near Hagaru, North Korea on Dec. 6, 1950. He was presumed dead on Dec. 31, 1953.<\/p>\n

His skeleton, which had been found in North Korea, was identified on Aug. 11, 2023. Dennis Spruell told The<\/em> Journal<\/em> that his uncle\u2019s remains were identified through his DNA as they were working on identifying \u201csome skeletons\u201d they had received from the Korean War.<\/p>\n

A celebration to honor John Spruell will be held at the Cortez Cemetery on Tuesday at 11 a.m. All are welcome to attend.<\/p>\n

John Spruell\u2019s remains were in Hawaii at the time the Army contacted Dennis Spruell.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were able to match my uncle John with my DNA and another girl\u2019s DNA that was a cousin I didn\u2019t even know about,\u201d Dennis Spruell said. \u201cThey did a bunch of other work, and when a sergeant major from the army came to my house, we got on the computer, and he showed me how they had identified his body as being John Spruell\u2019s. There\u2019s absolutely no doubt this is John.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Councilman
Councilman and former sheriff Dennis Spruell. (City of Cortez)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Spruell said they were even able to match up John\u2019s leg with his high school records, showing he broke his leg playing football in Cortez.<\/p>\n

When John Spruell was serving in the Korea War, he and thousands of other soldiers went to the Chosin Reservoir around October 1950, thinking they would be home by Christmas, Dennis Spruell said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt turned out to be one of the worst winters they\u2019ve ever had, and the Chinese decided they were going to invade during that time,\u201d Spruell said. \u201cThey had over 100,000 soldiers, and they just annihilated us. If they didn\u2019t die from being shot, they died from freezing to death, and it killed a bunch of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

John and his mother, who was cremated following her death in 1999, will be laid to rest together.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandmother and grandfather were deaf mute,\u201d Spruell said. \u201cShe was always wondering when her son was going to come home, since he was listed as missing rather than dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the army first asked Spruell about holding a memorial service in John\u2019s honor, he said he wasn\u2019t sure anybody would come.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, there will be people there,\u201d Spruell recalled the army telling him. \u201cThe army is going to have a color guard and 21-gun salute, and a whole contingency of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spruell said he has even been contacted by a South Korean journalist, who wanted to talk to Spruell about John and what Spruell thought about North Korea not returning all the remains of soldiers from the war.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to be a big deal. I\u2019ve had calls from all over the country of people that are going to come and pay their respects to a fallen officer. What\u2019s so neat about it is that they haven\u2019t given up after 73 years of trying to find out who this person is and bring him back home,\u201d Spruell said.<\/p>\n

In 2000, at the 50th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, South Korea\u2019s ministry of defense launched an initiative to help find remains of soldiers who died in the war with the goal of returning them to their families.<\/p>\n

Namjoon Kim, the leader of the globally popular k-pop group Bangtan Sonyeondan (BTS), was named the public relations ambassador<\/a> of this initiative in 2023 to help bring public awareness to the efforts of returning soldiers\u2019 remains to their families. Kim is currently serving in the South Korean army until June 2025.<\/p>\n

\"Namjoon
Namjoon Kim, right, at the 2023 ceremony naming him public relations ambassador for the South Korean Ministry of National Defense\u2019s Agency for the Recovery and Identification of those Killed in Action. (Screen Capture via YouTube)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The Ministry of National Defense\u2019s Agency for the Recovery and Identification of those Killed in Action, in partnership with the United States Department of Defense, has accounted<\/a> for 697 missing U.S. soldiers who fought in the Korean War. There are still approximately 7,460 still unaccounted for, with 5,300 of these thought to be \u201clost\u201d in North Korea.<\/p>\n

As of 2023, the bodies of 13,121 soldiers from U.N. countries, China and North Korea have been found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cpl. John Spruell, uncle of Cortez city councilman and former Sheriff Dennis Spruell, went missing in North Korea in 1950<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23784,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1987,21,28,60,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-23783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-armed-forces","tag-cortez","tag-headlines","tag-montezuma-county","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23783"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78262,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23783\/revisions\/78262"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23783"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=23783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}