Fifty years in the frozen Chosin is long time to be there. There were about 15 veterans at the ceremony, from VFW posts at Yokosuka, Yokohama, Zama, Yokota and Tokyo. It was the third time that skeletal remains of U.N. forces were brought back from Korean War battlefields in the North. Saturday's flight brought the number of returned bodies to 54 since North Korea first began returning sets of remains in the early 1990s. There are five such digs planned this summer.
Military officials are reluctant to go into much detail about the remains they recover.
But Baughman said the North Korean climate and soil are far better at preserving bones than in Southeast Asia, where teams trying to recover Vietnam War dead find bones disappearing rapidly due to the region's acidic soils and tropical climate. In North Korea, where the ground is frozen four months of the year, remains are in far better shape, Baughman said. Also, the Chinese didn't have heavy artillery, so U.N. bodies were usually intact at death. Dig teams found several sets of dog tags, but that's not as helpful as it might sound, he said. It was common for the Chinese to take U.S. dog tags as war trophies, meaning that the dog tags may be unrelated to a skeleton found nearby.