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One Airman No Longer Missing

The remains of an airman who was lost in November 1942 were finally identified today.

22 Year old Leo Mustonen of Brainerd Minnesota, an airman who's body laid undisturbed for 63 years in a California snowpack, deep in the High Sierra, was finally identified positively after its discovery in October 2005.

From TheState.com

Snip...

It was Nov. 18, 1942, when Leo Mustonen, two other navigator cadets and a pilot left a military airfield in Sacramento on a routine training flight.

There was no sign of the Beech AT-7 training plane again until 1947 when a climber scaling the Mount Mendel Glacier in Kings Canyon National Park found one of the twin engines in the snow at an elevation of 13,700 feet, 200 miles off course.

A search party found the second engine, scraps of clothing, a piece of dried flesh and one of the cadet's military dog tags. And that was all, until last fall.

In October, with the glacier receding, climbers came upon the frozen body of a fair-haired airman. He was removed from the glacier in a coffin of ice, carefully thawed and flown to Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, where the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command worked to identify him.

DNA testing was problematic because few of Mustonen's relatives remain. His parents, Finnish immigrants, are long dead, and his only sibling, a half brother, also is deceased. The closest remaining relatives are his half brother's wife and two daughters, one of whom is Sister Mustonen, known as Ona Lea Mustonen before she took orders as a Benedictine nun.

To identify remains genetically, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command lab most frequently uses mitochondrial DNA, or a piece of DNA that people inherit mostly unchanged from their mothers.

Authorities found female relatives of the three other airmen on board the doomed flight, tested their DNA and determined that none matched the man. Through that process of elimination, physical characteristics and a corroded military nametag on his uniform, authorities concluded the man was Leo Mustonen, his niece said.

Military officials have said the frozen airman would be eligible for interment with honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

But Sister Mustonen said she and her family, who all live in Florida, intend to bury Mustonen near his mother and father in Brainerd's Evergreen Cemetery.

"All our family is still there, cousins all over the place," she said. "It's where he belongs."

When the family will be able to claim the airman's remains is unknown, but his niece said they hope it will be in time to bury him next month.

Buzz Bereuder, a World War II-era veteran active in the Brainerd American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars color guard, has been following the story since the body was discovered last fall.
"I feel good about it," he said Saturday of the remains being identified as Mustonen. "He was a hometown boy, and he's got a place here."

End snip...

The world that exists today could not have been imagined by those who were alive in 1942. The war was deadly serious and was far from over. The concept of nuclear power was something that the odd people who wrote pulp science fiction magazines used to fill over the rough parts of the "far out" story plots, but it was not the stuff that serious people considered to be real. Polio was still a significant threat to the lives of everyday people in the world of 1942 and the miracle of pennicillin was just coming into general use. Radio was the "high tech" of the day, and I cant help but note that telegrams were the email of the era, and only this week they have finally ceased to be. Even the science and technology that was used to determine the identity of his remains did not exist in 1942. DNA was still unknown at the time this man died. They didnt use the popular psycology term "closure" in those days, and there never would be any for the family of Leo Mustonen, until today. The war eventually came to an end and the men who survived it finally came home. As the years went on, more wars came and went. "Men from the Planet Earth" even went to the Moon. Other men orbit the earth today in spacecraft, something that is so common to the lives of children today that they hardly make note of the names of Astronauts or watch when they are launched into space. In Leo's time, "Space" was a long way off, in our time, space has become almost commonplace. In 63 years, the world has moved from Leo's world to ours at light speed.

Mr. Mustonen saw none of it. He died one November day in 1942 at 13,500 feet and remained there for 62 years while the world went on just a few miles away from the cold snowy peak that reached out of cloud and slapped his aircraft out of the sky.

One November day in 1942, a young man went to work and never came home. The hole he left behind in the fabric of his families daily life must have been very difficult for them to survive. I'm sure that for years afterwards his family sat and wondered where their son, their brother, the hope of a generation went to. Was he dead?, was he alive?, was he hurt in some way?, no one would ever know for sure.

Every Christmas, every Thanksgiving would eventually bring the out the unspoken question in everyones mind; " I wonder where Leo is?" followed by those who would remember Leo in their own quiet way, and every time they did, the hole he left in their lives would get just a little bit bigger. With no grave to grieve over and no answers with which to complete the story behind his disappearance, they probably did what all humans usually do. They filled in the blanks with their own stories. Yet all of them would fall short in filling the dark hole his disappearance, left in their lives.

Other men disappeared in the war and never came home, but they were overseas, over "where the war was" and somehow those losses made more sense than the disappearance of Leo Mustonen. I'm sure that the loss of their loved one within the borders of the benign State of California bothered them to no end.

His remains were found just a few miles from Yosemite National Park. I imagine that at some time in the past 63 years, the family of Leo Mustonen may have visted that popular park, and yet they would have never known that their lost brother was just a few miles away, sleeping peacefully on a nearby mountain peak with his fellow airmen. All the while they visted the wonders of Yosemite, not knowing that the object of their loss laid silently on that mountain on the horizon.

Leo Mustonen is just one man and the Mustonen family just one family of all the men who went missing in World War II. There are 78,976 men that are still listed as officially missing from the United States Armed forces during World War II.

Tonight, we can lower that number by 1.

Welcome home Mr. Mustonen. May you now rest in peace.

Posted @ February 04, 2006 09:22 PM | Current Affairs