Oklahoma man learns his uncle's remains have been identified 60 years after he died in Korean War

Brooks, 51, of Blanchard, said military officials notified him this month that they have identified the remains of his uncle, Henry Leo Gustafson, using DNA. The news means Gustafson's family can hold a military funeral and bury him in the empty grave marked by his headstone.

Gustafson went missing Dec. 6, 1950, during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. He was 18 when he enlisted in the U.S. Army and headed off to war, a fact that has always stuck with Brooks.

“I used to travel a lot for my job,” Brooks said. “Every time I got on a plane to return to Oklahoma, I would see some of these young servicemen getting on the plane to come to Fort Sill for basic training fresh out of high school. It always reminded me of my uncle and how young he was.”

Gustafson never married or had children, and his death was a sore subject in the family. Brooks got the courage to ask his father and grandmother about his uncle as he got older.

As he learned more, Brooks became fixated on the idea of finding out what happened to his uncle and bringing his remains home. His grandmother gave the military a DNA sample in the early 1990s, after North Korea returned the remains of about 400 unidentified U.S. soldiers.

The military has a unit based in Hawaii tasked solely with finding and identifying soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen still missing in action. The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command's standard method for identifying soldiers' remains found years after their deaths involved mitochondrial DNA, which allows samples from a female member of the family to be compared with the DNA that can be recovered from a skeleton.