Private Jones Comes Home

What happened to Hoover Jones? The question loomed like a shadow over Ida Dickens’ life for nearly seven decades. When she last saw her younger brother, he was waving from the back of a taxicab, a lanky 18-year-old farm boy headed to Korea, a place he knew nothing about.

Hoover had enlisted as an infantryman in one of America’s last segregated units, even though he had never handled a weapon, let alone fired a shot in anger. In his mind, joining the military was a chance for a better life, an escape from the bitter racism of central North Carolina, Ida says. But he soon found himself in a poorly trained unit struggling with equipment that would fall to pieces in numbing subzero temperatures. In a Nov. 17, 1950, letter that Hoover wrote his mother from inside his foxhole, he described “very cold days” and the hope that he would be on his way home by Christmas.

Nine days later, Hoover vanished from a frozen battlefield. The U.S. Army believed he had been killed in a surprise attack, but his commanders couldn’t say for certain. His body was never found. No one saw him die.

Ida, now 92 years old, tried to move on with her life. She married, and subsequently buried, two husbands. She became a mother, then a grandmother and then a great-grandmother. She watched her small tobacco town sluggishly move away from the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation.

But one part of her, the part holding onto Hoover, remained stuck, unresolved. For all these years, in the back of her mind, Ida thought that maybe, just maybe, Hoover was still alive. Perhaps he was being held captive in a prison camp or living with amnesia somewhere in Asia.

And then one windy, gray morning last September, when Ida was hurriedly packing her bags to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Florence’s landfall, the phone rang. It was the Army. After 68 years, they finally found him. Ida’s knees buckled, and her breath froze. “I almost fell over,” she told TIME.

Two of Private Hoover Jones’ sisters, Ida Dickens, 92, and Elizabeth Jones Ohree, 95, in Rocky Mount, N.C., in February

How Hoover Jones came home is a story of military detective work and cutting-edge science. It involves teams of geneticists, forensic anthropologists and archival researchers. It is also a story about the persistence of history.

The war Hoover went off to fight never ended. A cease-fire signed in July 1953 left North and South Korea facing off across the heavily armed 38th parallel. Tens of thousands of Korean families remain divided, and the U.S.