DeBord was 18 years old when he arrived in Korea sometime between July 18 and 20, 1950, as a member of F Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, Eighth U.S. Army, according to the U.S. Army Human Resources Command.
He was reported missing in action July 25, 1950, while his unit was engaged in battle with the North Korean People’s Army near Yongdong, South Korea.
“As kids, we grew up hearing about Uncle Billy and everybody talked fondly of him,” Spurlock said. “My grandmother was devastated, to say the least. That was her only son and not knowing was horrible.”
DeBord, who was the oldest of five children and the only boy, had “a great smile” and was idolized by many, she said. He attended Miamisburg High School, but didn’t graduate and enlisted in the service instead, Spurlock said.
After DeBord went missing, his family spent more than three agonizing years before the Army issued a presumptive finding of death in December 1953.
“The sun kind of set on him, so it was a travesty that he passed,” Spurlock said. “It really hurt a lot of people. His mother was just heartbroken.”
The journey toward identifying DeBord’s remains started in April 1951, when the 565th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company recovered a set of remains near Yongdong. Without enough identifying evidence to associate the remains with DeBord, they were declared unidentifiable in 1955 and sent to Honolulu, Hawaii, where they were buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl.
In 2018, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency proposed a plan to disinter 652 Korean War Unknowns from the Punchbowl. In 2019, the DPAA disinterred what were eventually determined as DeBord’s remains for laboratory analysis.
Spurlock said DeBord’s nephew, her cousin Bill Olson, visited Washington, D.C., each year in an attempt to find any updates on if any remains were discovered and could be linked to DeBord. About 15 years ago, their aunt and some older cousins traveled there to provide their DNA.
Then, this April, the family received word that scientists from DPAA had used the family’s DNA, along with dental and anthropological analysis and a chest radiograph comparison, to identify the remains as DeBord.
“He called us and started telling all of us about it,” she said. “We were just ecstatic.”
Army officials met with the family in late April and showed them photographs of how it was determined that the remains were of DeBord.
The family also learned how DeBord died.
“They were climbing up a hill and the Koreans were coming down and they were all just shot to death,” she said. “He was shot in the chest.”
The family was given the option to have DeBord buried in Arlington National Cemetery, but chose Highland Memorial Cemetery in Miamisburg instead, right next to his mother’s grave and right across from a row of veterans.
DeBord’s family will receive friends from 5 to 7 p.m. today at the Swart Funeral Home, 207 E. Central Ave., West Carrollton with a Military Honor of Service Awards conducted at 7 p.m. Funeral Services are slated for 11 a.m. Saturday at the funeral home. Burial will follow at Highland Memorial Cemetery, 723 Upper Miamisburg Road, Miamisburg with full military honors conducted by the U.S. Army.
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