Fletcher Ryals Dunaway US Army

It was the Pentagon’s insistent call for help and the gentle nudging of his mentor that led Fletcher Dunaway to join the U.S. Army back in 1955 at the age of 18. He knew before basics where he would be going and what he would be doing for the Army. He was joining for a very specific and somber duty, a post-war reckoning.

For some time leadership at the Pentagon had been writing letters to his his boss in Marianna, long-time funeral director Carl Neal. Neal’s Funeral Home is gone now, but in its day was right across Lafayette Street from the spot now occupied James and Sikes Funeral Home.

Dunaway knew about those letters because his boss would tell him when they came in. He said something like this, too, one time. “ ‘Fletcher I got another letter from the Pentagon’,” Dunaway recalled in paraphrasing Neal’s words. ‘If you want to follow in my footsteps, what a tremendous opportunity for experience in helping families deal with the worst day of their lives—losing a loved one.’”

When the next letter came, Neal brought it out and asked him to make a decision in one simple question. “Do you or don’t you,” he asked.

Dunaway had one final test to take at Chipola before he graduated there. He took that exam, and then he went to basics and on to Korea. He wouldn’t see his native soil again until 1959.

The Pentagon was looking for people to “clean up the mess in Korea,” Dunaway said, explaining that the government was looking to repatriate all the Korean War dead from around the world with their families and countrymen back home.

Platoon leaders in the days of war had marked thousands of makeshift battlefield graves on grids coordinates, and the day had finally come to disinter, positively identify, and get the remains of the fallen soldiers back home. The job would keep Dunaway in Korea for more than three years. Some of the men had been dead two or three years, with no embalming done of course, and some men were still dying in defiant sniper attacks coming from the countryside around the freshly-former war zone. The truce had been signed, but for some the war wasn’t really over.

The disinterment teams were headquartered on the southernmost island of Japan. From there, the job was organized for Dunaway and more than 200 other military men like him in the 3204 AU, along with another 200 civilian embalmers and funeral directors who gave up a few years of their time to help take care of the war dead. Dunaway said 18 different countries had participated in the conflict. He and his fellow team members unearthed Scotsmen, Africans, Turks, Ethiopians, Englishmen, Koreans, and U.S. soldiers among others. Of the 54,000 estimated killed, 30,000 were American and the other 24,000 were United Nations soldiers from various other countries. Dunaway and his team members weren’t trying to figure out who was from where. They dealt in one basic truth. “It was a dead human being,” Dunaway said. “Our job was to rescue his remains through the normal process and repatriate that particular fallen soldier. I was not a combatant and I never was hit by sniper fire…that was mainly psychological warfare. I was taking care of the poor combatants who didn’t make it. I was there three years and three months. My mama kept asking, ‘Are you ever coming home?’

After his one Army tour was done, the disinterment duty having taken up almost all that time, Dunaway came stateside, completed his graduate work in a college of funeral service and settled in Dallas. He sold caskets to funeral homes for the next 17 years, and then he bought Bevis Funeral Home in Tallahassee. He would later take over Adams Funeral Home in Quincy and sold the businesses about 10 years after that.

He came back to Jackson County in retirement. On patriotic days, and perhaps most especially on Memorial Day, he thinks back on his Army years and the duty he considered sacred.

“We were taught as professional funeral directors/embalmers/ID specialists that our first job was to help families on the worst day of their lives. You’re a mother or a wife or a father and you get a telegram or a uniformed officer at your door, telling you that your son or your husband died in service to his country, but sometimes it might be three years alter before the actual sons or husbands were returned for a military funeral. That was a reality in war time that’s different than what you usually are dealing with in this line of work. But the bottom line is the same. In the funeral home business, your daily task is to help those who are dealing with grief and bereavement. It was my honor to be serving soldiers and their families in this way. It strengthened my determination to be in the business and do what I was doing. I had been trained by Mr. Carl Neal. He told me, ‘If you’re going to do this, Fletcher, you must do the very best you can because it will dwell in your mind off and on the rest of your life.” Dunaway followed his advice but said he rarely thinks of those years unless he sees news on television about war deaths. On those occasions, images can come flashing back. “Sometimes, I think to myself Oh my God,’ and something comes to mind. But I don’t regret going, not one moment. I’m a Christian. I believe in God and that he predetermined me to do that with soldiers under his direction.”

Dunaway shared other thoughts.

“I forever feel overwhelmed with emotions at times as I remember searching, recovering, indentifying and repatriating the Korean War dead,” he wrote. “Then I always take in account that I was doing what any responsible, patriotic, freedom-loving American would have done by helping send a fallen soldier back home to mama and them on the worst day of their life, for closure.”

Dunaway said there are still 8,100 Korean War veteran bodies still unaccounted for. “For several years now I have volunteered with the Department of Defense to aid with DNA samples locating and contacting surviving relatives of BTB (Believed To Be) soldiers missing and stored in the care of my old unit 8204 AU (Army Unit) headquartered under the name of CIV (Central Identification Unit),” he wrote. “The respect and care for the honored dead, the men who for an ideal and their country….has never been so resolutely demonstrated as during the conflict in Korea. This noble concept of honoring and caring for the remains of the valiant men who gave their all in defense of our republic, and the principles to which it is dedicated, has been in the past and always will be in the future a very important function of our armed forces,” he continued.

Dunaway was one of a half-dozen local retired military men who went on the most recent Honor Flight from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C. One of his daughters accompanied him on the trip. For Dunaway it was a time when he could set thoughts of the war dead far from his thoughts and focus on the fortune he felt to be in the company of soldiers still alive to tell of their military days. The camaraderie on that trip, he said, was something special to be part of. “It meant a lot to me,” he commented.

He also got to meet and speak briefly with Bob Dole. The veteran legislator was sitting in the sunshine, in a full–dress business suit when Dunaway first saw him. Dole had been a platoon leader in Italy during World War II, and suffered damage to both his arms during the war. Remembering Dole being at the event, in his 90s and giving encouragement to everyone, Dunaway said he was “phenomenal.”

For Dunaway and all America’s patriots, Memorial Day offers opportunities to honor those who gave their all in military service to their country.

In Jackson County, the Disabled American Veterans Chapter 22 will host a Memorial Day ceremony on the steps of the Jackson County Courthouse at 8 a.m. on Monday, May 25, the day currently observed as Memorial Day.

And across the panhandle, a local pastor is asking that people line U.S. 90 at dusk on May 30, the traditional but retired date for Memorial Day. He’s asking that they light candles or lanterns in honor of soldiers who gave their lives in service to their country, and in particular in remembrance for their defending the freedom of religion in America.