AN UNKNOWN MARINE

Lost in Battle, Found by Amateur Sleuths

By Dave Phillips

The New York Times
April 17, 2018

WASHINGTON - A mystery that went unsolved for 73 years began when Herman Mulligan threw a grenade.

In the thick of some of the most vicious fighting of World War II, on the island of Okinawa, Private First Class Mulligan's grenade clattered into the dark maw of a Japanese bunker and blew up a cache of ammunition. The huge explosion obliterated most of the hillside, and blasted the 21-year-old Marine beyond recognition.

Amid the chaos, his unidentified body was buried in a hasty battlefield grave, while the Marine Corps listed Private Mulligan as missing in action. In the years after the war, he was reclassified as "unrecoverable," and the family that knew him gradually died off, until his memory was almost as lost as his bones.

The private's story could have ended there, among the roughly 72,000 American troops from World War II who have not been accounted for. But the ending has been rewritten by a black-and-white snapshot found in a Marine veteran's trunk.

The search for Private Mulligan started with a blood-flecked Japanese flag that Dale Maharidge, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who teaches journalism at Columbia University, found among his father's things after he died.

Maharidge's father had been a Marine on Okinawa, and the flag was a souvenir taken from the brow of a dead Japanese soldier. He also kept a dog-eared snapshot of a buddy he lost in combat - Private Mulligan.

Maharidge decided to track down the men of the flag, and ultimately the man in the snapshot.
An amateur genealogist in Virginia named Bridget Carroll heard Maharidge give a radio interview.

Before long, she had found Private Mulligan's cousin, James Patterson.

His family provided DNA to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the arm of the Pentagon responsible for finding and returning lost war dead, that could identify Private Mulligan.

Robert Runsby, a former Army lieutenant, also heard of the search and used an old map of Okinawa to look for unknowns buried shortly after Private Mulligan died. One of the grave sites labeled X-35 looked promising.

Pressed by the family and their senators and congressmen, the agency exhumed X-35 in the spring of 2017 and sent a section of tibia to the military's DNA lab in Maryland to be compared with the sample supplied by James Patterson. The results were a match.