The faded handwriting on deeply creased, 4-by-8-inch stationery captures his last words home. In the summer of 1950, Pvt. Harold Shepard wrote of what he’d done the day before, the California heat and how getting letters from home would take longer once he left the country.
The wind in California was “right hot.” He hoped the tobacco growing on the family farm “makes alright this year.” “Well momma I guess I will close for this time so write soon. Love to all, Harold.” That simple letter would be the last the young Army private addressed to Wilmington before he was shipped off to Japan.
Three days after arriving in Korea, he was captured and became one of nearly 800 North Carolinians killed in the war. But like more than 100 other North Carolina residents, the body of Pvt. Shepard never made it home.
Adrian Shepard pulled the cherished letter from its envelope on a warm afternoon earlier this month to read it aloud. His voice cracked as he read the final line his older brother wrote at the tender age of 17.
He keeps the letter in a file filled with papers, mostly correspondence from the Department of the Army. Two Western Union telegrams are nestled among them.
The first telegram is dated Aug. 20, 1950, regretfully reporting that Pvt. Shepard had been missing in action since July 27. The second telegram, dated Jan. 27, 1951, confirms his death months after he was killed in late October, 1950. Less than two years ago, the family received a third message, this one detailing the circumstances of Pvt. Shepard’s death. There’s a letter to Pvt. Shepard’s mother, Ethel Shepard, signed by a two-star general. The general explains that every soldier must serve overseas in combat duty when necessary. A soldier’s age will not prevent him from being shipped off to war, it states.
Adrian Shepard believes his mother wrote the Army, begging that her young son not be sent overseas. Because Pvt. Shepard wasn’t 18, his parents signed for him to join the Army. That’s a decision, Mr. Shepard believes, his mother deeply regretted. About three years earlier, the Shepards had lost their oldest son, the first of eight children, in a truck accident in Japan following World War II. They were not ready to risk losing another son on foreign soil.
Walter Shepard, Pvt. Shepard’s dad, who made ends meet for his family as a fisherman and farmer, opened the last telegram to arrive at the Shepard house on a January evening in 1951. He sent Adrian to deliver the news to his mother. During the dusty, half-mile walk from home to the church meeting his mother was attending.
He never asked his father why he had to be the messenger. Years after his father’s death, he still wonders why his dad sent him to give his mother the devastating news.
“I almost wonder if he just couldn’t do it,” said Mr. Shepard, who has developed a gentle way about him in his years of being a minister.
Thinking back to the days following the Army’s notification, raw emotions surface among Pvt. Shepard’s living siblings. Marion Shepard, who was 19 when his brother was killed, cried as he talked about the grief his mother suffered.
Pvt. Shepard was known around town as a spunky teenager who didn’t back down from bigger boys in an argument. He was fearless; a fun-loving country boy who liked to strum his guitar. He took his guitar with him to boot camp, where, the family would learn decades later, he was known as the one with the Southern accent who played country-western songs.
The last T-shirt he wore before he hopped on a bus headed for boot camp hung in his mother’s closet for 45 years. The sleeves were left rolled up with a pack of cigarettes tucked in the front pocket – just the way Pvt. Shepard left it.“This was a death that my mother never had any closure of,” Adrian Shepard said.
Nearly a decade has passed since her death and her children continue to wait, still holding out hope that their brother will come home.
Mr. Davis keeps well-organized files, manila folders carrying pages of information and old newspaper clippings to tell the stories of young men who went to Korea and didn’t come home. “All of them have a story,” Mr. Davis said. “A lot of these people, a lot of them didn’t finish high school. They never even made a name for themselves. They were so young.”
On July 27, 1950, Pvt. Shepard’s unit suffered heavy casualties and, eventually, fell to an enemy attack. He was captured and forced north. His name appeared on a blackboard in a schoolhouse in Seoul where POWs were held in September. Along with other POWs, Pvt. Shepard was loaded into a boxcar heading north. The train was stopped at the Sunchon railroad tunnel, north of Pyongyang. POWs were handed plates, given the impression they were going to be fed. Instead, they were shot. His body was buried Nov. 5 in a temporary United Nations cemetery at Pyongyang.
Like the letters and telegrams before it, the 2003 letter detailing Pvt. Shepard’s death resurrected the heartache the Shepards have lived with all of these years. “When my wife read this to me, the grief came back,” Adrian Shepard said. “I thought of him as a child. ... You try to figure out how he could handle that situation at 17 years of age.”
The closest their mother ever got to the story was about 10 years ago when a man who befriended Pvt. Shepard in boot camp and survived the massacre contacted the family. The stranger had made a pact with Pvt. Shepard and two other close friends he met in boot camp. If any of them made it out alive, they would find the others’ families.
The Shepards, including 88-year-old Ethel Shepard, talked with the man for hours.
“Talking with someone who was with him the day before he was captured, it’s hard to describe because we hadn’t heard nothing for 50 years,” Marion Shepard said. “That was the first time we had heard directly from anybody who had been with him. That was kind of a closure. To know he’s back here, I think it would help with more complete closure.”
You’ll find Pvt. Shepard’s grave marker listed as "in memory of", and among other family markers in Blake's Chapel church cemetery plot in Hampstead. His remains most likely rest in Korea at Pyongyang.
The wind in California was “right hot.” He hoped the tobacco growing on the family farm “makes alright this year.” “Well momma I guess I will close for this time so write soon. Love to all, Harold.” That simple letter would be the last the young Army private addressed to Wilmington before he was shipped off to Japan.
Three days after arriving in Korea, he was captured and became one of nearly 800 North Carolinians killed in the war. But like more than 100 other North Carolina residents, the body of Pvt. Shepard never made it home.
Adrian Shepard pulled the cherished letter from its envelope on a warm afternoon earlier this month to read it aloud. His voice cracked as he read the final line his older brother wrote at the tender age of 17.
He keeps the letter in a file filled with papers, mostly correspondence from the Department of the Army. Two Western Union telegrams are nestled among them.
The first telegram is dated Aug. 20, 1950, regretfully reporting that Pvt. Shepard had been missing in action since July 27. The second telegram, dated Jan. 27, 1951, confirms his death months after he was killed in late October, 1950. Less than two years ago, the family received a third message, this one detailing the circumstances of Pvt. Shepard’s death. There’s a letter to Pvt. Shepard’s mother, Ethel Shepard, signed by a two-star general. The general explains that every soldier must serve overseas in combat duty when necessary. A soldier’s age will not prevent him from being shipped off to war, it states.
Adrian Shepard believes his mother wrote the Army, begging that her young son not be sent overseas. Because Pvt. Shepard wasn’t 18, his parents signed for him to join the Army. That’s a decision, Mr. Shepard believes, his mother deeply regretted. About three years earlier, the Shepards had lost their oldest son, the first of eight children, in a truck accident in Japan following World War II. They were not ready to risk losing another son on foreign soil.
Walter Shepard, Pvt. Shepard’s dad, who made ends meet for his family as a fisherman and farmer, opened the last telegram to arrive at the Shepard house on a January evening in 1951. He sent Adrian to deliver the news to his mother. During the dusty, half-mile walk from home to the church meeting his mother was attending.
He never asked his father why he had to be the messenger. Years after his father’s death, he still wonders why his dad sent him to give his mother the devastating news.
“I almost wonder if he just couldn’t do it,” said Mr. Shepard, who has developed a gentle way about him in his years of being a minister.
Thinking back to the days following the Army’s notification, raw emotions surface among Pvt. Shepard’s living siblings. Marion Shepard, who was 19 when his brother was killed, cried as he talked about the grief his mother suffered.
Pvt. Shepard was known around town as a spunky teenager who didn’t back down from bigger boys in an argument. He was fearless; a fun-loving country boy who liked to strum his guitar. He took his guitar with him to boot camp, where, the family would learn decades later, he was known as the one with the Southern accent who played country-western songs.
The last T-shirt he wore before he hopped on a bus headed for boot camp hung in his mother’s closet for 45 years. The sleeves were left rolled up with a pack of cigarettes tucked in the front pocket – just the way Pvt. Shepard left it.“This was a death that my mother never had any closure of,” Adrian Shepard said.
Nearly a decade has passed since her death and her children continue to wait, still holding out hope that their brother will come home.
Mr. Davis keeps well-organized files, manila folders carrying pages of information and old newspaper clippings to tell the stories of young men who went to Korea and didn’t come home. “All of them have a story,” Mr. Davis said. “A lot of these people, a lot of them didn’t finish high school. They never even made a name for themselves. They were so young.”
On July 27, 1950, Pvt. Shepard’s unit suffered heavy casualties and, eventually, fell to an enemy attack. He was captured and forced north. His name appeared on a blackboard in a schoolhouse in Seoul where POWs were held in September. Along with other POWs, Pvt. Shepard was loaded into a boxcar heading north. The train was stopped at the Sunchon railroad tunnel, north of Pyongyang. POWs were handed plates, given the impression they were going to be fed. Instead, they were shot. His body was buried Nov. 5 in a temporary United Nations cemetery at Pyongyang.
Like the letters and telegrams before it, the 2003 letter detailing Pvt. Shepard’s death resurrected the heartache the Shepards have lived with all of these years. “When my wife read this to me, the grief came back,” Adrian Shepard said. “I thought of him as a child. ... You try to figure out how he could handle that situation at 17 years of age.”
The closest their mother ever got to the story was about 10 years ago when a man who befriended Pvt. Shepard in boot camp and survived the massacre contacted the family. The stranger had made a pact with Pvt. Shepard and two other close friends he met in boot camp. If any of them made it out alive, they would find the others’ families.
The Shepards, including 88-year-old Ethel Shepard, talked with the man for hours.
“Talking with someone who was with him the day before he was captured, it’s hard to describe because we hadn’t heard nothing for 50 years,” Marion Shepard said. “That was the first time we had heard directly from anybody who had been with him. That was kind of a closure. To know he’s back here, I think it would help with more complete closure.”
You’ll find Pvt. Shepard’s grave marker listed as "in memory of", and among other family markers in Blake's Chapel church cemetery plot in Hampstead. His remains most likely rest in Korea at Pyongyang.
The faded handwriting on deeply creased, 4-by-8-inch stationery captures his last words home. In the summer of 1950, Pvt. Harold Shepard wrote of what he’d done the day before, the California heat and how getting letters from home would take longer once he left the country.
The wind in California was “right hot.” He hoped the tobacco growing on the family farm “makes alright this year.” “Well momma I guess I will close for this time so write soon. Love to all, Harold.” That simple letter would be the last the young Army private addressed to Wilmington before he was shipped off to Japan.
Three days after arriving in Korea, he was captured and became one of nearly 800 North Carolinians killed in the war. But like more than 100 other North Carolina residents, the body of Pvt. Shepard never made it home.
Adrian Shepard pulled the cherished letter from its envelope on a warm afternoon earlier this month to read it aloud. His voice cracked as he read the final line his older brother wrote at the tender age of 17.
He keeps the letter in a file filled with papers, mostly correspondence from the Department of the Army. Two Western Union telegrams are nestled among them.
The first telegram is dated Aug. 20, 1950, regretfully reporting that Pvt. Shepard had been missing in action since July 27. The second telegram, dated Jan. 27, 1951, confirms his death months after he was killed in late October, 1950. Less than two years ago, the family received a third message, this one detailing the circumstances of Pvt. Shepard’s death. There’s a letter to Pvt. Shepard’s mother, Ethel Shepard, signed by a two-star general. The general explains that every soldier must serve overseas in combat duty when necessary. A soldier’s age will not prevent him from being shipped off to war, it states.
Adrian Shepard believes his mother wrote the Army, begging that her young son not be sent overseas. Because Pvt. Shepard wasn’t 18, his parents signed for him to join the Army. That’s a decision, Mr. Shepard believes, his mother deeply regretted. About three years earlier, the Shepards had lost their oldest son, the first of eight children, in a truck accident in Japan following World War II. They were not ready to risk losing another son on foreign soil.
Walter Shepard, Pvt. Shepard’s dad, who made ends meet for his family as a fisherman and farmer, opened the last telegram to arrive at the Shepard house on a January evening in 1951. He sent Adrian to deliver the news to his mother. During the dusty, half-mile walk from home to the church meeting his mother was attending.
He never asked his father why he had to be the messenger. Years after his father’s death, he still wonders why his dad sent him to give his mother the devastating news.
“I almost wonder if he just couldn’t do it,” said Mr. Shepard, who has developed a gentle way about him in his years of being a minister.
Thinking back to the days following the Army’s notification, raw emotions surface among Pvt. Shepard’s living siblings. Marion Shepard, who was 19 when his brother was killed, cried as he talked about the grief his mother suffered.
Pvt. Shepard was known around town as a spunky teenager who didn’t back down from bigger boys in an argument. He was fearless; a fun-loving country boy who liked to strum his guitar. He took his guitar with him to boot camp, where, the family would learn decades later, he was known as the one with the Southern accent who played country-western songs.
The last T-shirt he wore before he hopped on a bus headed for boot camp hung in his mother’s closet for 45 years. The sleeves were left rolled up with a pack of cigarettes tucked in the front pocket – just the way Pvt. Shepard left it.“This was a death that my mother never had any closure of,” Adrian Shepard said.
Nearly a decade has passed since her death and her children continue to wait, still holding out hope that their brother will come home.
Mr. Davis keeps well-organized files, manila folders carrying pages of information and old newspaper clippings to tell the stories of young men who went to Korea and didn’t come home. “All of them have a story,” Mr. Davis said. “A lot of these people, a lot of them didn’t finish high school. They never even made a name for themselves. They were so young.”
On July 27, 1950, Pvt. Shepard’s unit suffered heavy casualties and, eventually, fell to an enemy attack. He was captured and forced north. His name appeared on a blackboard in a schoolhouse in Seoul where POWs were held in September. Along with other POWs, Pvt. Shepard was loaded into a boxcar heading north. The train was stopped at the Sunchon railroad tunnel, north of Pyongyang. POWs were handed plates, given the impression they were going to be fed. Instead, they were shot. His body was buried Nov. 5 in a temporary United Nations cemetery at Pyongyang.
Like the letters and telegrams before it, the 2003 letter detailing Pvt. Shepard’s death resurrected the heartache the Shepards have lived with all of these years. “When my wife read this to me, the grief came back,” Adrian Shepard said. “I thought of him as a child. ... You try to figure out how he could handle that situation at 17 years of age.”
The closest their mother ever got to the story was about 10 years ago when a man who befriended Pvt. Shepard in boot camp and survived the massacre contacted the family. The stranger had made a pact with Pvt. Shepard and two other close friends he met in boot camp. If any of them made it out alive, they would find the others’ families.
The Shepards, including 88-year-old Ethel Shepard, talked with the man for hours.
“Talking with someone who was with him the day before he was captured, it’s hard to describe because we hadn’t heard nothing for 50 years,” Marion Shepard said. “That was the first time we had heard directly from anybody who had been with him. That was kind of a closure. To know he’s back here, I think it would help with more complete closure.”
You’ll find Pvt. Shepard’s grave marker listed as "in memory of", and among other family markers in Blake's Chapel church cemetery plot in Hampstead. His remains most likely rest in Korea at Pyongyang.
The wind in California was “right hot.” He hoped the tobacco growing on the family farm “makes alright this year.” “Well momma I guess I will close for this time so write soon. Love to all, Harold.” That simple letter would be the last the young Army private addressed to Wilmington before he was shipped off to Japan.
Three days after arriving in Korea, he was captured and became one of nearly 800 North Carolinians killed in the war. But like more than 100 other North Carolina residents, the body of Pvt. Shepard never made it home.
Adrian Shepard pulled the cherished letter from its envelope on a warm afternoon earlier this month to read it aloud. His voice cracked as he read the final line his older brother wrote at the tender age of 17.
He keeps the letter in a file filled with papers, mostly correspondence from the Department of the Army. Two Western Union telegrams are nestled among them.
The first telegram is dated Aug. 20, 1950, regretfully reporting that Pvt. Shepard had been missing in action since July 27. The second telegram, dated Jan. 27, 1951, confirms his death months after he was killed in late October, 1950. Less than two years ago, the family received a third message, this one detailing the circumstances of Pvt. Shepard’s death. There’s a letter to Pvt. Shepard’s mother, Ethel Shepard, signed by a two-star general. The general explains that every soldier must serve overseas in combat duty when necessary. A soldier’s age will not prevent him from being shipped off to war, it states.
Adrian Shepard believes his mother wrote the Army, begging that her young son not be sent overseas. Because Pvt. Shepard wasn’t 18, his parents signed for him to join the Army. That’s a decision, Mr. Shepard believes, his mother deeply regretted. About three years earlier, the Shepards had lost their oldest son, the first of eight children, in a truck accident in Japan following World War II. They were not ready to risk losing another son on foreign soil.
Walter Shepard, Pvt. Shepard’s dad, who made ends meet for his family as a fisherman and farmer, opened the last telegram to arrive at the Shepard house on a January evening in 1951. He sent Adrian to deliver the news to his mother. During the dusty, half-mile walk from home to the church meeting his mother was attending.
He never asked his father why he had to be the messenger. Years after his father’s death, he still wonders why his dad sent him to give his mother the devastating news.
“I almost wonder if he just couldn’t do it,” said Mr. Shepard, who has developed a gentle way about him in his years of being a minister.
Thinking back to the days following the Army’s notification, raw emotions surface among Pvt. Shepard’s living siblings. Marion Shepard, who was 19 when his brother was killed, cried as he talked about the grief his mother suffered.
Pvt. Shepard was known around town as a spunky teenager who didn’t back down from bigger boys in an argument. He was fearless; a fun-loving country boy who liked to strum his guitar. He took his guitar with him to boot camp, where, the family would learn decades later, he was known as the one with the Southern accent who played country-western songs.
The last T-shirt he wore before he hopped on a bus headed for boot camp hung in his mother’s closet for 45 years. The sleeves were left rolled up with a pack of cigarettes tucked in the front pocket – just the way Pvt. Shepard left it.“This was a death that my mother never had any closure of,” Adrian Shepard said.
Nearly a decade has passed since her death and her children continue to wait, still holding out hope that their brother will come home.
Mr. Davis keeps well-organized files, manila folders carrying pages of information and old newspaper clippings to tell the stories of young men who went to Korea and didn’t come home. “All of them have a story,” Mr. Davis said. “A lot of these people, a lot of them didn’t finish high school. They never even made a name for themselves. They were so young.”
On July 27, 1950, Pvt. Shepard’s unit suffered heavy casualties and, eventually, fell to an enemy attack. He was captured and forced north. His name appeared on a blackboard in a schoolhouse in Seoul where POWs were held in September. Along with other POWs, Pvt. Shepard was loaded into a boxcar heading north. The train was stopped at the Sunchon railroad tunnel, north of Pyongyang. POWs were handed plates, given the impression they were going to be fed. Instead, they were shot. His body was buried Nov. 5 in a temporary United Nations cemetery at Pyongyang.
Like the letters and telegrams before it, the 2003 letter detailing Pvt. Shepard’s death resurrected the heartache the Shepards have lived with all of these years. “When my wife read this to me, the grief came back,” Adrian Shepard said. “I thought of him as a child. ... You try to figure out how he could handle that situation at 17 years of age.”
The closest their mother ever got to the story was about 10 years ago when a man who befriended Pvt. Shepard in boot camp and survived the massacre contacted the family. The stranger had made a pact with Pvt. Shepard and two other close friends he met in boot camp. If any of them made it out alive, they would find the others’ families.
The Shepards, including 88-year-old Ethel Shepard, talked with the man for hours.
“Talking with someone who was with him the day before he was captured, it’s hard to describe because we hadn’t heard nothing for 50 years,” Marion Shepard said. “That was the first time we had heard directly from anybody who had been with him. That was kind of a closure. To know he’s back here, I think it would help with more complete closure.”
You’ll find Pvt. Shepard’s grave marker listed as "in memory of", and among other family markers in Blake's Chapel church cemetery plot in Hampstead. His remains most likely rest in Korea at Pyongyang.
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