A Cortez soldier who was labeled missing in action during the Korean War has had his remains identified and returned to his family.
Cpl. John Albert Spruell, uncle of Cortez city councilman Dennis Spruell, was born on Aug. 4, 1931 in Eva, Okla. Cpl. Spruell, a member of Battery B, 57th Field Artillery Battalion, 7th Infantry in the Korean War, went missing during a battle at the Chosin Resevoir near Hagaru, North Korea on Dec. 6, 1950. He was presumed dead on Dec. 31, 1953.
His skeleton, which had been found in North Korea, was identified on Aug. 11, 2023. Dennis Spruell told The Journal that his uncle’s remains were identified through his DNA as they were working on identifying “some skeletons” they had received from the Korean War.
A celebration to honor John Spruell will be held at the Cortez Cemetery on Tuesday at 11 a.m. All are welcome to attend.
John Spruell’s remains were in Hawaii at the time the Army contacted Dennis Spruell.
“They were able to match my uncle John with my DNA and another girl’s DNA that was a cousin I didn’t even know about,” Dennis Spruell said. “They did a bunch of other work, and when a sergeant major from the army came to my house, we got on the computer, and he showed me how they had identified his body as being John Spruell’s. There’s absolutely no doubt this is John.”
Spruell said they were even able to match up John’s leg with his high school records, showing he broke his leg playing football in Cortez.
When John Spruell was serving in the Korea War, he and thousands of other soldiers went to the Chosin Reservoir around October 1950, thinking they would be home by Christmas, Dennis Spruell said.
“It turned out to be one of the worst winters they’ve ever had, and the Chinese decided they were going to invade during that time,” Spruell said. “They had over 100,000 soldiers, and they just annihilated us. If they didn’t die from being shot, they died from freezing to death, and it killed a bunch of them.”
John and his mother, who was cremated following her death in 1999, will be laid to rest together.
“My grandmother and grandfather were deaf mute,” Spruell said. “She was always wondering when her son was going to come home, since he was listed as missing rather than dead.”
When the army first asked Spruell about holding a memorial service in John’s honor, he said he wasn’t sure anybody would come.
“Oh, there will be people there,” Spruell recalled the army telling him. “The army is going to have a color guard and 21-gun salute, and a whole contingency of people.”
Spruell said he has even been contacted by a South Korean journalist, who wanted to talk to Spruell about John and what Spruell thought about North Korea not returning all the remains of soldiers from the war.
“It’s going to be a big deal. I’ve had calls from all over the country of people that are going to come and pay their respects to a fallen officer. What’s so neat about it is that they haven’t given up after 73 years of trying to find out who this person is and bring him back home,” Spruell said.
In 2000, at the 50th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, South Korea’s ministry of defense launched an initiative to help find remains of soldiers who died in the war with the goal of returning them to their families.
Namjoon Kim, the leader of the globally popular k-pop group Bangtan Sonyeondan (BTS), was named the public relations ambassador of this initiative in 2023 to help bring public awareness to the efforts of returning soldiers’ remains to their families. Kim is currently serving in the South Korean army until June 2025.
The Ministry of National Defense’s Agency for the Recovery and Identification of those Killed in Action, in partnership with the United States Department of Defense, has accounted for 697 missing U.S. soldiers who fought in the Korean War. There are still approximately 7,460 still unaccounted for, with 5,300 of these thought to be “lost” in North Korea.
As of 2023, the bodies of 13,121 soldiers from U.N. countries, China and North Korea have been found.
