Coons, Frederick Eugene
Army Private 1st class

Frederick Eugene Coons, age 22, from Buchanan County Saint Joseph, Missouri .

Parents: Nancy Ethel Coons

Service era: Korea

Date of death: Saturday, July 29, 1950
Death details: On October 29, 2018, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) identified the remains of Corporal Frederick Eugene Coons, missing from the Korean War. Corporal Coons, who entered the U.S. Army from Missouri, was a member of A Company, 1st Battalion, 34th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division. On July 29, 1950, CPL Coons was declared missing in action after setting up a roadblock near Geochang, South Korea. He was not seen to fall in battle and he was not reported as a prisoner of war, and no remains recovered from this loss area at the time were associated with him. In 1952, the U.S. military recovered three sets of remains from a shallow grave near the village of Apkong-ni, South Korea, with most of the recovered remains eventually sent for identification to the Central Identification Unit in Kokura, Japan; however, one set was declared unidentifiable and was transferred for burial at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Hawaii. In 2018, DPAA disinterred this set of unidentified remains for reexamination and using modern forensic techniques, analysts identified the remains as those of CPL Coons. Corporal Coons is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. His name is also inscribed on the Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, which was updated in 2022 to include the names of the fallen.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Carthage Evening Press (1954)