Hyman, Rufus Johnston
Army 1st lieutenant

Rufus Johnston Hyman, age 23, from Shelby County Memphis, Tennessee .

Parents: O. W. Hyman

Service era: Korea
Schools: Central High, West Point (1948)

Date of death: Sunday, July 30, 1950
Death details: On February 20, 2019, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified the remains of Seaman First Class Oris V. Brandt, missing from the Korean War. Captain Rufus Johnston Hyman entered the U.S. Army from Tennessee and served with A Company, 1st Battalion, 34th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division. In late July 1950 the 34th Infantry Regiment occupied positions near Kochang, South Korea, in part of a defensive formation known as the Pusan Perimeter. There, they attempted to halt the advance of the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) long enough for United Nations reinforcements to arrive in Pusan Harbor. On the morning of July 29, 1950 the NKPA attacked the 34th Infantry from multiple directions with masses of infantry and tanks. CPT Hyman was reported to be missing on July 30 after this fighting near Kochang. In 1951, a search team recovered remains from an isolated gravesite near where the 34th Infantry had fought the year before. The remains could not be identified and were eventually interred as an unknown in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. In July of 2017, analysts at DPAA disinterred these remains and used modern forensic tools to identify them as those of CPT Hyman. Captain Hyman 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, Commercial Appeal (1954)