Arab Alabama

Waymon Slaten, age 18, from Marshall County Arab, Alabama .

Parents: Johnny W. Slaten

Service era: Korea

Date of death: Friday, September 1, 1950
Death details: On August 14, 2024, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) identified the remains of Corporal Waymon Slaten, missing from the Korean War. Corporal Slaten entered the U.S. Army from Alabama and was a member of B Company of the 1st Battalion, 9th Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division. On August 31, members of Cpl Slaten’s company were stationed on the eastern shore of the Naktong River, along the Pusan Perimeter, a defensive formation around the town of Pusan, South Korea. That night, North Korean People’s Army forces initiated a large-scale offensive across the Naktong and infiltrated the positions of the 1st Battalion. The battalion’s B Company was driven from its positions on both Hill 209 and Hill 311 west of Yongsan. Cpl Slaten was lost in the fighting and was subsequently declared missing in action. In 1953 the U.S. Army issued him a presumptive finding of death. On October 22, 1950, American Graves Registration Service had recovered a set of remains from the ground surface at the base of Hill 209, approximately 11 miles west of Yongsan, where Cpl Slaten was reported missing. However, those remains could not be identified at the time, and they were buried as unknown in the United Nations Military Cemetery, Tanggok, South Korea. In 1954, this set of remains was reexamined, but still could not be identified, and the remains were ultimately interred as an Unknown in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. In May 2021, as part of phase 3 of DPAA’s Korean War Disinterment Project, this Unknown was as disinterred and sent to the DPAA laboratory for further study. The laboratory analysis and the totality of the circumstantial evidence available established the remains as those of Cpl Slaten. Corporal Slaten 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, Advertiser Gleam (1954)