Lawrence Arthur Smith, age 20, from Hocking County Haydenville, Ohio .
Parents: Okey Smith
Service era: Korea
Date of death: Sunday, August 6, 1950
Death details: On Nov. 14, 2025, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identified the remains of U.S. Army Cpl. Lawrence Arthur Smith, missing from the Korean War. Smith entered the Army from Ohio and served with C Company, 1st Battalion, 34th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division. He was reported missing on Aug. 6, 1950, after as his unit tried to dislodge enemy forces from high ground near the Naktong River in South Korea. No one saw him fall in battle, and he was not reported as a prisoner of war. Searches conducted for his remains were unsuccessful at the time of his loss. In November 1950, a team of the 565th Graves Registration Company recovered an unknown set of remains near Yongsan, South Korea, which could not be positively identified at the time, and which in February 1956 were interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu as an Unknown. In October 2019, the DPAA proposed a plan to disinter 652 Korean War Unknowns from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. As part of Phase Three of the Korean War Disinterment Plan, the unidentified set of remains from Yongsan was disinterred and sent to the DPAA laboratory for forensic analysis. There, based on the laboratory testing and the total circumstantial evidence available, this Unknown was identified as Smith. He 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, Logan Daily News (1954)
