336th TRS sergeant escorts uncle home, remains identified after 65 years Published May 11, 2015 By Christine Schweickert Fort Jackson Leader FORT JACKSON, S.C. -- Tech. Sgt. Earl Norwood has bought a new set of dress blues to escort home the remains of a great-uncle who died during the Korean War. Officials only recently identified the remains of Marine 1st Lt. Raymond Ball, killed in battle in November 1950. Norwood never knew his great-uncle -- he wasn't even a gleam in his parents' eyes in 1950 -- but eight years ago, he began the odyssey that would lead him to pick up Ball's remains in Hawaii this May. "I'm proud. I'm honored," to be escorting Ball to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, said Norwood, chief of the Air Force 336th Training Squadron Detachment and an instructor at the Interservice Postal Training Activity at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. "I'm acting as a representative of the American people, bringing him home. "I've always hoped we could bring him home prior to my retirement," said Norwood, who has logged 18 years with the Air Force and spent countless hours researching his uncle. "We're cutting it close." Norwood says he's the one to bring home the remains because his mother asked him to. The story, however, is a little more complicated than that. Ball, fighting with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment on Hill 1282 in the frozen Chosin Reservoir, was shot to death when Chinese troops poured into North Korea, taking American and South Korean forces by storm and forcing them to bury their dead in shallow, shared graves as they retreated. In 1954, the Chinese shipped back a collection of unidentified bones believed to belong to American servicemen. The remains had been stored in formaldehyde, preventing DNA identification, and bore no dog tags or other identifying marks. But Norwood's family didn't know of the mystery surrounding their lost relative. They knew he had been a hero and assumed he had been buried with honors at Arlington. Only when Vivian Norwood asked her son -- then posted in Virginia -- to visit her Uncle Raymond's grave did the Norwoods discover that Ball's remains were MIA. "I was under the impression he was buried at Arlington because I remember my dad saying, 'He deserves to be buried at Arlington,' " said Vivian Norwood, who was 12 when her uncle Raymond died and who lives in Wenatchee, Washington. So when her son Earl was stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in 2007, she asked that he visit her uncle, perhaps to read to him at his gravesite. But Earl Norwood couldn't find the grave. It didn't exist. Curious, he Googled everything he could find on his great-uncle, who was mentioned in a handful of books about the Korean War and listed on several websites as being in need of identification. He recruited his mother's help, learning all he could when she attended conferences for the families of POW-MIAs. The family began exchanging information with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, the same agency that recently announced it would attempt to identify the remains of servicemen killed on the USS Oklahoma during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Ultimately, officials used X-rays, and Ball's teeth and a collarbone to ID him. "We've got to bring him home," Norwood told his mother, now Ball's oldest surviving relative at 77. Although Marines usually escort home the remains of fellow Marines, the Norwoods won permission for Norwood to make the flight. He's having difficulty pinning down exactly when he will fly out. He does know, though, that he and Ball's remains must be at Arlington by 11:30 a.m. May 19. That's when 23 members of the Norwood family and two Marines who served with Ball will gather for the belated funeral and interment with full military honors. "I'm actually looking forward to sitting down and listening" to stories about Ball, Norwood said. Vivian Norwood cannot help but weep, both when she thinks about the loss of her uncle and the lengths to which she and her son have gone to bring him home. "He never swore, and he never drank," she remembers of her Uncle Raymond. "He had that kindness about him, and yet a kind of firmness. "He was a hero to the whole family."