Erma Petersen was sitting in her bedroom, at her little dressing table, powdering her face.
He appeared suddenly in a corner of the room, she later told her family. The only words he could muster were, “Mom, I’m gone.” It wasn’t very long after that a dreaded telegram arrived, delivered to the family’s farmhouse in Abraham.
A SACRIFICE FOR LIBERTY
Donald K. Petersen was declared missing in action by the U.S. Army, MIA in the middle of the bloody Allied effort to storm Manila, retaking it from the Japanese in February 1945.
Petersen was a 20-year-old private first class, serving in the Army’s 5th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division.
He volunteered for service in 1943. A farewell celebration, noted in this newspaper at the time, drew 150 friends and family and included a melon bust as well as a program filled with songs and poems and speeches.
The next day, the soldier left his home and his sweetheart, who promised to wait for his return.
Seventy-eight years later, Petersen remains missing.
His legacy, until recently, included his name etched into a wall at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, lying inside a circle of tall concrete panels, walls filled with the names of the dead and missing, all surrounded by fields and fields of white crosses, gleaming under the shadows of high rises that surround the hallowed ground.
A book of his letters home and that dreaded telegram sits alone at the Arizona house of his last living brother. Wayne Petersen, 86, also has a plaque that once sat inside the old Hinckley Post Office, the names of those boys, his older brother included, who died scratched into its surface long ago.
Not much is known about what happened to “Bud,” as Petersen was affectionately known. One family story has it that he was in a truck when a Japanese sniper shot and killed him.
A story printed in an unknown newspaper says simply that he was killed during the assault on Luzon, the name of the island where Manila sits, on Feb. 3.
An online history of the 1st Cavalry Division suggests the action during those first days in February 1945 was centered on entering the Filipino capital, freeing more prisoners of war after earlier success in storming POW camps in the days and weeks before.
General Douglas MacArthur is said to have been so impressed by the 1st Cavalry’s daring raids on the camps that he excitedly exclaimed to the division’s commanders, “Go to Manila! Go around the Japs, bounce off the Japs, save your men, but get to Manila!”
It’s not hard to imagine that Bud’s last days were spent not just fighting, but freeing thousands of Allied troops and Filipino natives living the absolute nightmare that was a Japanese POW camp—salvation, finally, from the grip of a brutal regime.
Six months after Petersen was killed, the soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division were informed they had been selected to accompany MacArthur to Tokyo and would be part of the 8th Army in the occupation of Japan.
The war was over.
A SIBLING’S LAST BURDEN
The Petersens didn’t talk much about it. A review of digital newspaper archives came up with almost no mention of Petersen’s sacrifice. His nine brothers and sisters grew up, had families of their own, watched their parents grow old, and then each one passed, never having heard exactly what happened, or having any remains to lay to rest in the Sutherland Cemetery alongside them.
Erma died in 1981. Her husband, Clifferd, Bud’s father, died a few years before in 1977.
Wayne understands that being the last of his generation requires he bear a certain burden. And the question he’s wrestled with for years is what he should do for Bud before he joins the rest of the family on that final journey home.
His nieces for years have tried to figure out a way to memorialize their Uncle Bud, spurring Wayne to come up with something he can both live and die with. The advent of DNA testing and successful efforts the last few years to identify the remains of soldiers and sailors previously thought lost forever have lent a certain renewed energy to the effort as well.
Juli Murray, one of Wayne and Bud’s nieces, daughter of Arnold and Elaine Petersen, said the feeling is that if the family puts out good karma now, by doing something special, then perhaps their beloved Bud will somehow, miraculously, find his way back home to them, to Erma and Clifferd, especially.
It’s not an impossible wish.
SCIENCE AND A CHANGE OF HEART
In June 2021, the Delta area celebrated the return of Theo Jensen, the U.S. Navy sailor killed while aboard the USS Oklahoma during the December 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. His remains were thought lost forever, his name listed among the “unrecoverables,” only to be identified and returned almost 80 years later thanks to innovations in science and a major turnaround in the feelings of Pentagon chiefs, who long held that WWII gravesites were simply too sacred to go digging through now.
And hope does persist.
Similar debates raged when family members of those lost in the Philippines campaign petitioned the Pentagon to do more to identify their loved ones about a decade ago.
Family members of another Bud, Pvt. Arthur “Bud” Kelder, a POW who died in captivity in 1942 and was buried anonymously, led a years-long fight against the Pentagon, eventually suing the government in 2012. The family had essentially uncovered their loved one’s burial site, they believed, but the Pentagon refused to test the remains interred there.
The story is fascinating.
Meticulous records kept by the POWs themselves helped lead Kelder’s family to a possible gravesite at the Manila American Cemetery. See, Kelder was reported to be buried in a common grave, number 717, at the POW camp where he was held. After the war, the military disinterred camp graves and identified the few they could, shipping those remains home, but reburying the rest under crosses that bore the words, “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.”
Kelder was one of more than 900 unidentified soldiers from his camp alone who were reburied. After his family filed its lawsuit, a series of investigative news reports in 2014 spurred the government into action. Chuck Hagel, the U.S. Secretary of Defense at the time, vowed to overhaul efforts to identify the “unknowns” buried in the Philippines.
By the following year, Bud Kelder was on his way home. Finally.
Similar work continues today.
And just as Murray and her Uncle Wayne were mulling on how best to extend Bud Petersen’s legacy after his last sibling is gone, the military came calling for the family’s DNA.
“We’re trying to get DNA from the relatives because we’re doing excavation over here and should we find any of your uncle’s remains, we’d like to send him home,” Murray described the initial conversations with the officials involved.
Murray said multiple DNA samples are now on record with the military. She said her next step is to get her Uncle Wayne’s DNA sample to officials, too, since he is a closer genetic match to his brother Bud.
Wayne said he received the forms to submit, but doesn’t understand exactly how to fill them out and send the sample. He says he plans to ask the American Legion to help him complete the task.
A KARMIC, INDEPENDENCE DAY PRAYER
And that is happening sooner rather than later—Wayne and Murray and dozens of their family members were headed to Sutherland on Monday, July 3.
Because before Wayne’s own journey ends, and nearly simultaneous to officials seeking his DNA, the family is celebrating the placement of a long-absent military head- stone alongside Erma and Clifferd’s gravesite at Sutherland Cemetery.
Not only in remembrance and commemoration of this Independence Day, the family wants to gather at the spot where they desperately hope their Uncle Bud will someday--soon perhaps--finally rest in peace.
The flat marker is already waiting there for him. It arrived recently and was placed with the help of former long-time sexton Scott Bassett.
Bassett is a Sutherland native who spent about 45 years as caretaker of the cemetery. He knew the Petersen family well, including Erma and Clifferd.
He never knew they lost a son in World War II.
One day, at the Topaz Museum, he happened to read Donald’s name on a list of local Millard County war casualties. His own uncle, also named Donald, had been a POW who survived the war and returned home. The name caught Bassett’s eye and after some research he learned whose child this other Donald was.
“I saw his name on a plaque in the museum and I did some research finding out who the ones were I didn’t know. When I found out he was Clifferd and Erma’s son, I was saddened that I didn’t know that had happened. I’d never heard anything about it,” he said, his words testament to the silent grief the family endured.
Bassett said the cemetery is honored to host the family this long July 4 weekend.
American Legion Post 135 members were expected to attend and participate in the gravestone ceremony— Wayne’s chance to get their help submitting his DNA.
A United States flag, courtesy the U.S. Army, folded and placed neatly inside a shadow box, will be handed to Wayne, his brother Bud’s name engraved on it, one more place for posterity.
The Petersens invited those who knew the family to attend the ceremony. A potluck dinner afterward at the Sutherland park was scheduled for 2 p.m.
“It’s just a headstone ceremony. No remains have been found at this time. But Uncle Wayne can go to heaven now knowing he did the best that he could do while he was here,” Murray said, excited about the gathering. “Should he ever come home, then of course we’ll do a bigger celebration of life for him then.”
With that, a karmic, Independence Day prayer might be whispered into the ether, that the words, “Mom, I’m gone,” doesn’t mean forever.
