SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — It was an emotional day for Kathy Coder and Elijah Kozak.
“Overwhelmed with gratitude,” Coder said.
Hundreds gathered at Mount Soledad in memory of their Great Uncle Walter Mintus. They called him Uncle Burt.
“My dad tells me that Uncle Burt would come home and they thought he was the biggest hero.”
Mintus served in World War II as a radio operator. In 1944, he was on a bomber aircraft shot down by Japanese forces near the Palau Islands.
“Missing in action, so that’s what we heard growing up. It definitely impacted me joining the military,” Kozak said.
A few decades later, a man named Patrick Scannon made it his mission to find the bodies of missing soldiers.
“We have done this as a measure of our gratitude to these mias and their sacrifices as well as the consequent sacrifices of their families,” Scannon said.
Scannon formed a team called Project Recover, and spent 24 years searching the harbor around the Palau Islands. In 2018, they located the remains of two soldiers killed in action, one of them being Walter Mintus.
74 years after his death, Walter Mintus was returned to his family in Pennsylvania and his plaque now hangs on the walls of the Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial.
“I think the whole family would be overwhelmed to see what’s happened because of his sacrifice,” Coder said.
“My dad finally getting some closure being able to finally have him back home in Pennsylvania was really good for us,” Kozak said.
Coder and Kozak say they now have another family of veterans in San Diego. Their service memorialized along these walls.
