     The Pentagon says the remains of a South Dakota soldier who died while a POW during the Korean War have been identified and will be buried soon in his hometown.
Services for Melvin Little Bear of Standing Rock will be in McLaughlin, SD, on Sept. 30.
Little Bear was a 21-year-old Army PFC with A Battery, 15th Field Artillery, 2nd Infantry Division when he was reported missing in action on Feb. 13, 1951 after his unit was attacked by the Chinese Army.
The Army later confirmed he’d been captured and held at POW Camp #1 in North Korea, but reports and information from both Chinese and North Korean forces said he died in captivity on or about July 21, 1951.
In the fall of 1954, after the armistice ended the fighting in Korea, remains of prisoners from POW Camp #1 were returned.
Those that could not be identified were buried Feb. 16, 1956, at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
More than 60 years later in November 2019, those remains were disinterred as part of the planned exhumation of 23 burials in the Punchbowl in 1956 of remains from the same part of North Korea
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor analyzed the remains using state-of-the-art forensic testing. Scientists were able to use dental and anthropological analysis to identify Little Bear
His name is on the Courts of the Missing from the Korean War at the Punchbowl, but will now have a rosette next to it he has been identified.