Welcome Home SFC Lincoln Clifford May
It is both a sad day and a joy when we welcome a missing soldier home to be finally laid at rest.
BRISTOL, Conn. — When the Chinese army surged into Korea shortly before the winter of 1950 in a bid to salvage the communist regime, the first American military unit to feel the brunt of its attack hunkered down in the mountains and fought back with legendary fierceness.
Caught in the hail of bullets and bombs, a Plainville soldier, Sgt. 1st Class Lincoln Clifford May, lay among the mounds of the dead.
Declared missing in action after the Nov. 2, 1950 battle that wiped out most of his unit, May’s remains lay somewhere in Unsan, North Korea for the next 43 years.
But in 1993, the North Koreans handed over 208 boxes of bones from U.S. soldiers who perished in that bleak landscape.
Using DNA provided by May’s two nephews, Glenn and Cliff Block of Bristol, some of the bones have been identified after all these years by military experts as belonging to the long-dead Plainville soldier.
May will be buried June 26 in a Plainville cemetery where many of the people the 22-year-old once knew are also interred.
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May arrived in Korea in August 1950 with U.S. forces who made a desperate stand to prevent the entire peninsula from being overrun by communist forces.
He was wounded near Pusan by a grenade the following month, Cliff Block said, but recovered enough to join his unit pushing north toward the Chinese border.
According to a newspaper clipping from the old weekly Plainville News, May carried shrapnel in his back as he headed out, sending a letter to his mother insisting he was no longer in danger.
The day before his death, the clipping said, May wrote to his fiancee in New Britain, whom he had planned to marry in October 1950, to say he was going out on “a big push.”
That was the last time anyone at home heard from him.
Welcome home, SFC. Thank you for your service and your sacrifice.
