(Tribune News Service) — White-gloved hands carefully lifted the American flag draped over the long casket and began to fold. Firm creases. Every edge straightened and tucked.

The process, steeped in ceremony and tradition, took minutes, not seconds, and the Navy honor guard carried out the solemn task with reverence.

As the six men and women made each of the 13 folds, the only sound was rain that fell on the roof of the small shelter in the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies in Cecil Township, Pa.

Dozens stood in the steady rain Thursday to pay final respects to a man they never knew. It’s likely that Navy Fireman 1st Class Walter F. Schleiter died before many of them were even born.

It was the end of a long journey for the boy from Beaver County, the Rev. Larry Mort, of St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Moon, told the small crowd.

Born in Freedom in 1919, Schleiter lived most of his short life in Stark County, Ohio. He joined the Navy in 1940, more than a year before the United States would be drawn into WWII.

He was stationed some 4,500 miles from home, at the naval base at Pearl Harbor. He was assigned to the USS Oklahoma in October, just over a year before Japanese planes decimated the battleship fleet moored at the base in a surprise attack.

The 22-year-old was killed. Nearly 83 years later, he made it home.

“We’ll never know what Walter was doing at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t wake up that morning thinking it would be his time,” Rev. Mort said. “Yet, we can be sure that Walter and all the Navy personnel on the Oklahoma who died that day were busy carrying out their duties to the end.”

Schleiter was among the 429 sailors and Marines who died aboard the USS Oklahoma; he’s also one of more than 350 whose remains have been positively identified since 2015. For decades, he’d lain alongside fellow service members in group graves in Hawaii at a cemetery known as the Punchbowl.

On Thursday, six years after he was identified, he received a funeral with full military honors.

Lynn Such, 83, Schleiter’s cousin and closest living relative, sat in the front row in the small cemetery shelter. She knew she had a cousin who was killed at Pearl Harbor, but she’d only been just over a year old when he was killed.

When the flag was folded, it was passed slowly to a Navy officer. He patted the creases once more and then knelt in front of Ms. Such, who wept and choked back emotion as she took the flag in her arms.

“On behalf of the president of the United States, the United States Navy, and a grateful nation,” he said, “please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

An act of war

Schleiter was born Sept. 27, 1919, to Ada and Carl Schleiter. Carl died of pneumonia about five months later, according to his death certificate, and Ada moved back to her hometown of Massillon, Ohio. By 1930, she had remarried, and the census that year listed Walter as the only child of Ada and Charles Stauffer.

In August 1940, just shy of 21, Schleiter went to Cleveland and enlisted in the Navy, records show. He’d been assigned to the USS Oklahoma in Pearl Harbor by October 1940 — that’s the first time he appears in the Navy’s muster rolls, quarterly reports of personnel attached to a particular unit or station.

On Dec. 7, 1941, the 27,000-ton battleship was moored next to the USS Maryland along “ Battleship Row” off Oahu. Schleiter was aboard the ship shortly before 8 a.m. when Japanese planes attacked.

The first two torpedoes that struck the Oklahoma came within seconds of each other. The battleship took at least three more hits. It capsized within 12 minutes.

Out of her crew of 1,200, 429 died, many inside the ship’s hull.

What Schleiter was doing that morning is largely lost to history.

His cousin, Paul E. Wiley, was also assigned to the Oklahoma, according to The Evening Independent, Massillon’s daily newspaper. In an interview four months after the attack, Mr. Wiley said he’d been below deck when the first torpedoes hit, and he’d eventually jumped overboard when orders were given to abandon ship.

He said he’d last seen his cousin the day prior.

“I have since talked with some fellows who were with him when the attack began,” he told the newspaper. “One of them told me that Walter was with him when they started to leave their stations. What happened to him after that, no one knows.”

Rescue and recovery efforts began almost immediately, but little could be done. Thirty-two sailors were rescued from an airtight section of the ship several days after the attack, but ramped-up war efforts hampered further work.

In 1942, efforts began to right the ship. By the time the Oklahoma was refloated in 1944, hundreds of remains had been recovered. Attempts to put names to the remains in 1947 yielded only 35 positive identifications. The rest were buried across 46 plots in the Punchbowl.

In 1949, the government deemed those men non-recoverable.

Fulfilling a promise

That’s how most stayed for decades — buried together, their names carved into stone to mark their sacrifice.

Organized efforts to recover missing service members date to the 1970s amid the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Since then, the mission has expanded to include World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War. The work has been undertaken by several organizations over the years, including the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) and the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO).

Amid a push in the early 2000s by a Pearl Harbor survivor, Chief Petty Officer Ray Emory, JPAC disinterred a single casket of Oklahoma unknowns, believed to hold the remains of five sailors. What was found were the remains of nearly 100 men; six were able to be identified.

In 2009, U.S. officials ordered JPAC to halt all disinterments until they could locate a certain percentage of family members of the missing Oklahoma sailors and get DNA for testing. That threshold was met in 2012, but it wasn’t until 2015 that the U.S. gave the greenlight to disinter all of the unidentified Oklahoma dead.

This effort, officials said, would be undertaken by a new group formed by merging organizations like JPAC and DPMO. It would become the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA.

“Our job is to make sure that the United States fulfills that promise to those service members and those service members’ families — to make sure that they ultimately come home and are laid to rest,” said Sean Everette, a spokesman for the DPAA.

An Army veteran himself, Mr. Everette said there is a sense of security in knowing that an organization like the one he now speaks for exists.

“It is kind of a comfort for service members to know that there is an organization whose sole purpose is to bring them home if, God forbid, their unit can’t bring them home when they’re first lost,” he said. “It doesn’t erase any of the apprehension or fear of deployment but, at the same time, knowing that they’ll be brought home is a comfort.”

Members of a Navy Honor Guard escort Fireman First Class Walter F. Schleiter of Massillon, Ohio, to his final resting place during a funeral for him at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies on Thursday, April 11, 2024.( Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette)

How that’s done varies, but each identification begins with DPAA researchers and historians, he said. They pore through service records, unit records and eyewitness accounts.

That can become a long and winding puzzle that’s part history and part geography.

Sometimes it’s a matter of location: Determining exactly where a plane carrying a particular set of service members went down. Investigators and anthropological teams then can be sent to look for clues or remains.

Other times, solving the puzzle means disinterring those buried as “unknowns” in U.S. military cemeteries across the world. To do that, DPAA needs to have at least narrowed down who that person might be. From there, they can cross-reference those records with any information gleaned from the remains themselves.

Identification was trickier for those lost aboard the Oklahoma, since so many remains were comingled within the group graves, said Carrie LeGarde, who led the USS Oklahoma identification project for DPAA.

Every scrap of evidence was inventoried, and each bone was documented — around 13,000 bones in all. Such evidence, she said, can paint a picture even before DNA samples are taken.

“If it’s a bone, that might give us information about age, [and] we’ll take measurements because we can use that to estimate living height,” she said. “And so all of that information is kind of an initial inventory.”

From there, Ms. LeGarde said, analysts try to match bones that go together. It’s impossible to DNA test every single bone, she said, and they must be selective about which bones they use. Those tests will tell Ms. LeGarde not only which bones match each other, but also which bones match the reference samples collected from family members.

As service members are recovered, it can be years before an identification is confirmed. Even once an identification is made, news of it remains mum until a relative can be notified.

“I spend a lot of time looking at the names and really trying to figure out whether or not we’ve got this guy,” Ms. LaGarde said. “Sometimes it’s years that we’re spending trying to get enough evidence that it’s this guy, and when we finally do, it’s exciting.”

DPAA’s USS Oklahoma project is considered closed. From 2015 to 2021, Ms. LaGarde and her team identified 355 service members killed on the battleship. The roughly three dozen who could not be identified were reburied together at the Punchbowl on Dec. 7, 2021. All told, 396 of the 429 men killed aboard the ship have been identified.

‘They signed their life away’

Among them was 22-year-old Fireman First Class Walter Schleiter.

The final leg of his journey home began in 2018, when his remains were positively identified. It took until early 2024 for DPAA to find a living relative, a process hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

His remains arrived at Pittsburgh International Airport on April 5, where his flag-draped casket was met by a Navy honor guard and other service organizations.

Those in uniform stood in silent salute. Civilians puts their hands over their hearts.

The honor guard carried Schleiter’s casket to a hearse while Patriot Guard Riders lined the way with American flags, according to a report in the Blue Sky News, a newsletter published by the Allegheny County Airport Authority.

The scene played out again Thursday. The honor guard carried Schleiter’s casket through the rain from the hearse to the shelter where his service would be held. A massive C-17 cargo plane from the 911th Airlift Wing soared overhead. Fellow veterans stood to salute.

Along the sidewalk, honor guard members stood at attention throughout the hour-long service. They took no notice of the rain, nor did the Patriot Guard Riders who stood at attention alongside the honor guard.

“He could have been a veteran for 15 minutes or 83 years, we would still represent and honor,” said Patriot Guard Rider Tiffany Simmons. Rain dripped off the brim of her hat. “They signed their life away for your freedom and my freedom.”

With the USS Oklahoma portion of DPAA’s work complete, 81,000 U.S. service members remain missing or unaccounted for worldwide. At least half are believed to be lost at sea.

Most are World War II casualties — about 1,500 have been accounted for since the government renewed efforts in 1973, but more than 72,000 from the war remain missing.

Each year, DPAA investigators and anthropologists travel to various corners of the world to search for American remains.

Nearly 7,500 who served in the Korean War remain unaccounted for, as well as nearly 1,600 from the Vietnam War. Hundreds are considered non-recoverable. From the Cold War-era, 126 service members are still missing.

Mr. Everette, of the DPAA, said his organization will exist until it fulfills the promise made to service members years ago.

“We’re going to be doing this for decades, but frankly, we’ll do it as long as it takes to bring them all home.”

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