Eisenhower buries two unknowns at Arlington; each man receives the Medal of Honor
On Memorial Day 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over the interment of two unidentified American servicemen at Arlington National Cemetery's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier — one from World War II, one from the Korean War. The World War II unknown was selected by Navy Hospital Corpsman 1st Class William R. Charette, then the Navy's only active-duty enlisted Medal of Honor recipient. Army Master Sergeant Ned Lyle made the final selection for the Korean War unknown, chosen from four disinterred candidates. Eisenhower awarded each man the Medal of Honor.
The 1958 ceremony joined the World War I unknown — interred in 1921 — with the dead of two more conflicts, transforming a single memorial into a national accounting of wars that had reshaped the century. The Korean unknown's selection came from remains disinterred at the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii, a direct consequence of a war that Truman had called a "police action" and that would long be known as the Forgotten War — the interment a formal refusal to let it stay forgotten.
QWhy was a Navy corpsman — not a general or an admiral — given the honor of selecting the World War II unknown?
William R. Charette was, at the time of the 1958 ceremony, the only active-duty enlisted man in the United States Navy holding the Medal of Honor. That distinction made him the symbolic choice: the nation's highest military honor, held by the lowest commissioned grade, selecting the representative of all the war's unidentified dead. Charette had earned his Medal of Honor in Korea, not World War II — a quiet irony in a ceremony meant to honor two separate wars. He designated the right-hand casket aboard USS Canberra. The remaining candidate was buried at sea.
QWhat happened to the three Korean War soldiers who were not selected as the unknown?
Four unidentified Americans who had died in the Korean War were disinterred from the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii for the selection ceremony. Army Master Sergeant Ned Lyle made the final choice of one. The three soldiers not selected were quietly re-interred at the same Hawaii cemetery, returning to the same ground they had come from, unnamed as before. Their non-selection was not a diminishment — it was simply the mathematics of a ritual that required one representative for millions of mourners.
QHow did the Korean War's designation as a 'police action' complicate the recognition of its dead — and what did the 1958 ceremony implicitly settle?
President Truman had used the phrase 'police action' as a legal pretext for committing troops to Korea without a formal congressional declaration of war. The United States never formally declared war on North Korea or China. That designation haunted the conflict's memory — the war was fought by 1,789,000 Americans, cost 33,739 battle deaths, and devastated a peninsula, yet it occupied an uneasy middle ground between World War II and later Vietnam. Placing an unknown Korean War soldier beside the World War I unknown in the nation's most consecrated military ground was an act of institutional acknowledgment that the language of 'police action' had never quite managed to confer.
