By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 23, 2007; B01

On Nov. 27, 1950, Army Cpl. Robert K. Imrie charged a Chinese machine-gun nest that had pinned down his platoon in a murderous crossfire on a hilltop in the far north of Korea. Firing his automatic weapon continuously Imrie wiped out the enemy position, but he was hit by a burst of fire from a second nest.

With enemy fired diverted by Imrie's actions, his comrades destroyed the second nest and captured the hill. But Imrie, 23, was mortally wounded.

For sacrificing himself to save his platoon, Imrie was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army's second-highest honor. But his body was left behind as the U.S. 8th Army withdrew in the face of a massive Chinese counteroffensive. The body lay in a remote corner of North Korea for half a century.

Today, at Arlington National Cemetery, Imrie will be buried with full military honors.

Imrie's remains were identified and brought home in part through the efforts of two Northern Virginia women who wanted to find an uncle who died before they were born, but who they always heard was a hero.

Imrie's nieces -- Fran Anderson of Alexandria and Anne Imrie of Arlington County -- will be joined at the funeral by a delegation from Randolph, Mass., the soldier's home town.

"We're trying to celebrate that short life," said Anne Imrie, 49. "It's emotional. I didn't think it would be."

Robert Imrie, who joined the Army in 1948, was shipped to the Korean Peninsula with the 2nd Infantry Division after North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950. After breaking out from the Pusan Perimeter, the division and the rest of the 8th Army drove toward the Manchurian border.

But in late November, hundreds of thousands of communist Chinese troops crossed the border in a massive counterattack, sending the 8th Army reeling. The 2nd Division was assigned to protect the withdrawal of the U.S. forces.

Imrie's platoon, part of F Company of the 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, was ordered to retake a hill near the town of Kujang that Chinese troops seized the previous night. When the platoon was stopped by machine-gun fire, Imrie advanced alone until he was killed.

"His gallant and intrepid actions had diverted the enemy machine-gun fire from his platoon, thereby saving his comrades from annihilation and enabling them to eliminate the one remaining machine-gun position and secure the objective," according to the 1951 citation that accompanied Imrie's award.

Robert Imrie's younger brother, Aubrey Imrie, a career Air Force officer who retired in the Washington area and died in 1986, had not told his daughters much about his brother.

They knew that the Defense Department had made widespread use of DNA testing in recent years to investigate remains from the Korean and Vietnam wars and from World War II.

In 2000, Imrie's nieces decided to have the family submit a DNA sample to a registry operated by the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office. "It had to be on the maternal side," Anne Imrie said. "We tracked down one of his uncles living in Nova Scotia."

Victor Leroy Tulk -- Robert Imrie's uncle -- who was then 92 and has since died, submitted a blood sample.

In 1996, after negotiations, the U.S. military began excavations in North Korea, searching for some of the more than 8,000 U.S. service members missing in action from the Korean War. By 2005, when excavations were suspended because of rising tensions with North Korea, the remains of more than 225 service members had been recovered. In 2000, about the time that Tulk's blood sample was entered into the registry, an excavation team investigated a burial site near Kujang.

Human remains had been plowed up in the area years earlier by a North Korean farmer, who moved them to a different location. The farmer's son took the team to the new site.

Excavation uncovered the commingled remains of several humans, along with the dog tag of an American soldier, Cpl. Samuel Wirrick, a member of Imrie's unit.

The laborious process of identifying the remains through dental records and DNA samples at the military's identification laboratory in Hawaii was not completed until this year.

"The resolution of cases several decades old is a methodical, painstaking process," said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Missing Personnel Office. "It requires the gathering of historical, circumstantial and biological evidence. And often this evidence is available only from our former enemies. This real-world process bears scant resemblance to fictitious versions of the forensic programs we see on television."

Imrie's nieces were notified in May that the remains of their uncle had been identified. "It was such a goose-bump moment," said Anne Imrie. "We never thought that it would happen."

Two other identifications have been made from the remains found near Kujang -- Wirrick of Lancaster, Pa., and Sgt. Donald Trent of Crab Orchard, W.Va., both with the 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment who were reported missing the day Imrie was killed. Their next of kin have been identified, and both will be buried at Arlington in October, according to Greer.

Last month, an Army team briefed Imrie's nieces on the circumstances of the recovery and on Robert Imrie's brave end. The briefing left both women sobbing for the uncle they never knew.

Said Anne Imrie, "It brought him to life."