Rex W Powell Obituary, Army Corporal Has Died

Rex W Powell Obituary, Death – Army Cpl. Rex W. Powell, age 18, of Valdese, North Carolina, was found on February 13, 2023. He died during the Korean War. On October 5, 1932, Isa Powell Williams Epley gave birth to Rex. His niece Jatonna Hunt Garner, nephew Warren Hunt and his wife Wendy, and two great-nieces Devon and Dylan Gailey are still alive.

Chaplin Tom Barton will preside over the funeral service on Friday, August 11, 2023, at 12:00 p.m. at J.C. Green and Sons Funeral Home in Thomasville, North Carolina. On Friday, August 11, 2023, at 2:00 PM, there will be a burial at Salisbury National Cemetery with full military honors. At www.jcgreenandsons.com, you may send the family an online condolence message.

Powell served in L Company, 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division during the winter of 1950. On December 12, when his battalion was attacked by hostile forces close to the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, he was listed as missing in action. Although it’s possible Powell was taken prisoner, there are no records or eyewitness stories of him being detained as a prisoner of war, and no remains that have been recovered have ever been connected to Powell. On December 31, 1953, the Army announced a presumptive finding of death.

Over 2,900 American remains were returned by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea during Operation GLORY in 1954. Powell was deemed unrecoverable in January 1956 when none of these remains were connected to him during the subsequent processing and identification process. 848 unidentified remains, including one marked X-15633 Operation GLORY, were buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, better known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu, Hawaii, when the identification procedure was complete. The DPAA put forth a plan in July 2018 to exhume 652 Korean War Unknowns from the Punchbowl. X-15633 was removed from the Punchbowl in March 2021 as part of DPAA’s Korean War Disinterment Project’s Phase Three and transported to the DPAA Laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, for analysis.