Suzanne Dunham Fong grew up not knowing what had happened to her father, an aviator who disappeared during the Korean War.
After 42 years, she's learned that he was buried on an island off the Japanese coast after his plane was shot down in 1952.A U.S.-Russian commission investigating treatment of prisoners in the Cold War announced Friday that it found the body of naval navigator Capt. John R. Dunham, who was shot down near the Sea of Japan while on a covert mission for the National Security Agency.
Fong was an infant when her father died. In 1992, Russia recorded his death, but his body had not been found.
Last year, a former Soviet sailor, Vaily Syko, said he had pulled Dunham's body out of the water in 1952.
Syko, 64, gave Dunham's U.S. Naval Academy ring, which he had kept since finding the body, to former U.S. Ambassador Malcom Toon, the American co-chairman of the joint commission.
Teams were sent to find the body but had no success until a records check turned up a burial certificate and a map of a graveyard in the Russian-occupied Kuril Islands off Japan.
Dunham's remains are expected to be returned within two weeks to the United States. An Army laboratory will examine try to positively identify them.
"The hardest thing is that there were eight men on that plane," Fong said. "The other ones, they still don't know for sure what happened. It's hard to think of those families."