Home At Last; Sister Consoled By Belated Return Of Brother Submitted by 10-05-
10-5-1996 Times Picayune

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Lawrence LeBouef was 19 in the fall of 1950, a fresh-faced private who had
been fighting in the Korean War just a couple of months when he sent a letter
to his mother in Houma.

"Boy, it sure is rough out here," he wrote. "But I don't believe it will last
much longer. At least I hope it don't."

On Nov. 1, not long after he wrote that letter, LeBouef disappeared in battle
in the North Korean countryside. After the war, he was classified as "presumed
dead." But for 46 years, his four sisters never knew for sure what happened to
the quiet, dark-eyed young man.

"I can truthfully say there has not been one day gone by that I haven't
thought of him," said Mable Rousselle, of Covington, LeBouef's oldest sister.
"It's always in the back of your mind: Is he captured in a prison camp, or
what? You never really know, and you never feel satisfied."

Now they know.

By an odd chance that family members consider a miracle, Army officials
stumbled across LeBouef's remains this summer in North Korea. After a careful
process of identification, they notified the family last month and brought
LeBouef home. Today, the family finally is putting him to rest. A funeral is
scheduled this morning in Marrero. The sisters, now in their 60s and 70s with
gray hair and great-grandchildren, have assembled a display of snapshots of
the teen-age brother they remember. A niece who was an infant when he left
will sing. And LeBouef, who was posthumously promoted to corporal, will be
buried with full military honors in a place where his family can visit him.

"This finalizes it, to me," said his older sister, Mildred Bernard, of
Marrero. "At least we can rest in peace now, knowing that he's here."

LeBouef's remains were found in July by a team from the Army's Central
Identification Laboratory, said Lt. Col. Anda Strauss, an Army spokeswoman.
The team, on a rare mission into North Korea in search of missing Americans,
was looking for evidence of a plane that reportedly had crashed near the Yalu
River on China's border. Instead, the team happened across a lead of another
sort.

A young farmer pointed out a hilltop in a remote valley. Years earlier, the
man said, his father had mentioned to him that an American soldier was buried
there.

After careful digging, the searchers uncovered part of a skeleton, some scraps
of cloth and buttons, a canteen cup, a belt buckle and dog tags bearing
LeBouef's name. Using dental records and other analysis, they identified the
remains as his and notified the family.

Laura Mae Dufrene thought it must be some kind of hoax when she got the call
at her home in Cut Off. She burst into tears.

But once she accepted the news, Dufrene - who is LeBouef's twin sister -
wasn't surprised by it. Long ago, some time after he disappeared, Dufrene
experienced what seemed to her a prophetic dream about her brother.

"He was in a foxhole and he was raising his hand to me and he was telling me,
'Laura Mae, help me.' I started to cry and I woke up and I asked God, 'How can
I help my brother? He's millions of miles away from me,' " she said. "I never
dreamed of him since. As far as I was concerned, that was the night he died."

LeBouef was, in fact, found in a foxhole position, Strauss said. His unit, the
2nd Battalion of the 8th Cavalry Regiment, and two other battalions were
fighting the Chinese in P'yongan-Pukto Province when he disappeared. More than
390 members of the regiment failed to return from the battle, according to an
Army memo, although LeBouef's body was the only one found this summer.

LeBouef worried about Chinese involvement in that last letter to his mother, a
letter quoted in a yellowing 1950 newspaper clipping that Rousselle still has.

"I believe there are already a few (Chinese) that are with the North Koreans,"
LeBouef wrote. "There is a big mountain in front of us that they say there are
2,000 of them on it. Tell everybody hello for me. I don't guess I'll be home
for about 28 months yet."

Rousselle still has Mass said for LeBouef every year on his birthday. Eight
years older, she helped raise him after their father died, when LeBouef was a
baby. Now she can finally grieve for the boy she considers as much a son as a
brother. But she's glad the mystery is over.

"I guess we'll be able to put him away right and we'll feel better about it,"
Rousselle said. "It'll be nice to have him near so we can go visit his grave.
You know, you never really lose your family members. They're with you all the
time."

1996