American War Hero · Korean War · Notice Nearby
No rights-safe contemporary likeness is on file. The record is the service and the writing, not an invented face.
Elton J. Harwell
April 11, 1927 – unaccounted for since March 26, 1953
Born Port Vincent, Louisiana
Loss location: Nevada Cities Complex (Outposts Carson / Reno / Vegas), Korea DMZ (loss location)
Private First Class, Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division; Nevada Cities Complex defense, March 26, 1953
Missing in action — DPAA lists Pfc. Elton John Harwell as Unaccounted For (Deferred), profile a0Jt000000lsrokEAA (verified 2026-09-23). Missing in action March 26, 1953 during the Chinese attack on the Nevada Cities Complex (Carson, Reno, Vegas) manned by the 5th Marines near the present DMZ; never reported as a POW; not identified among remains returned after the ceasefire. Memorialized on the Courts of the Missing, National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, and on the Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall. Deferred is an analytic category, not a recovered grave.
Elton John Harwell was born in Louisiana on April 11, 1927, and entered the Marine Corps with a Washington home of record. By late March 1953 he was a private first class in Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines — holding the Nevada Cities outposts just south of what is now the Demilitarized Zone.
On the night of March 26, Chinese forces hit Carson, Reno, and Vegas hard. Reno and Vegas fell. More than a thousand Marines were killed, wounded, or listed missing in that fight. Harwell went missing on that ground. He was never carried as a prisoner. After the armistice, his name was not among the remains returned to American custody.
DPAA profile a0Jt000000lsrokEAA still reads Unaccounted For, analytical category Deferred. He is on the Courts of the Missing in Honolulu and on the Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall. This page will not invent a DMZ recovery the public file does not carry.
- Publication
- NN-HERO-1950-017
- Content hash
- 1c14efd7 fbdbc3af 1d5274eb a14e63cd 5e2d1771 1a11b2bf f70adc17 3c33a63d
- Base anchor
- 0xde91a9 b3a3f36c 6446808a f7ff804f 4e0ea4db c4075b8a 0c9e529e 0d9c47e7 fb
Base stores the content hash, publication number, memorial id, and timestamp — not the full obituary text. The complete memorial remains on Notice Nearby. This is not a legal affidavit.