The remains of Clark Allred's brother, Harold Reid, will be flown home from Vietnam next week. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune)

BY BRANDON LOOMIS
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

    After three decades in anonymous Vietnamese graves, a Marine's remains are coming home to a hero's burial in Utah next week.
    Harold E. Reid of Salt Lake City turned up missing in action from his post guarding a bridge in Vietnam on Sept. 13, 1967. Military investigators determined last November he was killed in a firefight with guerrillas, and a DNA match with his brother and mother proved that bones and bone fragments unearthed last year belonged to Reid.
    "He's finally coming home," said Clark Allred, Reid's brother who was 4 years old when the 20-year-old soldier died. Allred has just two visions of his brother: playing with him and sending him off in a military vehicle.
    "It's been really emotional. Exciting. Good emotions, but a lot of tears," Allred said, recounting the family's ordeal in the three months since learning Reid's fate.
    Allred will travel to Hawaii on Sunday to retrieve his brother's remains. A military and civilian funeral is planned at Taylorsville Cemetery, 4500 S. Redwood Road, on April 3 at 11 a.m. Marines from various units in the Salt Lake City area will supply an honor guard and 21-gun salute. Salt Lake County sheriff's deputies will provide a motorcycle escort.
    John Gundersen, a former schoolmate of Reid at Salt Lake City's old South High School, is one mourner with a reason to look forward to the funeral. Gundersen also served in Vietnam and, after returning home, wore a bracelet supporting those listed as missing in action. By chance, the bracelet he was assigned bore Harold Reid's name, though Gundersen did not immediately connect it to his old schoolmate. He had known Reid by his nickname, "Ari."
    "I want to give his mother or brother the bracelet," said Gundersen, who was awarded a Purple Heart after being wounded by mortar shrapnel. He noted that Reid had signed his yearbook: "I hope our paths cross again someday."
    The Marine Corps' Casualty Branch and an MIA investigative team from the Defense Department interviewed villagers who knew of Reid's death near the Thu Bon River in the former South Vietnam. A Marine report of the investigation last November noted Americans last saw Reid when he was relieved of duty and said he was crossing the river to visit a friend stationed there.
    An informant claimed to have wrapped an American Marine in a parachute and buried him after he was killed by Vietnamese guerrillas
    That informant and others from the area said villagers exhumed the body and moved it to a makeshift cemetery about five years later, though no one could say where that is.
    The remains that are returning to Utah come from the primary burial site near the Thu Bon River, and Allred said the 42 bones and fragments are mostly from his brother's arms.
    Once military officials were somewhat confident of Reid's identity, they contacted his family to ask for DNA samples. Allred and his mother, Anna Matern, gave blood samples, and the results matched.
    Efforts to reach Matern on Friday were unsuccessful. But Allred said his mother is glad to be finished with a long "emotional ride" during which she suspected her son was dead, but did not know for sure.
    "She went through 30 years of not knowing what happened to her kid," he said. "I always wondered if he was alive or if he was suffering or if he was in a [prisoner of war] camp."
    Allred said he was honored when the Marines offered to bring him to Hawaii to transport the remains to Utah. "It gives me the opportunity to be with him again, to be a part of something with him."