When the 24th U.S. Division was beleaguered at Taejon in the first desperate month of the Korean war, TiME-LIFE Correspondent Wilson Fielder, 33, went in to cover the fight. The son of Baptist missionaries in China, Fielder was a veteran of the Marine Corps and of Texas and West Coast newspapering before he joined TIME. He had gone up to Korea from Hong Kong to be a combat correspondent (TIME, July 31, 1950). When Taejon fell to the Communists, Fielder left the burning ruins in the back seat of a jeep, seated next to a G.I. The jeep was hit by a burst of machine-gun fire, according to the driver, who had been ordered not to stop, and when he looked around, both Fielder and the G.I. were gone. For 18 months, Fielder was officially listed as "missing in action."
Last week in Tokyo, the Army announced that a body found in a ditch near Taejon ten months ago had been identified as Wilson Fielder's. He was the fifth TIME-LIFE war correspondent killed since the beginning of World War II and one of 14 U.N. correspondents killed covering the Korean war.