SLIDELL, La. — Charles Gomez Jr. left Slidell when he was 19. He will return home next week on what would have been his 97th birthday.
But his homecoming will be bittersweet.
The young sailor’s remains were only recently identified, decades after he was killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The first time his name appeared in the newspaper was Jan. 8, 1942.
There, on page two of The Times-Picayune, was his photo, a smiling young sailor. The headline read, "LOUISIANA CASUALTIES."
"Charles Clay Gomez, 19, son of Mr. and Mrs. Charles C. Gomez, was reported missing," the brief item read. "The casualties took place during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor December 7."
Gomez was a seaman 2nd class, who left his family in Slidell when he enlisted in the Navy in August 1940. He was assigned to the USS Oklahoma, which was torpedoed and sank when the Japanese launched their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
"In the end, 32 were rescued; 429 Oklahoma crew members perished," Rear Adm. Jon Kreitz, deputy director of the Department of Defense's Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency, said during the annual memorial service at Pearl Harbor in 2018.
No other vessel, except for the USS Arizona, suffered as many losses.
The Navy spent three years recovering remains from the Oklahoma after the attack. Efforts to identify them began in 1947, but there was little success. Only 35 were identities were confirmed.
"They didn't have DNA," Kreitz said of the methods at the time. "There are a lot of things they didn't have."
The unidentified remains were then buried in 46 plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the "Punchbowl" because of its location in an extinct volcano, in Honolulu.
Nearly 75 years after Pearl Harbor, in 2015, the Department of Defense ordered the remains disinterred to try to find out their identities. DNA analysis, which was not available the first time, was key.
Gomez's remains were identified on Oct. 10, 2018. The DOD announced the news about a month later.
He is one of the lucky ones. Of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II, there are 72,771 who remain unaccounted for, according to the DOD. The department estimates about 26,000 of those remains might one day be able to be identified.
Since the DOD began to DNA test remains, two other local men have been identified: 20-year-old Ralph Boudreaux and 21-year-old Cyril Dusset.
They were Gomez's shipmates on the Oklahoma.
Gomez's name, along with nearly 20,000 other names, was chiseled into the wall at the Court of the Missing at the Punchbowl. A marker will now be placed next to his name, to note he has been found.
A burial for Gomez with full military honors will be held at 12:30 p.m. on Monday, June 3, 2019 at Southeast Louisiana Veterans Cemetery, 34888 Grantham College Road, Slidell.
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WWL-TV reporter Danny Monteverde can be reached at danny@wwltv.com; Follow him on Twitter at @DCMonteverde