There are over 80,000 U.S. Armed Forces personnel that remain missing in action from World War II to the present.

And POW/MIA Recognition Day is held annually to remember the sacrifices made by the missing, as well as their families.

In a small gathering held at the Marine Corps League Pendleton Detachment of Warren County on Jackson Ave. on recently, that remembrance took place.

Dick Hansen said that the remembrance “reaffirms the commitment of all of our nation’s citizens that POW/MIA will not be forgotten.”

He presented a resolution from the Warren County Commissioners marking POW/MIA Recognition Day and shared the history of the day as well as of the POW/MIA flag in addition to the Missing Man Table ceremony.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency details a total of 73,515 missing from World War II, 7,839 from the conflict in Korea, 1,626 from Vietnam, 126 during service in the Cold War and three during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

State-level listing, with city of residence, are included for all of those conflicts except World War II.

Those records reveal one MIA from Warren County Private First Class Ray W. Etter, U.S. Army.

According to the federal American Battle Monuments Commission, Etter was born on Jan. 1, 1920 and killed February 13, 1951.

As a member of Company A, 13th Engineer Combat Battalion, 7th Infantry Division, the Commission reports that Etter “was listed as Missing in Action while fighting the enemy in South Korea on February 13, 1951. He was presumed dead on January 22, 1954. His name is inscribed on the Courts of the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial.”

He was awarded the Purple Heart, the Korean Service Medal, the United Nations Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Korean Presidential Unit Citation and the Republic of Korea War Service Medal.

Hansen ended the memorial on Friday with a poem by Major Michael O’Donnell, written just before his deployment to Vietnam where he was killed:

If you are able, save them a place inside of you and save one backward glance when you are leaving for the places they can no longer go. Be not ashamed to say you loved them, though you may or may not have always. Take what they have left and what they have taught you with their dying and keep it with your own. And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind.