Family gets brother's dog tag 63 years after soldier's death

ROY — Darrel Thorsted, a U.S. soldier in World War II, survived the Bataan Death March but didn't last as a prisoner in the Philippines.

"They just starved him to death," said a sister, Margaret Strevay, 79.

His family in Ogden never recovered his body. But they recently received one of Thorsted's dog tags — 63 years after his death — from a Filipino immigrant in Texas who found it in a cave and kept it in her wallet.

"We were so surprised. I guess it was just meant to be," Strevay said Tuesday. "I feel like it was a miracle, and my brothers feel the same way."

The tag, etched with Thorsted's name and serial number, was accompanied by a letter from Lourdes McLaughlin of Austin, Texas.

"I have carried Darrel's dog tag for 50 years, since I found it as a child in my dad's property in the mountains near Baguio City, Philippines, hoping that one day his family could get it," she wrote. "I'm sure Darrel would have wanted it that way."

McLaughlin, 10 at the time, found it in a cave where Thorsted was thought to have been held after capture.

She kept the discovery hidden from older playmates for fear they would take it in exchange for common Japanese bullets elsewhere on her father's land.

McLaughlin tracked down the Thorsted family in Utah with the help of a genealogist.

She sent the tag to Darrel's 86-year-old brother, Chester "Chet" Thorsted of Roy, a retired Air Force civilian worker. Another brother, Paul Thorsted, 83, and Strevay still reside in Ogden.

McLaughlin was reminded of her promise to return the dog tag in May, when she came across a story in the Austin American-Statesman about a picture of an unknown soldier in an antique shop.

Darrel Thorsted's family last saw him on a brief Army leave in 1939, before he was sent to Hawaii and then the Philippines. His family didn't learn he was overseas until 1941, when he wrote a letter saying he had married a Filipino woman and had two children.

Thorsted told his siblings he wanted to send his wife and sons to the United States. They didn't make the move, however, until long after his death.

His widow, now deceased, remarried in the 1950s and moved to San Antonio.

Thorsted's siblings had only a picture of his flag-draped coffin. They never learned where he was buried and could only guess he was given a grave site in the Philippines.

That's why the dog tag means so much.

"We can't believe that after all these years we'd secure anything of Darrel's," Strevay said.