The Marines standing guard near the USS West Virginia covered their ears.
Something inside the sunken battleship kept banging – and nobody could do a thing about it.
What salvage crews found inside that hull six months later is the most haunting story Pearl Harbor ever produced.
The USS West Virginia Sailor Who Spent 84 Years Buried as Unknown
Royle Luker was aboard the USS West Virginia on the morning of December 7, 1941.
He was one of 105 men killed when Japanese torpedoes and bombs tore through the battleship in the first minutes of the attack.
Salvage crews pulled roughly 70 bodies from the wreckage.
Thirty-four of them went into the ground without names.
Luker was one of them.
His grave marker said "Unknown" for eight decades while his family in Arkansas waited – first for news, then for closure, then for something they couldn't quite name.
The tapping is the detail that stays with you.
After the West Virginia settled onto the shallow harbor floor, rescuers heard sailors knocking from inside the sealed hull.
Three men – Ronald Endicott, 18; Clifford Olds, 20; and Louis Costin, 21 – had survived in a locked storeroom.
Crews couldn't reach them.
The men were sitting directly above live ammunition, and no cutting tool existed that wouldn't risk igniting the whole harbor.
Marines stood guard near the hull so they wouldn't have to hear the banging all night.
The tapping went on for sixteen days.
When salvage crews raised the ship six months later, they found a calendar on the storeroom shelf with a red X scratched through every date from December 7 to December 23.
Royle Luker had already been gone long before then.
How DNA Testing Finally Identified a Pearl Harbor Unknown
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency – the government office responsible for recovering and identifying Americans lost in combat – began disinterring 35 caskets associated with West Virginia unknowns from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in 2017.
Forensic technology that didn't exist in 1941 made identification possible.
DNA analysis, dental records, anthropological examination – the science caught up to the commitment.
The agency confirmed Luker's identity on May 29, 2024.
He enlisted in June 1941 and never saw his 18th birthday.
On May 30, Rear Adm. Michael Van Poots will preside over full military honors at New Bethel Cemetery in Plainview – the same Arkansas town Luker left to join the Navy.
He will be buried beside his parents, including his father George F. Luker – a World War I veteran who never imagined his son would follow him into a war and not come home.
72,000 Men Still Waiting
Luker's homecoming is one piece of a promise America is still working to keep.
More than 72,000 Americans who died in World War II remain unaccounted for today.
Every single one of them was someone's son.
Luker spent 84 years as an unknown.
He came home because forensic science advanced, because the DPAA made it a priority, and because a country decided its obligation to these men doesn't expire.
His face stares out from his Navy photograph – young, clear-eyed, no idea what was coming.
He signed up six months before his country needed him most and gave everything he had.
Ronald Endicott, Clifford Olds, and Louis Costin counted off sixteen days in the dark and went down with the ship they'd already given everything to defend.
Memorial Day exists for days like Friday in Plainview, Arkansas.
A Navy Rear Admiral standing over a headstone that finally has a name.
A family burying their boy next to his parents – eighty-four years late, but home.
That is what America owes every one of them.
Sources:
- Mark Tanos, "Arkansas Teen Sailor Killed At Pearl Harbor Will Finally Be Laid To Rest After Nearly 85 Years," The Daily Caller, May 24, 2026.
- Wyatt Olson, "17-year-old sailor killed in 1941 Pearl Harbor attack to be buried with honors," Stars and Stripes, May 21, 2026.
- "Teen sailor killed aboard USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor identified after 82 years through DNA analysis," Fox News, May 2026.
- "16 days to die at Pearl Harbor: Families weren't told about sailors trapped inside sunken battleship," The Seattle Times, December 7, 2016.
- Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, USS West Virginia case files, dpaa.mil.
- "America's Promise to Never Forget: Inside the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency," GovFacts, July 2025.