Search restores lost dog tags to family of vet - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Search restores lost dog tags to family of vet

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Rob Boyce lifted the top off the secondhand board game he’d just paid $2 for at Goodwill in the Mountaineer Mall.

Little Jason wanted it.

In fact, as the Boyce family strolled past the store on their way to Walmart that early spring day in 2008, the toddler saw the toys all stacked up and irresistible in the Goodwill window and took off toward the store.

Of course, the family followed.

“There was this board game I wish I could remember the name of it but I mean, it didn’t even have all its pieces,” Boyce, 28, said one morning just before Memorial Day, as he began to tell the saga of Leland Harless’ dog tags.

“Jason’s 4 now, so he must’ve just been about 2 then, but he wanted that game so bad because it had these little figurines in it. I said, OK, let’s get it.’ I think I paid two bucks for it.”

Once they got home, Boyce opened the game, checking for anything small enough for a child to choke on when he heard a rattle. He took out the game pieces, lifted the game board and, nestled beneath the cardboard at the bottom of the box, he saw two lightweight metal tags attached to a chain.

He lifted them up.

What are these?

It was another spring day.

It was 1945 and, at long last, the battles of World War II had ceased.

Those who fought and survived were coming home.

Betty Harless, 9, and her brother Jack, 7, were playing outside their small house in Itmann, southwest of Beckley, when they saw a soldier walking up the hill. He was toting a duffel bag and he was smiling at them. The children yelled for Mother and started running.

“We were so looking forward to Daddy coming home,” Betty Harless Lilly, 73, said with a voice full of memory.

“We lived in a coal camp back then and there were tons of houses all in rows. And me and Jack saw him coming up the road. I guess he took the bus in. But our house was at least five rows back and he was walking in through there.”

At that point, she paused her story long enough to allow two children from 65 years ago to run into their father’s arms once again.

“Then, of course, Daddy came in the house,” she said. “There was all this excitement.

“In the letters we would get, which weren’t too often,” Lilly said, “he would say he couldn’t wait to get home and that he had surprises for us. But we were all just so excited that we didn’t even think about what was in the duffel bag for a while.”

But soon they did.

When the welcome died down, U.S. Army Pfc. Leland Harless opened his duffel bags to retrieve the gifts he’d brought home for his family and found nothing inside but another soldier’s clothing.

“There was nothing in that bag,” said Lilly, who now lives in Quiet Dell outside Clarksburg. “It wasn’t his and there was no name in it. Daddy said that when they got ready to leave (Germany), everybody’s bags were just sitting there and they all grabbed one and left. He just grabbed the wrong one.

“And I don’t know why, but he’d left his dog tags in his duffel bag. Normally they wore them all the time. But he’d taken his off and he’d put them in that bag.”

The metals dangling from the beaded chain in Rob Boyce’s hand were stainless steel and printed with a name: Leland B. Harless.

Beneath the name was an I.D. number and a blood type.

“At first I thought they were just toy dog tags you’d get made somewhere,” Rob Boyce explained. “But then I started looking at them and I thought, well, those looked kind of real.”

So Boyce, a technician with the engineering department at Ruby Memorial Hospital, decided to find Leland B. Harless or at least someone who loved him. He thought it would set a good example for his three sons Austin, 11; Cris, 6; and, of course, Jason, 4.

The search took him nearly a year and a half.

“Austin had wanted to keep them because he thought they were cool. You know, little boys and Army stuff, what’s cooler than that? But I wanted to see who they belonged to. If they were my Pap’s or somebody I loved, I’d have liked to have them back.”

Since the tags were found at a local Goodwill store, Boyce thought perhaps the soldier came from somewhere around Morgantown. He started with the local phone book. No luck.

“I can’t remember if there were even any Harlesses in there,” Boyce said. “I ended up getting on the Internet. I was just calling people in West Virginia. I must have called 40 different people asking questions and nobody knew anything.

“Most people just hung up on me because I was asking personal questions. I would’ve hung up on myself, too, but I didn’t want to just come out and say I have these dog tags’ because somebody would be like, Oh, yeah. Those are mine.’“

Boyce expanded his search, talking with “countless people.” But no one he called said they knew of a Leland Harless.

Finally, the dog tags ended up in a desk drawer where they stayed for months.

“Then a couple weeks before Thanksgiving (2009), I was in the drawer and I found them again. I said, OK, I gotta find out who these belong to.’“

Boyce went back to the Internet, but this time he stumbled upon a genealogy website. He made some inquiries and before long, he found a phone number for a Jack Harless in Durham, N.C.

He called a few times. No answer. Then just before Thanksgiving, Boyce was standing outside Target when he took out his cell phone and dialed the Harless number once again.

“His wife answered,” Boyce said. “She was so nice. Jack wasn’t there, but I was asking her all these questions and she kept answering them one after another. She didn’t even ask why or who the heck I was. Anyway, every question was a Yes.’ I thought, these have got to be theirs.

“Finally, I said, Hey, I have these dog tags.’“

That afternoon, Boyce’s phone rang. It was Leland B. Harless’ son, Jack.

Boyce said: “He told me a story about how his dad’s duffel bag never came back from the war. I said, Well, for sure, these tags are yours.’”

Jack Harless didn’t tell his sister Betty about the dog tags. He was days from making his annual trip to Clarksburg for Thanksgiving dinner and he decided to make the tags a surprise.

Rob Boyce had offered to meet Harless in Clarksburg, so Jack gave Boyce Lilly’s phone number and an approximate time to call.

But Harless was late.

“Jack didn’t tell me anything,” Lilly said. “All he would say was, Betty, I’ve got a surprise for you.’ Well, my brother is a big jokester and I thought, what is he gonna do?”

Betty’s birthday was getting close. She’d played a trick on Jack on his 50th birthday and it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps this was the year he’d decided to reciprocate. “So I thought, oh no, he’s gonna do something.”

Of course, as it turned out, it was a different sort of surprise.

Harless was delayed getting to Clarksburg, so he hadn’t arrived yet when the telephone rang.

“Rob called,” Lilly said.

Boyce asked for Jack. Lilly said he wasn’t there.

Then Rob Boyce said: “Well, I wanted to make arrangements to get the dog tags to him.”

“I said, What? What are you talking about?’ And he told me he had found Daddy’s dog tags. And I started crying. I did, I just started boo-hooing because it was ... Because it was ...”

Even today Betty Lilly is filled with emotion when she thinks about that day and its connection with the past.

“Daddy had said it was so disorganized that day they left Germany,” she said. “He was so lucky. He was in the infantry. He was on the front line. His best friend, his buddy they called them their buddy I have a picture of him. Daddy called him Harbert because everybody called each other by their last name.

“We found out this Harbert lived in Rutherford, which is just a half hour from here. We went over and visited with him and, oh my goodness! You should have seen their joy. They talked and they talked and they talked. It was so nice.

“Harbert has since died. And, of course, Daddy died in ’81.”

Lilly said Leland B. Harless died at 68 from black lung and emphysema he got from his years in the coal mines before he was drafted and from circulation problems. After the war, he’d been a salesman and a police officer.

Lilly said her mother, Violet Harless, died less than a year before her husband’s dog tags came back to them.

As it turned out, when Lilly and Boyce talked on the phone that day before Thanksgiving, they discovered that Boyce and Lilly’s daughter Tomi work on the same floor at Ruby Memorial Hospital. In fact, Tomi was able to get the dog tags from Boyce and bring them to Clarksburg.

Lilly said it was Tomi who laid the tags in her mother’s hand and rejoiced with her when she cried.

She also said maybe it was meant to be that Boyce was the one to surprise her instead of Jack.

“It all worked out for the best,” Lilly said. “When (everyone) got here, we all had these stories to tell and the showing of the dog tags.

“I could not thank Rob enough. Jack and I both, we could not believe that he would take the time to go into such detail to find who those dog tags belonged to. He could have just tossed them.

“But he had the heart. He has such a wonderful heart. And I don’t even know him.”

Lilly and Harless talked it over and decided to give their dad’s dog tags to Lilly’s son, Tim, for safekeeping. Although Leland was close to all his grandchildren, he and Tim seemed to have a special bond.

Back in Morgantown, Rob Boyce is pleased with the way his quest turned out.

He found it amusing that Lilly’s daughter works down the hall from him.

“I was like, I’ve been hunting for over a year and I’ve been walking past this person in the hallway every day.”

And he’s glad he was persistent.

“Everybody was saying, I would have just thrown those things away.’ They looked at me like I was crazy. But I was more or less trying to keep in mind that I wanted to set a good example for my boys.”

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Information from: The Dominion Post, http://www.dominionpost.com