My great-uncle, Ingwell Vernon Bartleson, was born in Lake Mills, Iowa, in 1907. On February 10 of that year, he was baptized as Ingvald Petter Bartleson at Bristol Lutheran Church in Lake Mills. Many years later he was living and working in Cut Bank, Montana, when he was drafted into the Army in 1941 and assigned to the 194th Tank Battalion.
Ingwell survived the Bataan Death March. As a prisoner of war, he was sent to a work detail on Luzon in the Philippines, where he died of malaria and dysentery on June 12, 1942. He was 35. For more than eight decades his family did not know where he rested. This past March, his remains were identified from a mass grave.
On Wednesday, November 11 — Veterans Day — Ingwell will finally come home. He will be laid to rest near his parents at Glacier Memorial Gardens in Kalispell, Montana. My father, Ingwell's nephew, has been leading the family's preparations. As an ELCA pastor, I have the honor of presiding over the religious portion of the graveside service.
I have been holding the two ends of his story together: the promise God made to him at the font in 1907, and the committal we will speak over him 119 years later. He was claimed as a child of God long before the war, and nothing that happened to him in the Philippines undid that claim. It moves me deeply that the church that welcomed him in baptism will also be the one to commend him to God and lay him to rest.
