The Veterans Cemetery recognizes its first soldier missing in action and lost during WWII.

At almost 10 years old, the California Central Coast Veterans Cemetery has gone from accepting cremated remains only in 2016 to its first-ever in-ground burial in 2021. In another first for the cemetery, officials will be memorializing a World War II prisoner of war whose remains were never found, in a special ceremony at 9:30am Friday, May 23, three days before Memorial Day.

The soldier being honored is U.S. Army Maj. Harold Stevenson, believed to have died in 1944 off the coast of Japan. The Department of Defense report about what happened to him reads like a horror story.

Stevenson was captured in the Philippines just a few months after Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He was shuffled between POW camps until 1944, when he and thousands of other POWs were forced to board what came to be known as “hell ships,” headed for Japan. Many soldiers died while on board due to harsh conditions.

The unlabeled ships were bombed by U.S. forces, unknowingly targeting their own soldiers. Stevenson survived an attack on the first hell ship he was on but on the second ship, he succumbed to head injuries suffered during a bombing, according to a fellow officer interviewed after the war. The officer said he buried Stevenson at sea.

There are still over 71,000 MIA soldiers from WWII, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission, with most of those being from the War in the Pacific. According to the DoD report, Stevenson’s remains were declared nonrecoverable in 1950, but efforts to find every WWII MIA soldier, including those lost on the hell ships, are ongoing.