09/04/2026
After 84 Years, New Mexico National Guardsman Comes Home
By Hank Minitrez, New Mexico National Guard Public Affairs Director
PORTALES, N.M. — Eighty-four years after his death in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines, a New Mexico National Guardsman who survived the Bataan Death March is finally coming home.
U.S. Army Sgt. Melvin E. Jones, a member of Battery E, 200th Coast Artillery Regiment (Anti-Aircraft), will be laid to rest with full military honors at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 15, at Portales Cemetery.
Jones was born Oct. 17, 1919, in Clayton, New Mexico, to Charlie Clay Jones and Justina Miranda Brooks.
A member of the New Mexico National Guard, Jones served with the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment, whose service in the Philippines during World War II became one of the defining chapters in the history of the New Mexico National Guard.
The 200th Coast Artillery arrived in the Philippines in September 1941 and was stationed at Fort Stotsenburg near Clark Field. When Japanese forces attacked the Philippines in December 1941, Jones and his fellow Guardsmen were thrust into the defense of the islands.
The regiment was eventually ordered to the Bataan Peninsula, where its Soldiers joined American and Filipino forces fighting to hold a defensive perimeter against the Japanese advance.
After months of combat, disease, dwindling food supplies and little hope of reinforcement, U.S. forces on Bataan surrendered April 9, 1942.
Jones was among the thousands of American and Filipino service members taken prisoner.
He survived the Bataan Death March, the brutal forced movement of prisoners from the peninsula into captivity, and was eventually interned at Cabanatuan Prison Camp in Nueva Ecija on the island of Luzon.
Conditions inside the camp were devastating. Prisoners suffered from severe overcrowding, malnutrition and disease.
On July 28, 1942, a little more than three months after the surrender of Bataan, Jones died of malaria. He was 22 years old.
Jones was buried alongside other prisoners in a communal grave designated Common Grave 215.
Following World War II, the American Graves Registration Service recovered remains from the grave.
Complications surrounding the original burials and subsequent recovery, however, prevented the identification of a number of those who had died there, including Jones.
The unidentified remains were eventually interred at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines, while Jones' name was inscribed on the cemetery's Walls of the Missing.
For decades, that was where his story remained.
Then, more than 75 years after his death, advances in forensic science provided another opportunity to bring him home.
In June 2018, as part of the Cabanatuan Project, unidentified remains associated with Common Grave 215 were exhumed and transferred to a laboratory for examination.
Scientists used modern forensic techniques and historical evidence in an effort to put names to the remains of the American service members who had died in captivity so many decades earlier.
On Sept. 23, 2025, Jones was officially accounted for.
More than eight decades after a 22-year-old New Mexico National Guardsman died thousands of miles from home, the long journey that began in the Philippines is finally ending in New Mexico.
On Sept. 15, Sgt. Melvin E. Jones will be laid to rest on New Mexico soil with the military honors he earned through his service and sacrifice.
For generations, his name stood among the missing.
Now, after 84 years, one of New Mexico's own is finally coming home.
