Sherae Honeycutt

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Original Post

For one Kansas marine, it’s taken 75 years to reach his final resting place. Tuesday, the remains of World War II veteran, Nicholas Gojmerac returned to the metro, and his family was there to welcome him with a heroic homecoming.

“It’s great. I mean, this is something that is being done for us,” Judy Wolfe, Gojmerac’s niece, said. ‘We’ve just been thrilled that we can bring him home.”

Gojmerac grew up in Kansas City, Kansas on Strawberry Hill and went to Wyandotte High school.

Private First Class Gojmerac was assigned to the Fourth Raider Battalion. On July 20, 1943, the Fourth Raiders assaulted a Japanese stronghold at Bairoko Harbor, New Georgia Island, Solomon Islands.

According to U.S. Marine records, during the Battle of New Georgia, Gojmerac was last seen after crawling through heavy fire and providing medical care to a marine while he was also mortally wounded.

Four years later, in 1949, the bodies of 21 unidentified marines were found, and buried in Hawaii. One of the marine’s was known for decades as X-6, and was finally identified as Gojmerac last year.

In 2018, after Gojmerac parents, brother and sisters had died, a knock on Moeller’s door by two Marines brought the closure her family had been looking for. The body known by the Marine Corps as X-6 for 75 years is her Uncle, Private First Class Nicholas Gojmerac.

“It’s a closure, but it’s also a happy moment,” Wolfe said. “He was born in Kansas, he lived in Kansas, and now he’s here in Kansas with his family where he belongs.”

While his parents and most of the family he knew has passed, generations of family members welcomed Nicholas home at KCI.

“It would nave been nicer if this had happened earlier for my grandmother, or my mother and her sisters, and her brother, to have witnessed something of this nature,” Wolfe said. “But it didn’t happen. It happened now. It seems like we have brought the past forward, and these next generations, our generations is really fortunate to witness this.”

Brothers in battle he never knew showed up with their motorcycles to salute him, and escort his remains to Leavenworth National Cemetery where he will have a proper burial will full military honors.