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Pfc Clossie D. Brown was a manager of the Val-U shop.

He enlisted at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana on 8 April 1944.

He was officially declared death one year and one day after he was reported missing and was presumed death. At that time his unit was fighting in the vicinity of Lichtenberg. During an enemy counter-attack the area was subjected to heavy artillery and morat fire while they were pinned down by small arms and machine-gun fire. After his unit had withdraw, Pfc Brown was never seen again.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced Pfc Clossie D. Brown was accounted for on 25 April 2024.

Shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1944, German forces launched a major offensive operation in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace-Lorraine, France, known as Operation Nordwind The German attack surged through Allied defenses along the Franco-German border, and the ensuing battle enveloped two U.S. Corps along a 40-mile-wide front. In the following few weeks, Company F found itself assigned to a 7-mile sector at Reipertswiller and Wildenguth, France. At some point on 21 January 1945, Brown was killed, but due to the intensity of the fighting his body was unable to be recovered. With no record of German forces capturing Brown, and no remains recovered, the War Department issued a “Finding of Death” in January 1946.

Beginning in 1946, the American Graves Registration Command (AGRC), the organization that searched for and recovered fallen American personnel in the European Theater, began looking for missing American personnel in the Reipertswiller area. On 15 June 1947, a French demining unit in the Obermuhlthal forest, northeast of Reiperstwiller, discovered fragmentary human remains and Pfc. Brown’s identification tag. The recovered remains, designated X-5723 Neuville (X-5723), were analyzed, but at the time scientists were unable to make a positive identification. They were interred at the U.S. Military Cemetery at St. Avold, France, known today as Lorraine American Cemetery.

DPAA historians have been conducting in-depth research into Soldiers missing from combat around Wildenguth and Reipertswiller, and believe that the fragmentary remains comprising Unknown X-5723 could be associated with Brown. They also determined that additional remains, designated X-8046 St. Avold, could also represent portions of Brown. In June 2021 and August 2022, Department of Defense and American Battle Monuments Commission workers exhumed X-5723 and X-8046, and transferred the remains to the DPAA Laboratory for analysis.

To identify Brown’s remains, scientists from DPAA used anthropological and other circumstantial evidence. Additionally, scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis.

Brown’s name is recorded on the Walls of the Missing at Epinal American Cemetery. A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for.

Pfc Brown was given his final resting place in Frankfort, Indiana on 24 September 2024.