HOLYOKE — X-21. For 82 years, that’s what a Holyoke Navy man’s remains were known as. But on Saturday morning, thanks to the doggedness of a retired police chief from Texas and something about the sailor’s teeth, Merle Hillman, pharmacist’s mate 2nd class, comes home at last, to be buried next to his brother at Saint Jerome Cemetery.

Hillman, 25, perished in the earliest moments of Japan’s surprise prewar aerial attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on Dec.7, 1941. His ripped-apart and badly burned body could not be identified, and his remains, along with 52 of his shipmates, were buried in Honolulu as “Unknowns.”

Hillman, who joined the Navy in 1937, had reported to the Battleship USS California in 1939. The flagship of the Pacific Fleet, with a crew of 57 officers and 1,026 men, arrived at Pearl Harbor in 1940. On the “Day of Infamy,” the ship was moored on Battleship Row at Ford Island, its watertight hatches wide open for routine inspection.

The band on the nearby USS Arizona was up on deck getting ready for the morning flag raising. Just a routine day. No one was at war. Yet. Or so everyone thought.

Merle Hillman was last seen in the galley, just before the flame and fury, before the first torpedo hit below the ship’s armor belt, before the 551-pound bomb from above smashed through the main deck, ricocheted off the second deck and detonated in the ship’s interior, setting of stores of ammunition — and blasting some 50 men to bits.

As a medic, Hillman likely would have already been tending to the wounded before that bomb hit.

The California’s crew fought on with valor until a second aerial bomb ruptured the forward fuel tanks and knocked out the electrical system. Thick smoke forced the evacuation of the engine room and the ship flooded and sank in the harbor — 104 killed, 62 wounded, part of the 2,403 Americans who lost their lives in the raid, 1,177 from the Arizona alone. Japanese planes heavily bombed all eight battleships in Battleship Row, sinking four, while destroying 180 U.S. aircraft and a large number of other ships.

Hillman was originally listed as MIA, but that status soon changed to “dead.”

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Hillman’s niece, Cheryl Hillman Quinn, 73, of Holyoke, still has a framed letter sent to her mother from President Franklin D. Roosevelt with condolences on Hillman’s death.

But no flag-draped coffin ever came home.

In 1948, the California’s Unknowns were disinterred and processed at the Central Identification Lab in Hawaii, where technicians were able to identify 30 sailors out of 52. The rest were buried in the Punchbowl — the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific — in Honolulu, catalogued as the so-called “X-files.”

Hillman, all but forgotten, was killed in action at the exact moment that the United States was pulled into World War II.

Though Cheryl Hillman Quinn lives in the same Oak Street house Merle Hillman grew up in, it has not always been in the family. “My parents bought it in 1958 when it became available,” she said. There is nothing of Merle Hillman left behind. He would have just turned 108. “I don’t think there’s anyone in town who’d remember him,” said his niece.

Her son, Brendan Quinn, 43, an Army veteran who served with the 3rd Infantry in Iraq, found out about his uncle and Pearl Harbor from his mom when he was 9 or 10.

“The man is my hero,” said Brendan Quinn. “There’s a lot of pride there; I’ve been looking up to him my whole life. I joined the Army because of Uncle Merle. I enlisted at age 21, just like him.”

As a kid, Quinn sought to learn as much as he could about his hero, but when he tried to get his grandfather (Merle Hillman’s brother Donald) to talk about him, he knew he struck a nerve.

“No one knew how much it hurt my Grandpa,” said Brendan Quinn. “He never talked about his brother. It was very difficult for him to speak about it. It was his kid brother.”

“We don’t have much information on Uncle Merle at all,” said Cheryl Hillman Quinn. “The Holyoke Library has his 1933 high school yearbook. We know he liked singing and acting and that his favorite song was ‘Louise’ by Maurice Chevalier.”

No reason was given as to why he enlisted in 1937, four years before Pearl Harbor, when an entire generation mobilized for war. “It was the middle of the Depression,” said Brendan Quinn. “My guess is he needed money to send home.”

We know he was about 5-foot-7 and weighed 150 pounds. That he was born in Chicopee in 1916, that his mother died at age 25 when he was a baby, that he was raised by his grandparents, Peter and Agnes Provost of Holyoke.

He also had a daughter, Marjorie, born the year he joined the Navy, but not much was spoken about that. “People were very close-mouthed back then,” said Cheryl Quinn. The child was raised by Hillman’s sister, also named Marjorie, and she died in 2009. The sailor also ended up with three granddaughters and a great-great grandson.

He began his time in the Navy as an apprentice seaman and listed his grandmother as next of kin. He started on the California as a hospital attendant and was promoted to pharmacist’s mate 2nd class in 1941.

“I know he was well-liked,” said Brendan Quinn. “He was a medic — a medic is always well-liked.”

But there were no flesh and blood memories of Merle Hillman, just an old photo or two, the rest forever buried in dust in a faraway graveyard in Hawaii. X-21.

As for what happened next, the Quinns give a lot of credit to Rick Stone, a retired police chief from Texas who, through his Family Charitable Foundation, has made it his life’s work to match the remains of the war’s Unknowns to someone who fought and died. Combining law enforcement technology with that used to identify victims of terrorism or plane crashes, Stone, who was appointed chief naval historian in 2019, crunches databases and hunts for clues.

It was Stone, as early as 2011, who urged the Department of Defense to exhume X-21’s remains.

A key, and the main reason Stone pressed for the exhumation, were the sailor’s dental charts, which showed that he received extensive dental work on another ship in June of 1941, not to mention his “multiple extractions and fillings at the time of enlistment.”

The severity of the explosion that killed those 22 men made identification next to impossible. Some crew members’ remains could have fit inside a helmet.

But Stone knew that the remains of X-21 included a skull, and urged that those remains be disinterred and a full forensic exam conducted.

Meanwhile, Merle Hillman’s blood relatives were tapped by the Defense Department for a certain procedure, not thought to be much of anything at the time. Cheryl Quinn and her cousin Merle, who was born a few weeks after Pearl Harbor and named for her uncle, scraped their cheeks and sent some DNA the government’s way. “Then we kind of forgot about it,” said Hillman Quinn. “It’s been 12 years.”

X-21 was finally exhumed in 2018 and sent to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory with others from the Punchbowl.

Despite pressure from Stone and his team, the lab took some time, six years in fact. It has a bit of a workload — there are still active recoveries of casualties going back to land battles from World War II.

But in November the Quinns got a phone call that there was a DNA match. On Dec. 7, of all dates, two sailors came to the house, said Brendan Quinn, “and finally gave us the answers we’ve been waiting for all these years.”

“We saw photographs of his remains, a skull and some of his bones,” said Cheryl Hillman Quinn. “So amazing!”

When Brendan Quinn called Rick Stone with the news, he cried, “It was X-21, wasn’t it? I KNEW it!”

“Welcome home Sailor!” wrote Stone on Hillman’s memorial page. “We share the joy of your family in your return!”

Pharmacist’s Mate 2nd Class Merle Hillman was coming home. In style.

“Mom and I were talking about Uncle Merle’s homecoming,” said Brendan Quinn. “We wanted a hero’s welcome, 82 years in the making.”

Holyoke has honored Merle Hillman at other Pearl Harbor remembrances, but nothing like this.

It started Wednesday night at 6:30 when the family met a plane at Bradley International Airport. “So moving,” said Cheryl Quinn when she saw the flag-draped coffin. “He’s finally coming home.”

At Hillman’s side the whole way, from putting the coffin on the plane in Hawaii to disembarking at Bradley Airport to the drive to Barry J. Farrell Funeral Home, was Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Jonathan Shewchuk of Holyoke, a Navy mortician who often accompanies fallen service members on their last voyage.

“He’s a Holyoke boy bringing home a Holyoke boy,” said Cheryl Hillman Quinn, who asked Shewchuk if any of that was coincidental.

“Oh, I may have twisted some arms,” came the reply.

The family had an escort from police and veterans groups. “I’ve never felt anything like it,” said Cheryl Quinn. “We came in by Whiting Farms Road, and there’s the Fire Department, all the trucks out front, everyone saluting as we passed in the fog.”

“Such a flood of emotions,” she said. “I never thought this would happen. We thought it was over and done.”

Calling hours start at 9 a.m. Saturday, followed by a ceremony at 10 and an 11 a.m. burial with full military honors at Saint Jerome Cemetery. Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia will be among the speakers.

“They’ll give him a 21-gun salute,” said Cheryl Quinn. “Governor Healey has ordered all state flags at half-staff, sunrise to sunset. Everybody I’ve talked to can’t believe it!”

Brendan Quinn said that this is one funeral where sadness doesn’t enter into it.

“It’s a happy day,” he said. “Uncle Merle will be buried in the same plot as my grandparents.”

“It’s been a long time coming; I’m happy for my mom,” said Quinn, who will deliver his uncle’s eulogy. “It’s not every day you’re given the honor of speaking at your hero’s memorial service. Since I’ve been in the military, this is top of the list.”

“He was truly part of the Greatest Generation,” said Quinn, who’ll send off Merle Hillman this morning by thanking his uncle for his service and wishing him “fair winds and following seas.”