(WSBT) South Bend joined the nation Sunday to remember an often forgotten toll of war: America's prisoners of war and those who never came home at all.

More than 88,000 American servicemen and servicewomen are still classified as "missing in action." Their families are forced to wait, wonder and hope. Sunday at South Bend's military honor park at the South Bend Regional Airport, they weren't waiting alone.

At the somber ceremony, there was no flag draped casket, no grave side marker, and no memorial. Just an empty chair at an empty table, and a promise filled with hope.

"We can never forget those still missing in action," said ceremony organizer Gennie Pickins of the VFW Ladies Auxiliary Post 1167. "They're being forgotten. They're not trying hard enough to get all of our soldiers home. We need to keep trying and trying to get those soldiers home."

It is a charge South Bend-based retired Army Private Harry Miller lives with each and every day. The moment he was captured in Germany in 1944 is still fresh in his mind. The six months and one day he spent as a POW are a daily reminder of the struggles America has endured. His thoughts are never far from those he served with who never came home.

"You don't realize what we went through," Miller said. "The food, the starvation, the marches of hundreds of miles. When they acknowledged me as a prisoner of war [Sundy night], I got a tear in my eye because not many people do that anymore. They forget," he trailed off. "They forget."

But at the ceremony, there are promises.

"We write no last chapters, we close no books, we put away no memories," said the ceremony's keynote speaker, Master Sergeant Thomas Lustik, Command Chief in the United State Air Force (Ret.), echoing the words President Reagan spoke when establishing national POW/MIA remembrance day in 1980.

Throughout South Bend's ceremony Sunday, there were visual reminders of the remembrance as well, from an empty, but set, table with an empty chair to a 60 foot by 30 foot flag flown over the U.S. capital as the National POW/MIA flag.