The Story of Sgt. Frank Praytor

“In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.” — José Narosky

On this Memorial Day, when we pause to honor those who gave their lives in service to our country, I find myself drawn not just to the names etched in stone or the solemn rows of white crosses, but to a single image: a black-and-white photograph taken in Korea in 1953. A Marine sits in the mud of a makeshift trench, his pistol at his side, his helmet on his knee. In his hands is a tiny orphaned kitten, and he is using a medicine dropper to feed her. The Marine is Sgt. Frank Praytor. The kitten’s name is “Mis Hap.”

The photo became famous—circulated around the world and published in Life magazine—as a symbol of unexpected tenderness in a brutal war. It offered a glimpse of compassion in the midst of chaos, a reminder that humanity survives even on the bloodied edges of conflict. The image would later help define the Korean War in popular memory, a “forgotten war” made suddenly more intimate through a moment of care.

What few people know is the full story behind that photograph—and the man behind the camera.

Frank Praytor was a journalist before he was a Marine. Born in 1927, he had been a copy boy for The Birmingham News, and while attending Birmingham Southern College he was a sports writer for The Birmingham Age-Herald. When war broke out, he volunteered for the Marine Corps, and thanks to his background, he was assigned to a press unit where he worked as a combat correspondent and photographer.

His job was to document the war—but his heart was never far from the human stories unfolding around him. When a fellow Marine’s cat was killed by a mortar shell, two orphaned kittens were left behind. Praytor took one in, fed her, cared for her, and named her “Miss Hap”—a play on “mishap,” the unfortunate accident that orphaned her. He later joked that she had “earned her name by almost being stepped on a dozen times.”

The photo of Praytor and Mis Hap would become an emblem of compassion, but it nearly cost him his career. According to later accounts, he was almost court-martialed by a commanding officer who believed the photo projected weakness and distracted from the image of Marine toughness. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. The Marine Corps ultimately embraced the image, recognizing that in an age of rising television and photojournalism, humanity had become part of wartime narrative. Praytor was spared, and the photograph went on to become one of the most reproduced images of the Korean War.

After the war, Frank returned home and continued his life in journalism, working for The Albuquerque Tribune and The Associated Press. He married, raised a family, and remained a storyteller at heart. He died in 2018 at the age of 90.

Sgt. Frank Praytor didn’t die in war, but he gave a part of himself to it. His service—like so many others—was not only in bullets and orders, but in moments of grace. On Memorial Day, we rightly remember the fallen, but we also honor those who carried the burden home. Some came back with wounds you could see. Others carried scars deeper and quieter. Men like Praytor showed us that even in war, gentleness is not weakness. It is courage of another kind.

And sometimes, the most lasting legacy of a soldier is not a battle won, but a kitten fed.