Pvt. Joseph C. Carbone is finally back at his mother’s side.
The remains of the fallen Brooklyn Marine were laid to rest Saturday — 74 years after he was killed during the Battle of Tarawa — in the Queens burial plot his mother purchased years ago adjacent to her own.
Nancy Carbone never saw her son come home from World War II, but never gave up hope.
“He’s gonna walk through that door one day — I know he is,” she would tell her family, said niece MaryAnn Filippelli, 64. “When my grandfather passed away . . . She bought three burial plots knowing that if she didn’t get to see him come home, he was coming home to her that way. Now he’s being buried with them.”
“It’s bittersweet, but more sweet,” she said. “For 74 years our family — and [especially] when my grandparents were alive — was every day talking about Uncle Joe. No one’s ever forgotten about him. He was the one that we spoke most about during the holidays. Our children know all about him.”
The solemn ceremony at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, complete with 21-gun salute, followed a celebration of Carbone’s life.
He was killed in action Nov. 20, 1943, during the fierce four-day Battle of Tarawa. But his remains could not be found, and were only recently identified through DNA. They were returned Friday.
Hundreds paid their respects during a star-spangled sendoff from the Scarpaci Funeral Home in Bensonhurst, not far from Carbone’s childhood home on Gold Street. Members of the Marine Corps League and two veterans’ motorcycle clubs paid their respects.
At the Basilica of Regina Pacis in Bensonhurst, Nancy Lewis, the niece whose dogged DNA quest helped identify Carbone, led the family procession. Marines carried the flag-draped casket to the strains of “America the Beautiful.”