Fifty-eight years ago, on the banks of a muddy river in the Philippine jungle, a 28-year-old Cartersville man begged a fellow soldier to grant a dying wish.

"I want you do something for me," Howard Leachman told a startled Glenn Frazier.   "I'm dying."

Both men were prisoners of war, captured during the Japanese conquest of the Philippines.   They had survived the infamous Bataan Death March, only to be put to work as slave laborers on a road detail.   Leachman, gasping to speak, fished out from his mud-caked wallet a worn photograph of a baby boy.   "This is my son who was born after I left Fort Benning," he said.   "I want you to promise to go back and make sure he's being taken care of, tell him about me, how much I loved him."

Frazier, then just 17, made the promise.   Last week, he finally kept it.   He met Leachman's son, Howard Marshall, a 60-year-old Atlanta scientist, in an emotional reunion that has helped both men come to grips with a painful past and provided Marshall the unexpected chance to meet many of his father's relatives, people he hadn't known existed.

The men's meeting was "very painful, but also wonderful," Marshall says.   "Learning how he died --- that my daddy was thinking of me, even after all he went through."   "I never thought it would happen," adds Frazier, 75, a decorated Army veteran who drove from Florida to Marshall's home in Lithia Springs for their first meeting.   "At times Marshall would walk off toward the wall and cry.   I even cried myself.   This was one of the most gratifying things I've ever done."

Frazier made the promise to Marshall's father during one of the darkest periods of World War II.   Frazier and Leachman had been captured along with more than 10,000 other GIs on the Philippines' Bataan Peninsula, just months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.   Their forced march to a prisoner of war camp, lethal to thousands of soldiers, became known as the Bataan Death March.

Both were plucked out of the surviving POW pool for a 306-man work detail to hack a road out of the jungle. In less than three months of work, more than half of them, including Leachman, died of malaria, dysentery, dengue fever, starvation or exhaustion.   Frazier eventually was transferred to a POW camp in Japan.

Returning to the United States after the war ended in 1945, he contacted the Leachman family in Cartersville.   Frazier was assured that the child was being well cared for, but the family didn't want to discuss the still raw subject of Leachman's death.   Which meant Frazier wasn't able to tell the son about the dying man's last requests, an important part of his promise.

Frazier figured he'd done all he could.

By that time, Marshall was living with his mother, who had married another man, in a distant part of Georgia.   Time and circumstance soon obscured his Cartersville connections.   Marshall eventually earned a doctorate in marine sciences, married and had children of his own.   Today he works for the Environmental Protection Agency, living just 30 miles from Cartersville in Atlanta's western suburbs.

He's not sure why, but earlier this year, Marshall felt "a real pulling urge" to try to find out about his biological father.

"I had sort of avoided it for a long time," he says. "Mama had told me he was dead.   But a few months ago I started reading all I could about Bataan, hoping I could find out something about my daddy.   I couldn't find anything."

Then serendipity --- Marshall calls it "blind luck" --- intervened.

Marshall and his wife, Gail, were visiting a friend who's a genealogist, and they mentioned his quest to find some information about his father.   "She went into her computer and a day or two later called me back with information," Marshall says.   "She told me he was listed as MIA, which was disturbing because it was contrary to what Mama had said.   I'd grown up thinking he was buried in Manila."

Marshall, doing some research of his own, found out about Michael Norman, a New York University professor who was researching the work detail that claimed Leachman's life.   Norman e-mailed Marshall the names of nine known survivors of the work detail.

One was Paul Reuter, a leader of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor veterans group.   Marshall contacted him.   "He took my information and said, 'If I'm ever talking to someone who was there, I'll ask them about your daddy."

A day later, by chance, Frazier called Reuter for some information regarding an article in a veterans' newsletter.   Reuter asked Frazier for any names he remembered from the work detail.   "Leachman," Frazier replied.

"Well, you're not going to believe this, but I just talked to Leachman's son yesterday, "Reuter told him.   "He's in the Atlanta area."   Frazier, who says he had "never stopped thinking" about his unfulfilled promise, called Marshall right away.

"He liked to have fainted, and so did I," Frazier says.   "I could tell he needed answers to those little-boy questions inside him about his daddy.   And I knew I could tell him things he didn't know."

What Frazier told him was horrific, Marshall says.   "There was malaria and dysentery and dengue fever.   No-good food, and not enough of that.   They slept on wet sand at night, with heinous clouds of mosquitoes.   And Frazier was right there when he died."

Then Frazier told Marshall about his father's last moments, a hard story for the old veteran to tell and for the son to hear.   Stricken and separated from Frazier, Leachman desperately asked friends to get his buddy.   Frazier sneaked past Japanese guards to find the dying man.

"He was gasping.   He was sort of delirious but said, "I want you to do something for me."   He showed me this picture and begged me to check after the baby . . . .   "I had to leave, but in a day or two I got word again.   Guys told me, "You better go now; he's about gone."

They were right.

"He sort of whispered, "Please do as you promised,"   "Frazier remembers.  "I said, "I will."   He said, 'Now I'll die in peace."   It was just a minute or so, and I couldn't get a pulse."

Now both men want to have Leachman's body located, exhumed, identified and returned to Cartersville.   According to Norman, the NYU professor, 118 of the 306 men on the work detail survived, and it's a mystery where the others are buried.   Some were probably removed to a cemetery in Manila, buried under "unknown" tombstones.   But 20 or more might still lie beneath the flood plain of the Basaid River, Norman says.   The Army's Central Identification Laboratory, the outfit that has found and identified many remains from Korea and Vietnam, is planning to return to the site because Frazier and other survivors have provided new evidence about where Leachman and others may be buried.

"It would be a miracle to find him, but anything's possible," Norman says.   Marshall --- and his newfound uncles, aunts and cousins --- are optimistic.   "We want him home," the son says.   "We all want him home.   And in the family plot, with his mother and father.   And we're going to make every effort to get him there."

Frazier is eager to help, and almost gleeful that he was at last able to fulfill his promise completely.   "I feel I got more out of this than Howard," he says.   "I got a lasting friend, and I have done my duty."