CAMBRIDGE -- Bob Sparks woke up one night when he was a little boy and found a stranger in his living room, coming to say goodbye. The man, his uncle, looked just like his dad.

"I said 'Are you a soldier?' and he said, yes, he was going away," Bob Sparks recalled.

"I said 'Where are you going?'" Sparks said. "He said, 'There's a war on, and I'm a soldier."

That soldier, Cambridge native Cpl. Ronald Sparks, left for the Korean War. He went missing in February 1951, while clearing a road that was blocked by enemy forces. He died at age 20 in a prisoner of war camp in North Korea on May 26, 1951.

On Tuesday, Ronald Sparks came home.

There was joy and there were tears as Sparks' body returned to a hero's welcome in his hometown of Cambridge. Buglers played taps, and a police motorcade escorted the hearse as people lined the streets outside Cambridge City Hall waving American flags and saluting. Sparks was escorted past his childhood home in Cambridge to a ceremony at Cambridge City Hall, then through Arlington to a funeral home. He will be buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett on Friday.

"I wish he was walking here and standing right here beside me," said Sparks' older brother Larry Sparks. "But it wasn't meant to be."

Ronald Sparks grew up in Cambridge, attended Cambridge schools, worshipped at the Methodist church and hung out in Central Square and at Magazine Beach. His friends called him "Sparkie." His friend Moses Moore recalled a "quiet kid" who would play basketball with him in the school gym.

When the U.S. went into Korea, Sparks volunteered to fight. When President Dwight Eisenhower negotiated an armistice to end the war, Eisenhower insisted that North Korea return the bodies of all U.S. soldiers to South Korea.

"We prayed and hoped that the best we could ask was that the good Korean people gave him a proper burial," Bob Sparks said.

When Bob Sparks' father, William Sparks, who was Ronald's brother, died in 2005, he asked Bob Sparks from his deathbed to track down Ronald's remains and bring him home.

The U.S. Army had set up a lab in Hawaii to identify fallen soldiers through records and DNA testing. Bob Sparks worked with the Pentagon and the military, and members of the Sparks family submitted DNA.

Family members knew there was little chance they would find Sparks among the remains of 7,800 unidentified Americans killed in Korea.

"It's been a long 65-year journey," said William Sparks, who is Ronald Sparks' nephew. "My brother Bob worked tirelessly for 11 years with the Pentagon ... with the U.S. Army to find Ronnie."

Finally, a couple of months ago, Bob Sparks got the call that U.S. officials had identified Ronald Sparks' body through DNA. "My throat tightened. My eyes welled up, and I had to call back because I couldn't speak," said Bob Sparks. "It was such overwhelming joy. ... I knew that 65 years after falling in the service of his country, 11 years after my dad asked me to find him, we found him, and he was coming home, and today he's home."

Sparks was greeted in his hometown by the Cambridge mayor and vice mayor, the Korean consul general, veterans and strangers.

"When a person is killed in service, it's often referred to as the ultimate sacrifice, but I can't begin to imagine what it's like when that loved one is killed in service and can't return home," said Vice Mayor Marc McGovern. "To not have the opportunity to have that closure, to have that ceremony, it's truly the ultimate sacrifice."

Jack Welch, a Vietnam era Air Force veteran from Cambridge, knows what that is like. It took six years for the body of Welch's father to be returned from Italy, where he was killed during World War II. A welcome home ceremony for a fallen veteran, however many years later, is very important, Welch said moments before the ceremony for Sparks began.

Welch explained, "Your loved one's coming home."