Generations of American families have grown up not knowing exactly what happened to their family members who died in service to their country in World War II and other conflicts.
But a federal lab hidden above the bowling alley at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha and a sister lab in Hawaii are answering these open questionswith the aim of offering 200 families annually the chance to honor their relatives with a fitting funeral.
“Maybe they weren’t even alive when the soldier was alive, but that story gets passed down from generation to generation,” said Carrie Brown, lab director on the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Offutt. “Maybe they saw a picture of that person on the mantel as a child and didn’t really understand or know who they were.”
Memorial Day and the upcoming eightieth anniversary of D-Day on June 6 remind us of the urgency of Brown’s work. The forensic anthropologists, health workers and historians who’re working together to discover lost soldiers are in a race against time because the stays buried on battlefields across the globe proceed to deteriorate.
But due to advances in DNA technology and modern techniques equivalent to comparing bones with chest X-rays taken by the military, labs are in a position to discover more missing soldiers annually. About 72,000 soldiers from World War II remain missing, together with about 10,000 more from all conflicts since then. Experts estimate that about half of those might be recovered.
The agency identified 59 military personnel in 2013, when the Offutt lab opened. That number has steadily increased — 159 military personnel last yr, up from 134 in 2022 — and the labs have set a goal of constructing 200 identifications annually.
Thanks to the labs’ work, Donna Kennedy was in a position to bury her cousin, Cpl. Charles Ray Patten, this month with full military honors in the identical cemetery in Lawson, Missouri, where his father and grandfather are buried. Patten died 74 years ago in the course of the Korean War but spent many years buried obscurely on the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.
“It just hurt. I mean, it hurt. You know, I just felt so bad. Even though I didn’t know him, I loved him,” Kennedy said.
Patten’s funeral was an easy affair with only a couple of members of the family in attendance. But when veterans who fought many years ago are identified, people often line the streets of their hometowns with flags and signs to announce the return of their stays.
“This work is important first and foremost because these people gave their lives to protect our freedom, making the ultimate sacrifice. That is why we stand here and promise to bring them home to their families,” Brown said.
“It’s important that their families show them that we will never stop, no matter what,” she said.
There are sometimes compelling details, Brown said.
One of their first cases involved the intact stays of a World War I Marine present in a forest in France. His wallet was still in his pocket. The wallet, with the initials GH, contained a New York Times article describing the plans for the offensive by which he eventually died. He also had an infantry badge along with his name and the yr he received it on the back.
Before leaving France with the stays, the team visited an area cemetery where other soldiers were buried and learned that only two soldiers with the initials GH were missing.
Brown had a reasonably good idea who this soldier was before his stays even arrived on the lab. This veteran was buried at Arlington National Cemetery and Brown often visits his grave when she is in Washington DC
Most cases will not be that straightforward.
The experts within the lab must reconstruct the identities using historical records describing the stays and which soldiers were in the world. They then seek the advice of the list of possible names and use the bones, items found with them, military medical records and DNA to substantiate the identity, specializing in battles and plane crashes where they’ve the very best likelihood of success based on the knowledge available.
But their job might be made tougher when soldiers are buried in a makeshift cemetery and relocated when a unit is forced to retreat. And unidentified soldiers are sometimes buried together.
When stays are taken to the lab, extra bones are sometimes present in them. Experts then spend months and even years comparing the bones and waiting for DNA and other test results to substantiate their identity.
A test may even determine whether the soldier ate mostly rice or corn during his childhood.
The lab also compares certain features of the collarbones to chest X-rays that the military routinely takes before soldiers deploy. It helps that the military keeps comprehensive records on all soldiers.
These clues help experts piece together the puzzle of an individual’s identity.
“It’s not always easy. It’s certainly not instant,” Brown said. “In some cases we really have to fight to get to this point because some of them have been missing for 80 years.”
