>Combining resources
>Finding the missing
>Global work
>Serving humanity
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Those who serve have made a promise to protect our country. In return, JPAC promises that should they fall on a battlefield anywhere in the world, not only will they be remembered, but they also will eventually be brought home.

In February 1968, eight Army Green Berets went missing or were captured when their fighting position near the Laotian border in northwestern South Vietnam was overrun by North Vietnamese troops during the Tet Offensive. Five men remained MIA for more than 35 years — missing, but not forgotten. Through the intervening years, numerous investigation teams from what is now the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), based at Hickam AFB, Hawaii, searched in vain for the missing servicemembers. Local witnesses were interviewed and several fighting positions were excavated, but no remains were found. In 2004, however, JPAC received a break. Two Vietnamese villagers, who had been foraging for scrap metal in the region where the Green Berets were thought to have fought their last battle, found evidence of American remains. A recovery team was dispatched immediately, and the remains were brought back to the JPAC laboratory, where forensic anthropologists and dentists were able to positively identify two of the missing men and return them to their families. The recovery of American MIAs in Vietnam has received much press in recent years, but thousands of American servicemembers remain missing worldwide, says Col. Claude H. Davis III, USMC, deputy commander of JPAC. This includes an estimated 78,000 Americans from World War II; 8,100 from the Korean War; 1,800 from the Vietnam War; 120 from the Cold War; and one from the Gulf War. Of those missing from World War II, approximately 35,000 are considered recoverable, with the others lost at sea or entombed in sunken vessels, including the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii. Since 1973, JPAC and its predecessors have returned the remains of more than 1,200 missing servicemembers to their families.

“One of the key promises we make to those who serve in the United States military is that if they should fall on a battlefield anywhere in the world while protecting our nation’s interests, they will never be forgotten,” explains Davis. “We’re going to ensure that they will one day return to their families and their loved ones. There are very few nations that perform POW/MIA [recovery] missions, and there definitely [is] none that comes close to the scale [at] which the United States performs this mission.”

Combining resources

JPAC was created in October 2003 when the 30-year-old U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory merged with the 11-year-old Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA). Both organizations were doing essentially the same work, with JTF-FA focusing on American MIAs in Southeast Asia and the Central Identification Laboratory performing more global recoveries. “The Central Identification Laboratory and the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting were intricately tied together, so it was believed that their combined efforts would be more effective and efficient if they merged,” explains Davis.

The command has approximately 425 personnel, including members from all four branches of the armed services plus Navy civilian employees and contractors. In addition to the main offices and laboratory at Hickam AFB, the command has forward-deployed detachments in Vientiane, Laos; Bangkok, Thailand; and Hanoi, Vietnam.

“We span the gamut of military specialties,” says Davis. “We have explosive ordnance personnel, mortuary affairs personnel, medical personnel, communications personnel, and what we would deem small unit specialists, such as personnel who can conduct investigations and recoveries in the mountains. We also have the gamut of skilled personnel you’d find in most military units.”

JPAC also has started underwater operations, training divers to search for remains in rivers, lakes, and oceans. “Water recoveries take a special skill,” reports Bob Mann, JPAC deputy scientific director and forensic anthropologist. “We have two underwater archeologists at JPAC who are skilled not only in diving, but also in constructing and performing underwater investigations. That is totally different from a terrestrial, or land, recovery.”

According to Mann, JPAC has 31 anthropologists on staff, perhaps the most under one roof in the world. “There is a big umbrella of anthropology, and it’s broken down into four subdisciplines: cultural anthropologists, archeologists who do excavations, physical/forensic anthropologists, and linguists,” explains Mann. “At JPAC, we have many people who wear two hats — they are archeologists and physical/forensic anthropologists, so they can do excavations and recoveries around the world and analyze remains to put together a biological profile.”

Finding the missing

The accounting of America’s missing heroes typically begins with an archival investigation that relies on shoot-down records, combat reports, and interviews with survivors and witnesses to narrow the region where remains might be found.

“Once we have enough information to take us to a particular area, we’ll put an investigation team on the ground,” says Davis. “These teams have interpreters assigned to them so they can go to small villages and talk to individuals we think may have actually witnessed a loss incident. Once we have defined the area where we think a missing individual may be found, we’ll review the evidence again to determine [whether] we want to conduct a recovery at that site. We try to be as prudent and thorough as possible through the investigation process because of the high cost of [search and recovery].”

If the evidence is strong, an excavation and recovery team is sent to the site. The work of JPAC anthropologists is meticulous and time-consuming, and evidence comes in a variety of forms. If they’re lucky, the excavation team will find actual remains, such as bones and teeth. But inorganic evidence — such as pieces of equipment, dog tags, rings with inscriptions, and pieces of uniform — also can be helpful in identifying missing servicemembers. “Coins found at a site, for example, can help date a loss incident,” says Mann. “Sometimes we’ll even find letters written by loved ones. They’ve stayed in the ground for 30 or 60 years and often we can still read what’s on those letters today.”

Once physical remains are returned to the JPAC laboratory, the next phase begins. “We never make an identification based on one thing alone,” says Mann. “Some people think we find two teeth and that’s all that goes into an identification, but we have to look at the bigger picture and consider all of the evidence. We look at the archeology and the physical anthropology, and we approach the identification based on a combination of these factors, often to include DNA, which we can get out of bones and the inside of teeth.”

Bones are examined by an anthropologist, and teeth are examined by a dentist. The scientists examining the evidence work separately, and their findings, conclusions, and recommendations are submitted independently to the laboratory’s scientific director, who reviews all of the evidence and decides whether it supports a positive identification.

When a positive identification is made, the servicemember’s family is notified through the appropriate service’s casualty office, which sends a representative to explain the identification process and its conclusions, says Davis. The family is then given the opportunity to accept or challenge the report and the remains. If family members choose to appeal the identification, they are permitted to present evidence to the Armed Forces ID Review Board, which reviews the ID packet as well as the family’s evidence.

“If the family accepts the report, we offer them the opportunity to come to Hawaii and receive the remains,” says Davis. He adds: “For me, that is by far the most rewarding aspect of the operation here — when we can bring a family in many years after the fact and turn over to them a set of remains that they can take back home and bury.”

Global work

JPAC performs about 25 missions in a typical year, which includes five in Laos, four in Vietnam, and one in Cambodia. The command also performs about 10 worldwide missions to such far-flung locations as Palau, Papua New Guinea, Russia, and South Korea. JPAC used to visit North Korea, but those missions have been halted temporarily. “Conditions are not currently conducive to JPAC operations, but we are looking forward to getting back there when the time is appropriate,” Davis reports.

Sometimes JPAC even searches for missing servicemembers within the United States. This past year, a JPAC recovery team located what are thought to be the remains of Navy pilots who went down in remote regions of Washington. One site, in the Wenatchee National Forest, is associated with an SBD-5 Dauntless that went missing in February 1945. A second excavation site in the Okanogan National Forest correlates to a P-38 that was reported missing in 1942.

More recently, a JPAC anthropologist was part of the team that helped recover the remains of an airman frozen in a glacier atop Mount Mendel in Kings Canyon National Park near Fresno, Calif. It’s thought that the airman, who was wearing an Army-issued parachute from the World War II era, was a crewman on an AT-7 navigational plane that crashed Nov. 18, 1942. The wreckage and four bodies were found by a climber in 1947.

“There were more than 25 operational losses of aircraft in California alone during World War II,” says JPAC spokesperson Maj. Rumi Nelson-Green, USA. “Not all of those have MIAs associated with them, but it demonstrates that this aircraft crash was not as unusual as some may think.”

JPAC anthropologists also are working on the remains of two Union sailors from the USS Monitor. “They are missing American sailors,” Mann explains. “They’re missing from the Civil War era, but they are still missing American sailors, and we have not forgotten about them.”

Serving humanity

But JPAC’s mission is not solely the recovery and identification of missing American servicemembers. The command’s anthropologists and other personnel also perform humanitarian missions in a variety of locations and often under dire circumstances, such as the aftermath of the tsunami that struck south Asia in 2004. “We have had personnel deployed for mass casualty situations such as the bombing of the Marine Battalion Landing Team Head-quarters in Beirut, Sept. 11 at the Pentagon and New York City, and various aircraft crashes,” says Davis. “We also assist local law enforcement when they find skeletal remains.”

The technology JPAC’s anthropologists use to locate, analyze, and identify human remains is evolving constantly, and newly developed technology is shared with forensic professionals around the world through workshops, presentations, and publications. “We have an obligation to publish our findings in peer-reviewed journals,” Mann says. “It’s not enough to develop or use a method or technique in-house — the world must also have the opportunity to test and evaluate it.”

It was advancements in DNA technology — one of JPAC’s most useful tools — that in 1998 allowed the command to identify the remains of Lt. Michael J. Blassie, the Air Force pilot who had been interred in the crypt of the Unknown Soldier of the Vietnam War at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. That was just one of many important identifications — many more remain. And the staff of JPAC has vowed never to give up until the very last American MIA has been located and the servicemember's remains have been returned to loved ones.