Scientists who work in the central identification laboratory of Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) at Hickam AFB, Hawaii, typically work with mere bone fragments to identify the remains of Americans lost serving their country. Most of the remains brought there are of men who perished in recent wars—Vietnam, Korea, or World War II. They have close family members still alive who are hopeful of one day learning their loved one’s fate.

But in the Hickam laboratory, the most dramatic current display of remains are two separate sets of bones of men killed 142 years ago on the USS Monitor, a Civil War-era ironclad. While under tow Dec. 31, 1862, off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the ship sank with 16 sailors aboard. The remains, discolored by iron and silt, were found inside the turret when it was raised in 2002. Working with genealogists and DNA comparisons with heirs of the 16 sailors, JPAC scientists hope to identify the two men. “They are starting to get it narrowed down ... to one of two or three possibilities in one case and one of three or four possibilities in another case,” says Air Force 1st Lt. Ken M. Hall Jr., a spokesman for JPAC.

The 440-person JPAC was formed in October 2003 by merging the Army’s renowned Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, with the Joint Task Force Full Accounting, a successor to the Joint Casualty Resolution Center. The mission is to recover and identify missing U.S. servicemembers from all past wars—an enormous task. There are 1,849 Americans still missing from the Vietnam War, 78,000 missing from World War II, and 8,100 lost during the Korean War. An additional 120 U.S. servicemembers disappeared in the Cold War and one in the Persian Gulf War. But JPAC anthropologists’ responsibilities can extend beyond past wars. Three are in Iraq investigating mass graves. The findings could be used in the prosecution of Saddam Hussein and members of his regime. The government spends more than $100 million on the effort, half through JPAC, where 75 cents of every dollar spent goes to investigative and recovery missions versus staff salaries or facilities. JPAC in just the past year sent teams to Albania, Burma, Cambodia, France, North and South Korea, Laos, New Guinea, Palau, Tibet, and Washington state.

James Coyle, the command’s research director and second-longest-serving current employee, has spent more than 18 years investigating the whereabouts of Americans who were lost while serving their nation. Although his personal enthusiasm hasn’t flagged, Coyle says the effort and expense of finding remains increases every year. “The real problem facing us … is time,” Coyle says. “Time is reducing the number of eyewitnesses [and] destroying ... the physical evidence, including aircraft wreckage, uniform pieces, [and] remains.”

Coyle and Hall credit the tenacity of missing servicemembers’ families from the Vietnam War for changing the nation’s perception of the effort and its commitment to finding the remains of Americans. Why was Vietnam different? In part, says Coyle, because of advances in technology and in part because America lost the war in Vietnam. “After World War II we had control of the battlefield. We had the Graves Registration Service,” Coyle says. Yet by 1955, with almost 80,000 Americans still missing, the organized search for casualties ended. After Vietnam, “we didn’t have control of the battlefield,” Coyle says. So many Americans thought, “‘Damn it all, they owe us an explanation!’”

Fueling that anger was a widespread perception that living Americans had been left in Vietnam. Coyle, a foreign-language officer during the war, thought so himself. He said he became a casualty resolution specialist in 1986 expecting to verify and expose a government cover-up. Instead, he says, he learned that many dedicated military and civilian personnel had been working for years to find missing Americans and bring them home.

Until a few years ago, Coyle thought the effort to find missing U.S. servicemembers would wind down soon. “But now that we’ve become JPAC and assumed responsibility for the Korean conflict, for World War II, and basically [for] all our wars prior to the Gulf War … this probably is never going to end.”

He adds: “As long as people want us to keep looking, we’ll keep looking.”

Tom Philpott is a freelance writer and syndicated news columnist. His column, "Military Update," appears in 48 daily newspapers throughout the United States and overseas.