More than 82,000 Americans remain missing from World War II through the Gulf Wars and other conflicts. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is devoted to accounting for military service members who are prisoners of war or missing in action.
Transcript
Judi Boyer Bouchard: Alan was three years older than I was. Quintessential Big Brother. I tried to do everything he did. He, uh, he was the one who taught me how to ride a bike, drive a car. He called my parents and said, I’m gonna join the army. I wanna be the best, and he was. And he was selected to be Special Forces. We got a call that, well, they came to our house and told my parents, actually very little, other than he was missing. And, so, for the first couple of years we were just on our own.
President Ronald Reagan: The anguish you’ve suffered, the families of brave men of listed prisoners of war or missing in action, the misery is an anguish is unspeakable. Something the rest of us can really never know even in a partial measure. If they could be here today, millions of Americans from every corner of this land who have only a glimmer of your pain, would say to you, we want with all our hearts to share your burden, to realize our common quest; the return of all POWs. The fullest possible accounting for the still missing, and the repatriation of the remains of those who died.
Narrator: Until they all come home, a creed of the American military; to never leave a man behind. For the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, it’s their singular objective.
Kelly McKeague: I think it speaks volumes to the character and the values of the United States that here we are decades after the conflicts ended, that we are still inherently fulfilling our role and our promise made. That when we send a service member off to war, that should they become missing, that it’s our responsibility as a nation to bring them back home.
Narrator: To meet their goal, they travel anywhere U.S. troops have served, conducting historical investigations and archaeological digs.
Kelly McKeague: Time is our biggest enemy so we’re talking decades that remains I’ve been in the ground. We have high-speed crashes where the impact created a massive field investigation site. Witnesses are dying. In many cases you have a remote, rural, dense jungle-infested territory. It’s difficult for our teams to excavate the site and be expeditious and, more importantly, diligent manner.
Narrator: And even when remains are recovered, identifying them in the lab presents challenges of their own.
Dr. John Byrd: In this laboratory, we’re working with what, in the forensic realm, people might call residual remains. These are mostly the hard tissues that are still here with us after so many years of being missing. And this would be bones and teeth, for example. And, so, we, we have a heavy reliance on anthropology. That’s the profession that actually studies how you can say things about a person from their bones. We also have dental records from most of our missing service members, thankfully, and so our forensic dentist here in the lab, we’re able to compare what we see in the teeth to dental records that we have retained in the Department of Defense for all of these years. But we also use DNA extensively. The majority of our cases involves some type of DNA testing. But to make good use of DNA results, you have to have something to compare it to.
Narrator: Though it’s now common practice to retain DNA samples from service members, before the early 1990s DNA testing essentially didn’t exist as a forensic tool. This means that to be able to use DNA as a method of identification, they need samples from close family members to use as a reference.
Dr. John Byrd: But it’s not easy. Some of them we run into dead ends with, and we can’t find anybody. As you can imagine, when you’re dealing with literally tens of thousands of missing service members, particularly from World War II, the services have an enormous burden to try finding all of these family members, each and every one of them with their individual unique stories. What happened to the family? Where the family moved. But we always like to take opportunities to say, if there’s anyone out there who has a family member who’s missing, to reach out to that service casualty office, and help us get the DNA samples that we need.
Narrator: On the front end, conducting archaeological digs in dense jungle, harsh terrain and occasionally underwater, require support from outside of DPAA. Dozens of service members from every branch of the military are asked to augment recovery teams.
Army Maj. Gen. Susan Davidson: We cannot only support the recoveries, we actually can see it accomplished. And it’s one of the few times in our service that we can, start-to-finish, really feel good about what we’ve done. What’s amazing to me is when we have soldiers go, that volunteered to go, for whatever reason, may not have been a reason other than they wanted to stop the monotony of the day here or take a mission, they come back a different person. And they have a different respect for our Army, and for what we do.
Narrator: Bringing our missing home can be a decades-long journey, that takes a small city worth of people to accomplish.
Judi Boyer Bouchard: March 7th of 2016, I picked up the phone. It was, it was the night before of what would’ve been Alan’s 70th birthday. Picked up the phone, and this a deep voice asked for Judi and I said, “This is she.” He said, “This, I’m calling from the Army.” My legs literally went out from under me. And I said, “you found Alan.” And he said, “We did.” I mean, I, I could barely breathe. The funeral itself was just, um, just such a joyful homecoming. And again, I’m one of the very fortunate ones. I hope that the other family members will finally receive their accounting. Because it’s such a sacred commitment that the United States has to do.
Americans need to be made aware that POWs, MIAs are still missing from all wars. And that DPAA is making a difference in fulfilling that mission, for the fullest possible accounting, and bringing all of them home.