JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii — The beleaguered command tasked with finding the remains of lost U.S. troops said it has more than doubled the number of identifications of MIA remains in 2014 over the year before.
The 107 identifications for 2014 by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command came primarily from remains linked to the Korean War (42), World War II (36) and the site of a 1952 crash of an Air Force cargo plane into Mount Gannett in Alaska (17).
The number of identifications from the Vietnam War, at 12, was about half the average of 21 IDs made annually over the previous nine years.
John Byrd, JPAC’s laboratory director, credits the increase to a mix of new procedures, increased lab space and developments in technology.
“It’s success for us, big success for us,” Byrd said during an interview at his office at JPAC headquarters at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. “A lot of the programs that we’ve put together through the years are reaching maturity and bearing fruit now.”
The words success and JPAC have not been associated often in the past couple years.
A Defense Department Inspector General’s report in October concluded that the MIA accounting effort lacked clarity of mission, a strategic plan, a disinterment policy, a centralized database of MIAs and coordination with combatant commands and host nations.
More than 40 current and former employees complained of mismanagement, which taken as a whole “paint a picture of long-term leadership and management problems,” the report said.
Last year the defense secretary ordered an overhaul of the agency, which is now under way. Just how the restructuring and new personnel will mitigate shortcomings and increase the effectiveness in accounting for MIAs remains to be seen.
JPAC spokesman Lee Tucker described the agency makeover as “a phenomenal opportunity” for “taking an already talented and great organization and doing nothing but improving it.”
Asked how that assessment jives with shortcomings cited by the IG report, Tucker said, “I think that we’re being very responsive right now in addressing all those concerns head-on in forming an entirely new DOD agency. We’re not just putting Band Aids on here and there.”
The increase in identifications for 2014 is the first sign of improvements to come, he said.
The 107 remains identified won’t be officially “accounted” for until their nearest kin are contacted and they agree with JPAC’s findings, Byrd said.
“We have an eclectic, diverse tool kit that takes advantage of the kinds of records that the military built up and maintained over the years,” Byrd said.
One of JPAC’s most productive programs now is identifying a set of Korean War remains called K208. The remains were turned over to the U.S. in 208 boxes toward the end of that conflict and are estimated to hold the comingled remains of about 350 individuals, based on subsequent testing, Byrd said.
Using the standard operating procedures of the time, U.S. mortuary personnel dipped the remains in a chemical bath to sanitize them before examination, he said.
Among the chemicals was formaldehyde, which years later was discovered to have degraded DNA in the tissue and bones, which makes sampling difficult.
“We were stuck for a long time,” Byrd said. But “a lot of wheels turning between 2008 and 2012” helped produce last year’s identifications, he said.
“In 2006 we were identifying one or two soldiers a year from the K208, and it had been that way since the early 1990,” Byrd said. In 2008, a separate lab was set up for the K208 remains.
“That gave us the ability to take all of the remains out at one time and look at them as a large group,” Byrd said. “The problem with that group is that they’re comingled in a very massive way.”
The lab developed a DNA protocol for “untangling” the comingled remains. “That protocol is one of the big breakthroughs that has helped speed things up,” Byrd said. “We’ve identified over 40 Korean war cases this year.”
Thirty of those were J208 remains, with an additional 10 from remains disinterred from the graves of unknown soldiers buried at National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, also called the Punchbowl.
Another development over the past five years aided in identifying Korean War remains and, to a lesser degree, those from World War II: chest X-rays.
Sometime around 2005, JPAC learned that the services had taken and stored chest X-rays of inductees during the 1940s and ‘50s to screen for tuberculosis.
Numerous times, JPAC queried the National Archives and Records Administration, which holds the bulk of military records in warehouses in St. Louis, but were always told their whereabouts were unknown, Byrd said. Then around 2008, the National Archives contacted JPAC “out of the blue” and said they were on the verge of recycling the entire stash of Army and Air Force X-rays for the minute amount of silver on each film.
JPAC retrieved about 7,500 X-rays belonging to soldiers or airmen missing from the Korean War and about 1,200 from the World War II era for those services.
Although the X-rays were of the lungs, the neck vertebrae and collarbones are also captured in each shot. Bones and teeth have patterns and shapes that are unique to a person, much as fingerprints are, Byrd said.
Technicians superimpose the induction X-ray over an image of found bones, which at times “match up perfectly,” he said.
“Most forensic experts consider that kind of radiographic comparison to be positive identification, meaning that you can find uniqueness such that if you find a match, it shouldn’t be anybody else -- if it matches up on multiple points.”
More recently, JPAC found and took possession of similar X-rays taken of inductees for the Navy and Marines. Each shot, however, was loaded onto reels that contain hundreds of X-rays, and over the past year, JPAC has been unraveling the chaotic filing system.
But in that time, they’ve found X-rays for 80 percent to 90 percent of the Marines missing from the Korean War.
“For World War II we have a long way to go, but so far they culled out about 1,400 X-rays of missing sailors and Marines,” Byrd said.
Global climate change and melting glaciers played a role in retrieving and identifying 17 airmen from the cargo plane crash 62 years ago.
In 2012, the crew of an Alaska Army National Guard Black Hawk unit on a training flight saw a tire, life rafts and oxygen bottles on a glacier, according to a report by ABC News.
olson.wyatt@stripes.com
Twitter: @WyattWOlson
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