Pentagon forensic identifications

Status: Analysis, built on court records, congressional and GAO oversight, declassified files and the published work of researchers who have examined these cases for decades. Where a family has disputed an identification, the page says so and states the family’s grounds.

While most identifications of returned remains as specific American POW/MIAs are reliable, not all of them are. From men identified on a handful of teeth, to a documented record of incorrect and questionable identifications — some rejected by outside forensic experts, some rejected by the families themselves — the record raises questions that have never been satisfactorily answered.

Four of them run through every case on this page.

Could an identification simply be wrong? If it is, there is no proof the American died at all.
Could the remains genuinely be his, and still show that he did not die where or when the enemy said he did? That he got out of his aircraft alive, and was secretly held by the communists for months or for years before he died.
Have the communist governments salted recovery sites? Placing remains, uniforms and equipment they had warehoused for years or decades into the ground where American teams would find them, so that a death would appear to have happened at the incident.
Could material recovered from such a site — teeth among it — have been taken from a prisoner who was still alive?

Not one of those questions is settled by a laboratory report. A laboratory examines what it is handed. It has no instrument that can test how the material came to be in the ground.

None of this is an argument that the accounting agency does its work badly. Most Pentagon forensic identifications are sound. Recovery teams work in minefields, on mountainsides and in flooded paddy. Laboratory scientists have given many families the answers they needed. Where the record has been wrong, it has more than once been the government’s own scientists who found the error and corrected it. That correction runs furthest back in Korea, where the oldest identifications in the system were made in a matter of months — and where hundreds of other men lay under stones marked Unknown for sixty years before anyone could name them.

But some identifications have been wrong, and the proof is not in this project’s assertions. It is in a federal appellate opinion, a congressional hearing that ended a laboratory technique, a Government Accountability Office audit, opened graves, and the files of families who refused to accept what they were told. This page sets out both halves, because a family being asked to close a case is entitled to know which half their case falls in.

One case stands at the front of that record. Marine Ronald Ridgway was declared killed in action in February 1968, and his remains were buried as a group with nine other Marines at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Missouri. In 1973 his name appeared on the list of prisoners Hanoi released at Operation Homecoming. He had been alive in captivity for five years while a headstone in Missouri carried his name. He is not the only one: graves have been opened because the man in them was not the man on the stone, and a set of remains left over from a corrected 1967 identification went sixteen years unmatched before a 1998 review concluded they were Jerry Degnan. Those cases are set out under When the wrong man was buried.

What outside experts found at Pakse

On 21 December 1972 an Air Force AC-130A gunship, Spectre 17, was shot down near Pakse, in southern Laos, with 16 men aboard. Two were rescued. In 1985 the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii — CILHI, now part of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) — identified the 13 men still missing.

The family of Lt. Col. Thomas T. Hart III did not accept it, and took the government to court. Dr. Michael Charney, the Colorado State University forensic anthropologist, concluded the remains could not be reliably attributed to Hart. Three further independent forensic anthropologists — Dr. Ellis Kerley, Dr. William Maples and Dr. Lowell Levine — reviewed the whole set.

They found that only two of the thirteen Pakse identifications could be confidently confirmed.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in Hart v. United States, 894 F.2d 1539 (1990), recorded the position in a single sentence:

“The identifications did not appear to be justified according to standard forensic methods.”

The Harts lost the case. They did not lose it on the forensics. The court held that the Army’s identification and burial decisions were discretionary functions and therefore immune from suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act. The science was never adjudicated; the door was shut before it could be.

Pakse is the reason the rest of this page exists. It produced a House Armed Services investigations subcommittee hearing on CILHI in September 1987, and in October 1992 a Government Accountability Office audit of the laboratory’s management controls.

Morphological approximation, and the man who invented it

The technique that produced the Pakse identifications had a name and an author. Tadao Furue was the Central Identification Laboratory’s leading anthropologist through the 1980s, and his method — morphological approximation — worked by comparing a fragment of bone against collections of intact bone and predicting from it the parameters of a complete skeleton. From a few small pieces it produced a height, an age, a race, a name.

Furue was not new to this work. He had been doing it since the 1950s, when American war dead were being identified at the laboratory in Japan — which is to say the same hand is on Korean War identifications and Vietnam War identifications, thirty years apart.

At Pakse in 1985 the method was applied to thirteen men whose recovered remains were, in the main, tiny fragments. Ann Hart, Lt. Col. Hart’s widow, hired Dr. Michael Charney to re-examine them. Charney’s conclusion was that “there was no way” fragments that small “could be identified as Lt. Col. Hart.”

At a congressional hearing in 1986, several anthropologists testified that Furue had misused his own technique. Charney accused him of “reporting unrepeatable observations, fabricating age data” and “failing to include margins of error.” Two colleagues said his work was “guided by wishful thinking, as CILHI strove to achieve the military’s goal.”

The most damaging assessment came from a man who had worked alongside him. Dr. Ellis Kerley — one of the three independent anthropologists who found only two of the thirteen Pakse identifications confirmable — had known Furue since the 1950s. His judgment was that by the 1980s Furue was no longer as cautious as he had been.

The consequences were institutional and they were rapid:

By 1987 the identification of Lt. Col. Hart was rescinded.
Congress recommended a moratorium on morphological approximation. The technique was suspended, and nothing was put in its place.
In 1987 Ellis Kerley became Forensic Anthropology Consultant and Scientific Director of CILHI — the outside critic was brought inside to run the science.

That is the shape of the correction, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not settle. A discredited method was stopped and a serious scientist was put in charge. But identifications already made on that method were not all revisited, and no family was written to and told that the technique behind their case had been withdrawn on the recommendation of Congress.

What the GAO found in 1992

The GAO report (NSIAD-93-7) was not a finding that identifications were wrong. It was a finding that the laboratory could not always demonstrate they were right. Among the deficiencies:

inadequate documentation of remains entering the laboratory;
insufficient procedures for tracking case files and the location of remains;
unclear roles for the outside scientific consultants who reviewed identifications, and incomplete files provided to those reviewers;
weak controls over remains sent out for independent examination;
inadequate follow-up on requests for medical and dental records; and
ambiguous regulation of the destruction of unidentified remains.

The Army implemented all nine recommendations between November 1992 and July 1993. The laboratory that exists today is not the laboratory of 1985. But the identifications made before the reform were not all revisited, and the families living with them were not told which category theirs fell into.

The Vietnam Unknown

The remains designated X-26 were recovered near An Loc in 1972 and interred at Arlington in 1984 as the Vietnam Unknown. Selection as an Unknown required that remains be genuinely unidentifiable and, in the standard of the day, of “absolute anonymity” — nothing recovered with them that could establish identity.

In 1998, mitochondrial DNA identified them as 1st Lt. Michael J. Blassie, U.S. Air Force.

The researcher Lynn O’Shea, whose book Abandoned in Place reconstructs the case from the documents, records that then-Major Johnie Webb signed a document stating the X-26 remains were unidentifiable, and acknowledged fourteen years later that he knew Michael Blassie was buried as the Vietnam Unknown. O’Shea also records that none of the CILHI remains then held met the anonymity criteria — on account of “the paucity of the recovery (10–30%), anthropological inconsistencies, lack of absolute anonymity.”

It is the single clearest demonstration of both halves of this page at once. An identification was withheld that should not have been. And it was science — new science, applied late — that put it right.

When the wrong man was buried

The question is not hypothetical. Graves have been opened because the man in them was not the man on the headstone.

Marine Ronald Ridgway, 1968

Declared killed in action in February 1968. His remains were recovered and buried as a group with nine other Marines at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Missouri. In 1973 his name appeared on the list of prisoners Hanoi released at Operation Homecoming. He was alive, and had been a prisoner for five years while a headstone in Missouri carried his name.

The group-burial mechanism that put Ridgway under a stone he did not belong under is the same mechanism used for Baron 52.

Pvt. John Guinn, 1967 — and Pvt. Quinn Tichenor

Guinn’s family were notified he had been killed in action. Remains were identified as his and returned for burial. The casket was closed but had a viewing window. His mother said the remains were not her son. Nobody listened.

A week later she received a letter from him, written after the date of his supposed death. The Army found Pvt. Guinn alive and still in Vietnam and put him on the next plane home. On Thanksgiving morning 1967 the grave was opened. On re-examination the remains were identified as Pvt. Quinn Tichenor and returned to his family.

One family’s joy was another family’s grief, and a mother who was right was disbelieved until a letter from a dead man arrived in her post.

At least eight from two mortuaries

Some thirty years afterward it emerged that there had been at least eight misidentifications out of the Da Nang and Tan Son Nhut mortuaries between August 1967 and April 1968 — an eight-month window in two buildings.

The Massachusetts grave, and Jerry Degnan

A misidentification made in 1967 was corrected in 1982, and the grave in Massachusetts was opened. That left the laboratory holding a set of remains that matched no unaccounted-for serviceman in Southeast Asia at all. They sat unresolved for sixteen years, until a new analyst reworked the file in 1998 and concluded they were Jerry Degnan — using digital superimposition of X-rays over photographs of the bones, which produced a “near exact match” on the clavicle, together with mitochondrial DNA.

There is a timing question inside that case which O’Shea raises and PIP records without answering it. The correction was made in 1982, the year the government was actively looking for remains to inter as the Vietnam Unknown, when — in her account — “every set of remains at CIL-HI became a potential candidate.” A set of remains recovered with a loss-site association, dog tags and an identification card had by then been held at various mortuaries for fifteen years.

The Vietnam Unknown, 1998

The largest exhumation of them all. Ted Sampley, working from public records and a passage in Susan Sheehan’s A Missing Plane, concluded that Michael Blassie was the Vietnam Unknown and published it. The Air Force Casualty Office told the Blassie family no evidence supported the claim, and warned them about Sampley. CBS News producer Vince Gonzales confirmed the research; the story broke on 19 January 1998. Senator Bob Smith wrote to Secretary of Defense William Cohen:

“It seems to me that the remains in the Tomb of the Unknowns should be subjected to DNA testing immediately to determine once and for all if they, in fact, can be associated with 1Lt. Blassie. That is the least we can do for the family at this point.”

A former CIL employee had already told Sheehan, years earlier: “Putting X-26 in the Tomb of the Unknowns was politically expedient.” The crypt was opened. The remains were Blassie’s.

Cases in which families refused the identification

These are not allegations by this project. In each case the family, or an outside forensic scientist retained by the family, put an objection on the record.

LCDR Milton Vescelius

Remains were returned by Vietnam on 14 August 1985 and identified on dental and skeletal evidence. CILHI anthropologists recorded a healed fracture of the right femur — “right femur, distal ½ of shaft (very old fracture).” His wife said he had never broken his leg, and refused to accept the remains for burial. The independent forensic anthropologist the family retained listed three mismatches: the skeleton was of a man under 5′10″ and Vescelius was over 5′10″; the femoral fracture; and the skeleton appeared to be of a man who died in his early or mid-twenties, while Vescelius was over thirty when he disappeared.

Maj. Victor J. Apodaca Jr., USAF

Lost over Quang Binh province, North Vietnam, on 8 June 1967, when his F-4C went down on an armed reconnaissance mission. A joint U.S.-Vietnamese team recovered remains in 1989, and the Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, identified them as Apodaca’s on 9 March 2001. His sisters do not accept the identification. They say the questions they raised about the process a quarter-century ago have never been answered, and that they were not permitted to attend the burial at the Air Force Academy, which followed his eldest son’s acceptance of the remains as primary next of kin. “In our opinion there was no evidence that the remains were that of Jr’s,” his sister Janella Apodaca Rose says. “Sadly, our story is a common one among the POW/MIA community.” The full case.

Cdr. Harley H. Hall, U.S. Navy

Shot down on 27 January 1973 — the last day of the war — over Quang Tri province. His back-seater, LCDR Philip Kientzler, was captured and came home. Hall was carried as a prisoner of war, Category 1. In January 1993 a joint team recovered material from a Vietnamese local, and three front teeth were identified as Hall’s by dental analysis. The identification was announced in 1994.

His widow, Mary Lou Hall, objected on the record. Three teeth, she argued, were not sufficient to declare death, least of all at a site where U.S. agencies had previously said he could not have died; and among prisoners, teeth were lost to beatings, extraction and malnutrition, not only to death. Her words on the closure of the case:

“Such a false answer is worse than none.”

Lt. Daniel Borah, U.S. Navy

A recovery produced a relatively intact flight suit containing an undetermined quantity of remains, among them nineteen teeth, five with restorations, found where the head would have lain — but no skull and no jaw. The bones were in too poor a condition for anthropological analysis, meaning they could establish neither age, height, sex nor race. CILHI could not locate Borah’s dental X-rays and worked from a dental chart.

Cdr. Thomas Dunlop

An enemy prisoner had identified Dunlop as captured alive. The recovery produced “small highly weathered” bones with pieces of an ejection seat. The forensic report is candid about what it could and could not do:

“The human remains found amid the wreckage of the aircraft cannot be individually identified as those of Cdr. Dunlop given the current state of forensic technology; however, the context in which they were recovered is sufficient to establish a presumptive correlation.”

A presumptive correlation is an inference from where something was found. It is not an identification of the man, and the case turns on whether the ground was what it appeared to be.

Jerry Degnan

The corrective case, and it cuts both ways. An identification was made, and it was wrong; when it was corrected, CILHI was left holding remains exhumed from a Massachusetts grave that matched no unaccounted-for serviceman in Southeast Asia. In 1998 a new analyst reworked the file and concluded they were Degnan — a Caucasian male aged 23 to 30, about 5′10″, with trauma consistent with an air crash, against records showing a 28-year-old of 5′11″. Digital superimposition of X-rays over photographs of the bones produced a “near exact match” on the clavicle. The laboratory found its own error and fixed it. The family, being civilians, were sent the news in the mail.

Baron 52

An Air Force EC-47Q, call sign Baron 52, was shot down over southern Laos on 5 February 1973 — nine days after the Paris agreement. Eight men were aboard: the four flight crew and four back-end signals-intelligence operators. Signals intelligence subsequently reported the movement of four American personnel under enemy control.

The crash site was excavated around the twentieth anniversary. What came out of the ground was:

five lap-belt buckles, only three of them locked;
one tooth;
three dog tags;
four service revolvers;
roughly two dozen parachute V-rings, from at least seven parachutes; and
bone fragments — initially reported as twenty-three, a figure that varies in later documentation.

The laboratory could not confirm that the bone fragments were of human origin, which precluded DNA analysis. On that basis all eight men were identified as a group and buried together at Arlington beneath a single stone bearing all eight names: Capt. George Spitz, Capt. Arthur Bollinger, 1st Lt. Severo Primm III, 1st Lt. Robert Bernhardt, Sgt. Dale Brandenburg, Sgt. Todd Melton, Sgt. Peter Cressman and Sgt. Joseph Matejov.

The Matejov and Cressman families rejected it. They still do. Their grounds are specific and they are physical: the crew routinely carried extra parachutes, and V-rings from at least seven canopies came out of a site holding one tooth; Joseph Matejov’s dog tag was found lying on the ground during a 1992 survey, though he frequently flew sanitized, without tags; two lap belts were open; pistols were recovered uphill from the fuselage; and nothing whatever belonging to Sgt. Dale Brandenburg was ever found.

There is a separate documentary thread. Memoranda written by Sedgwick D. Tourison, an investigator for the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, record that four Baron 52 crewmen were carried in the Defense Department’s own casualty system under code “KK — captured, died in captivity” through at least 1979, while sworn testimony held that all eight died in the crash. Tourison’s note on the consequence:

“The reporting to the Defense Department that the EC-47Q aircraft personnel were ‘Dead’ and not ‘Unaccounted for’ effectively removed these eight individuals from any serious consideration for recovery.”

The problem forensic science cannot solve on its own

Everything above concerns what happens inside a laboratory. The harder problem is what happened to the remains before they reached one.

Remains from these wars did not come out of neutral ground. In the great majority of cases they were recovered by joint teams working with the cooperation of the government that had held the prisoner, or they were handed over by that government at a time of its choosing. That creates a possibility the laboratory has no instrument to test for: that remains were stored, and then produced in a manner designed to support a particular account of how and when a man died.

This is not speculation. Reporting in PIP’s research records that North Korea has attempted to deceive American investigators by “salting” excavation sites — burying warehoused American remains in places where U.S. investigators would find them. A Chinese official told the United States that “hundreds” of American remains were already in a Pyongyang warehouse by the late 1980s. Vietnam’s returns were similarly staged: on 11 September 1989 three boxes were handed over, one bearing the name Roger Netherland, with his identification card passed across separately from the remains it belonged to.

Lynn O’Shea asks the question directly of the Dunlop recovery — a man an enemy prisoner said had been captured alive, whose bones were found amid his own wreckage: did the Lao salt the site?

The significance is precise. If a man survived his incident, was held, died later in captivity, and his remains were then placed at his loss site and recovered there, every forensic step can be performed correctly and the conclusion will still be wrong. The bones are his. The context is manufactured. A presumptive correlation drawn from location is exactly the kind of finding that fails in that circumstance, and it is the kind of finding on which a great many Southeast Asia cases rest.

A burial site the government’s own investigator called staged

In 1991 the United States recovered remains identified as Robert Greer and Fred Schreckengost. The grave showed evidence of tampering — remains exhumed and reburied. A Special Assistant to the Commander of Joint Task Force-Full Accounting put it in writing in a memorandum on Vietnam case assessments:

“Although the witnesses interviewed indicated both individuals in this case were killed during an escape attempt shortly after captured, several sources have identified the pre-capture photograph of PVT Schreckengost as a Live U.S. POW years after the time of death provided by the witnesses; in SA’s opinion the burial site where the remains were found was staged…”

That is not an outside critic and it is not this project. It is a senior U.S. investigator, in a U.S. government memorandum, using the word. The Greer family accept that the teeth identified as Robert Greer’s are his. They question the Schreckengost identification, and their position is that “the book is still open on Fred Schreckengost.”

The laboratory as a corrective

The science that can be misled is also the science that has repeatedly exposed error — including the government’s own. Mitochondrial DNA identified Michael Blassie in 1998 and emptied the Vietnam crypt, fourteen years after a determination that the remains were unidentifiable. A CILHI analyst reworking the Degnan file in 1998 found the laboratory’s earlier error and corrected it. The nine deficiencies the GAO identified in 1992 were closed out by the Army within nine months.

The corrective capacity is real. What it has not done is reach back systematically through the identifications made before the reform, and tell the families living with those which category theirs falls in.

When the forensics contradicted the captor

In the McKinney case, the laboratory’s own findings broke the account the captor government had given. It is quoted below from documents cited in the published literature.

Lt. Clemie McKinney, U.S. Navy — case 2044

Shot down on 14 April 1972 near Cam Lo, Quang Tri province, with his crewmate John Greenleaf. The wingman reported a direct hit and no parachutes. The Navy carried him missing, then killed in action, within a week.

Vietnam repatriated 26 sets of remains on 14 August 1985. One set was identified as McKinney in February 1988 — the identification delayed by a records error, because McKinney, who was African-American, had been listed as Caucasian. The error was not found until 1987.

Mrs. McKinney disputed the identification. Her stated concerns included the “apparent discrepancy of having received a direct hit in the cockpit, precluding the possibility of recovering any identifiable remains,” and problems with the configuration of the foot bones.

Then the forensics began contradicting Hanoi. Vietnam said McKinney died at Chu Viet on 8 November 1972 — seven months after the shoot-down. In his deposition to the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs of 7 November 1991, Garnett “Bill” Bell, then head of the U.S. POW office in Hanoi, testified to what the laboratory had found, and connected it to a refugee report that an escaping African-American prisoner had been shot in the leg: the remains identified as McKinney were missing the lower portion of the right leg. Bell also recorded the laboratory’s conclusion on timing:

“According to the anthropologist at CILHI… the remains they received on Lieutenant McKennie [sic], the date of death could not have been prior to 1975.”

DIA called this a “theory.” On 28 January 1992 the Joint Casualty Resolution Center issued an interim response to DIA’s analysis of Bell’s testimony and did not agree:

“The DIA analyst has described Mr. Bell’s opinion regarding this case as a ‘theory.’ The fact is an anthropologist with many years of experience rendered a professional opinion that based on the condition of Lt. Mc Kinnie’s [sic] remains, he was alive subsequent to Operation Homecoming. Mr. Bell discussed this information with both the JCRC and CILHI Commanders…”

The same message continued: “What the analyst has failed to address is the importance of the information regarding the condition of returned remains… the condition of Lt. McKinnie’s [sic] indicate he was out of the aircraft prior to impact.” A further message states plainly: “Forensic examination of Lieutenant Mc Kinney’s remains did not show any signs of high speed impact.”

On 23 May 1993 Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, successor to the JCRC, stated the conclusion in its own voice:

“Analysis of the remains, along with minimal information provided by Vietnam, led to the conclusion that Mc Kinney had ejected from his aircraft prior to the crash and had survived in captivity for a period of time prior to his death.”

That is the United States government, in a 1993 message, recording that a man written off in the wreckage of his aircraft in 1972 got out of it alive and was held. No returned prisoner ever reported seeing him.

Published reporting states that the McKinney family, having found the anthropologist’s date-of-death statement in the laboratory records, sued and settled out of court for $350,000, and were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the Defense Intelligence Agency. A non-disclosure agreement binds the parties; it does not seal a federal court docket, and the docket is a public record.

The remains called “Stinky”

A related question remains open. In a June 2010 letter to the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, the National Alliance of Families asked about a set of remains that Vietnam reportedly returned in 1989 and that, according to the letter, were not fully skeletonized. Because of their condition, the letter said, the remains were given the nickname “Stinky.” The Alliance asked whether they had ever been identified and what the laboratory had been able to determine about them.

If that description is accurate, remains still carrying soft tissue when handed over 16 years after Operation Homecoming would raise the question of when that person died. PIP has not seen a government answer to the letter or the laboratory file, has not confirmed the account, and does not know whose remains they were. PIP is investigating. Anyone with information about these remains is asked to contact PIP.

Mitochondrial DNA: what it settles and what it does not

Mitochondrial DNA transformed this work. It identified Michael Blassie and emptied the Vietnam crypt at Arlington. It works on degraded, fragmentary material that yields no nuclear DNA, which is most of what comes out of a tropical crash site fifty years on. Nothing here should be read as an argument against it.

But families have raised objections to how its results are presented, and the objections are technically correct.

Mitochondrial DNA is inherited down the maternal line, and everyone on that line shares it. A man, his brothers and sisters, his mother, his maternal aunts and uncles, and his maternal cousins all carry the same sequence. mtDNA is therefore powerful at exclusion — it can prove remains are not a given man — and comparatively weak at individualization. It cannot, by itself, distinguish one brother from another.
It does not, on its own, identify anyone. It narrows a field. The identification is then completed by dental comparison, anthropological profile, material evidence and circumstance — the same categories that failed at Pakse, and the same circumstance a salted site would corrupt.
Commingling multiplies the difficulty. Where fragments from several men are recovered together, a matching sequence establishes that a maternal line is represented in the assemblage. It does not establish which fragment belongs to whom, or that a particular man is present at all rather than a maternal relative who served alongside him.
Some material cannot be tested at all. The Korean War remains in the Punchbowl were treated with formaldehyde in 1954 to preserve them for a future identification. The chemical makes DNA analysis difficult — a preservation decision that closed off the technique that would eventually have solved them.
And a sequence match cannot date a death. It says whose bones these are. It says nothing about when, or where, or in whose custody the man died — which in these cases is frequently the whole question.

The Korean War record

The record runs further back than Vietnam, and in Korea it takes its oldest and least answerable form. Identifications were made quickly, by the earliest methods, on remains that had been in the custody of the enemy for as long as three years. Hundreds of other men received no identification at all — and then waited sixty years for one.

Remains that reached the laboratory through the adversary

In Operation Glory, in the fall of 1954, North Korea and China handed back the American dead under the terms of the armistice. The material had been out of American hands since the men died, in some cases for three years, and it was returned in the quantity, condition and order the other side chose. That is the chain-of-custody problem in its purest form, a decade before Vietnam, and it is why the salting question belongs to the Korean War at least as much as to Southeast Asia.

What came back was identified at the Kokura laboratory in Japan by a mixed American and Japanese scientific staff of, in one Pentagon official’s description, “widely varying academic and government backgrounds,” where “internal disagreement was common enough. Notes passed back and forth.” One of those notes, preserved in a modern Pentagon analytical file, reads: “Wrong body sent home?”

In 1956 the United States removed sixty men from the list for which it demanded accountability, on the strength of remains identifications. Some of those same names remain on the unaccounted-for list today. Either they were not identified in 1956, or they were and their families were never told. Both possibilities are in the government’s own files, and neither has been resolved.

The men who waited sixty years

Eight hundred and sixty-seven Korean War unknowns lie at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu — 432 recovered in South Korea, 416 returned by North Korea in Operation Glory, and 19 recovered in the 1950s and 1960s (DPAA, Korean War Disinterment Project phase schedule). They were buried under stones marked Unknown and left there, in remains that had been treated with formaldehyde in the 1950s to preserve them for an identification the science of the day could not make — the same chemical that would later impede the DNA testing which could.

The disinterment did not begin until this century. DPAA proposed disinterring 652 of those unknowns and has worked through them in phases. By September 2024, when the agency announced its 700th Korean War identification, 232 Americans had been identified through the disinterment project (Department of Defense release, 13 September 2024). Men who died in 1950 and 1951 were being named in the 2020s, seven decades after their families were told that nothing further could be done.

The same is true of the remains North Korea returned in July 2018. Fifty-five boxes were handed over after the Singapore summit; laboratory analysis found roughly 250 individuals represented in them, of whom 93 had been identified by September 2024 (same release). About 7,353 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Korean War (DPAA, as of Sept. 18, 2026).

One comparison holds the whole point. The Vietnam crypt at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is empty: mitochondrial DNA identified 1st Lt. Michael Blassie in 1998 and he was returned to his family in St. Louis. The Korean War Unknown, interred at Arlington in May 1958, is still there.

Why the age rule bites hardest here

Korean War identifications are the oldest in the system. They were made by the earliest methods, on remains handed over by an adversary, then treated with a chemical that impedes the technique which would later have resolved them. Every axis of the age rule points the same way.

And the same record shows the correction working. Two hundred and thirty-two men taken out of a row of stones marked Unknown and given their names back is the government’s own scientists finishing work the 1950s could not do. Both halves are true at once: some Korean War identifications were questionable when they were made, and many more men waited decades for any identification at all. Neither fact is an argument against the accounting agency. Together they are the strongest available argument for asking, in any case, when the answer was given and what it was made from.

Sources

Hart v. United States, 894 F.2d 1539 (11th Cir. 1990) — the Pakse thirteen; the findings of Drs. Charney, Kerley, Maples and Levine; the discretionary-function ruling.
U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Investigations Subcommittee, hearing on the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, 15 September 1987.
U.S. General Accounting Office, POW/MIA Affairs: Issues Related to the Identification of Human Remains From the Vietnam Conflict, GAO/NSIAD-93-7, October 1992.
Deposition of Garnett E. “Bill” Bell to the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 7 November 1991; Joint Casualty Resolution Center interim response of 28 January 1992; Joint Task Force-Full Accounting message of 23 May 1993 — the McKinney case, quoted from Abandoned in Place.
National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen, letter to the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, June 2010 — the 1989 remains called “Stinky.”
Joint Task Force-Full Accounting Special Assistant, memorandum on Vietnam case assessments — the Greer/Schreckengost staged-burial finding.
Ryan Wentzel, “DNA Technology and the Struggle for the Power to Declare Missing Soldiers Dead in the Post-Vietnam War United States,” The Historical Journal — on Tadao Furue, morphological approximation, the 1986 congressional testimony and the 1987 moratorium.
Lynn M. O’Shea, Abandoned in Place — the Vescelius, Borah, Dunlop, Degnan, Netherland, Guinn, Ridgway, Greer/Schreckengost, McKinney and Blassie case files, with the underlying correspondence and forensic reports cited in her notes.
PIP research files — the salting of excavation sites in North Korea, the Pyongyang warehouse, the Kokura laboratory, the “Wrong body sent home?” annotation, and the Punchbowl formaldehyde problem.
Memoranda of Sedgwick D. Tourison, Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 17 December 1991 and 10 June 1992 — the Baron 52 “KK” casualty coding.
Letter of Dr. George W. Gill, American Board of Forensic Anthropology, to Dr. Michael Charney, 29 August 1986 — the independent review in the Vescelius case.
Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Korean War Unknowns phased disinterment schedule — the 867 Korean War unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
Department of Defense release, 13 September 2024, on the 700th Korean War serviceman accounted for — 652 unknowns proposed for disinterment, 232 identified through the project, 93 identified from the 55 boxes returned in 2018.
Mary Lou Hall, correspondence of 1993 on the identification of Cdr. Harley Hall.

Where this page quotes a forensic report, a court, an auditor or a family member, the words are theirs. Where it draws an inference, it says so. Some identifications have been wrong, and in those cases the families were right. For certain periods, and in some cases — for example, an entire crew declared identified from limited remains of only some of its members — families have reason not to accept an identification automatically.