Headed home
JPAC recovery teams search battle sites for service members' remains
by
Alison Walker-Baird
News-Post Staff
A bomber clips its wings on limestone jutting from a steep slope in a remote region of northern Laos. Moments later, it crashes.
Nearly 40 years after that crash, a military anthropologist arrived at the slope to help unearth the remains of the two Air Force captains on board.
Elias Kontanis, fresh out of graduate school, was a month into working for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, the military agency that finds and recovers the remains of service members who never returned from war.
This was the first case for Kontanis, a pilot himself, and it hit him hard.
"I think it gives me a lot of respect for what these guys had to do, what they were asked to do and did," Kontanis, a JPAC recovery team leader, said. "Flying an airplane is difficult enough. I can't imagine flying in a hostile environment, people shooting at you and having to navigate (the limestone)."
In fall 2004, his recovery team spent more than a month pulling bone fragments and aircraft equipment from erosion channels at the site until there was nothing left to find.
JPAC's roughly 400 staff members can spend years scouring records and forging through mud to bring back not only remains for families to bury but also answers to years of questions about how and where the missing died.
Aircraft crashes often obliterate everything and everyone on board, as well as all hope of returning ashes, teeth or even dog tags to surviving families. Vietnam's acidic soil and hot, humid weather hasten decomposition and deterioration.
People who witnessed crashes or burials have died or can't remember. Locals or so-called "wreck hunters" have scavenged crash sites and taken crucial evidence.
With an annual budget of about $50 million, JPAC has helped identify the remains of about 1,300 U.S. troops from the Korean, Vietnam and Cold wars, as well as World War II.
Though 88,000 troops are missing from WWII and later conflicts, military officials know even the most diligent investigations can't bring them all home. About half of the 78,000 missing from World War II are unrecoverable, lost at sea or disintegrated in fiery crashes.
The Department of Defense created the Central Identification Laboratory in 1973 to find American troops missing in Vietnam. The laboratory merged in 2003 to form JPAC with agencies that were created to recover and identify remains from other conflicts. It is based at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii.
Groundwork starts
Before crews arrive with picks, brushes and other equipment to unearth human remains, investigators put in months — sometimes years — of legwork.
To collect information on the thousands of missing troops, military officials create a case file for each loss to store service records, photos and other documentation to help refine the search for remains.
JPAC historians and analysts comb through archives and talk to whomever last saw or served with the individual. Unit reports about flights or enemy fire might provide hints, and researchers often study foreign countries' records to review accounts written by enemy troops.
Investigators deploy
JPAC deploys an investigation team to visit a site if case files point to a location, or if the agency receives a third-party tip, such as locals uncovering remains or crash sites on their own.
Four to nine people — including an analyst, a medic and a linguist who helps the team talk to locals — visit several sites during a one- to two-month trip. Investigations at each site can last as little as a day or two, some much longer.
"We definitely exhaust all leads, wherever they lead us — we've got to follow through on them," said U.S. Marine Capt. Michael Taylor, a JPAC investigation team leader and former recovery team leader. He returned in April from a six-week mission in Vietnam.
Investigators compile testimony from residents who may have seen the crash or battle, or who helped with the burial. Their accounts, along with details gathered by JPAC historians and researchers, help the team scout the site's general boundaries.
The investigators sometimes traverse treacherous terrain — bamboo jungles, mountains, rice paddies, rubber tree and cashew nut plantations, even under water.
Team leaders run metal detectors and scour the site's surface, looking for evidence. Photographs and sketches of terrain, vegetation and other elements help the recovery team prepare for their excavation, Taylor said.
"It's almost as if we're peeking into a window of history," he said. "It's amazing to be part of that process, part of that team."
After the team returns to JPAC headquarters, investigators recommend a recovery team be sent to excavate the site if the evidence points to a likely recovery, Taylor said.
Deciding not to continue to the recovery phase can be difficult.
"You adapt to it but you never really get used to it," Taylor said. "You go out there thinking, 'We're going to bring someone home.' But after 30, 40 days you realize there's nothing left."
At any given time, more than 200 investigated cases are waiting for recovery teams to deploy.
Teams excavate
JPAC sends its 18 recovery teams on about 15 missions each year to excavate sites and collect evidence. The 10- to- 14-member teams include a forensic photographer, forensic anthropologist, bomb technician and medic.
Costs and difficulty range widely. Flat, accessible terrain costs less to recover than sites that are under water or require daily helicopter fly-ins.
Recovery teams bring an arsenal of tools, including picks, shovels and trowels for digging, and excavators and small sticks for detailed work such as scraping around fragile bones.
Before any equipment touches the surface, bomb technicians ensure no deadly surprises lie beneath.
Metal detectors and ground-penetrating radar help scout boundaries. An anthropologist and team leaders grid the area to meticulously sort remains and evidence.
They sieve soil through quarter-inch mesh screens, picking out bones and teeth, often in small fragments. Watches, rings and dog tags are pulled out and carefully catalogued to help with identification before eventual return to families.
Teams look for fragments of parachutes, helmets, ejection seats and other evidence that places troops at a crash or combat scene, Kontanis said.
Digging can destroy even as it uncovers, so the teams must be meticulous and methodical, Kontanis said.
"You can never go back — the site can never be replicated," he said. "Once the site is dug, it's dug."
Teams document where each bit of evidence is found in the grid squares. Identifying and sorting remains of multiple individuals can hinge on knowing where each piece is found, Kontanis said.
"If we perform the recovery in a haphazard manner and bully through the grave, we would lose that information," he said.
Teams can thoroughly excavate some sites in a few days; others take multiple trips over years, Kontanis said. Myriad factors play a role, including how far debris is spread laterally and underground. An aircraft crashing at a steep angle, for example, can push evidence deep under the surface.
Teams continue searching a site until they can be sure nothing is left to recover.
Evidence that could be used for identification is sent to JPAC's Central Identification Lab in Hawaii, which is the largest forensic anthropology lab in the world.
Often recovery teams can't be sure how many individuals' remains were excavated. Teams may expect to find remains of several individuals but lab testing reveals they excavated only one or two, or vice versa.
Labs identify
Back at the laboratory, scientists create a biological profile — including age, sex and cause of death — from remains and other evidence. To prevent bias, the recovery team members don't analyze the evidence, Kontanis said.
To conclusively identify a service member, multiple lines of evidence must all point in the same direction, he said. The recovery team looks for continuity in field information, such as a specific aircraft, skeletal remains, dental records, DNA matches and material found at the scene, such as dog tags or a wedding ring.
The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville extracts DNA from the remains and compares it with samples from missing service members and their families.
The Central Identification Laboratory and AFDIL sort commingled remains from evidence excavated by a recovery team, confiscated from remains traders or turned over to the U.S. by foreign governments.
Coming full circle
Kontanis continued to follow the two airmen who crashed in Laos through identification and the return of remains to their families. Two years after he left the crash site, a training trip in Washington brought him to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall.
In fall 2006, Kontanis rubbed his fingertips over their engraved names.
"It was bringing it full circle, in my mind," he said.
A park ranger at the memorial said the men's remains had recently been recovered. Where once a cross had been etched next to their names — the mark for all unaccounted-for Vietnam troops — a diamond was superimposed over it, denoting their confirmed deaths.
Kontanis chatted briefly with the ranger but never mentioned the prominent role he played in the recovery. He didn't want to draw attention to himself.
"I just went on my way," he said.
