Over many decades and many wars, service members in the armed forces have lost their lives. Hundreds have been buried as unknown soldiers, but hundreds have also been finally identified.
Thirty Gold Star families are scheduled to gather at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl Crater on Friday. It is believed to be the largest gathering of its kind to mark National POW/MIA Recognition Day.
Thanks to emerging technology and the staff at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, many families now have closure. Fern Winbush is the agency's principal deputy director, and Dr. John Byrd is the lab director.
"We've started to really identify a lot of the servicemen and women who have gone missing from World War II forward, and I'd like to highlight one of them. Of late, we identified our 700th Korean War service member," Winbush said. "We were very successful in identifying Cpl. Billie Driver. He was 18 years old, a baby, from Dallas, Texas."
The agency has been identifying unknown Korean War service members through its Korean War Disinterment Project.
"Today, most of the remains that are coming into the laboratory for the Korean War are coming actually from the Punchbowl cemetery here in Hawaiʻi. A lot of people may not realize, but all of the unknown unidentified remains of our soldiers from the Korean War eventually got buried in the Punchbowl cemetery," Byrd said. "This was in the 1950s."
The ceremony for National POW/MIA Recognition Day at Punchbowl begins at 10 a.m. The public is invited to attend, and the event will also be live-streamed.
Charles Djou, the head of the American Battle Monuments Commission will preside over the commemoration. He served as a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and has been a U.S. representative, a state representative and a Honolulu councilmember.
Last year, the agency was also approached about using their expertise to help identify Maui fire victims. The agency sent a team of eight, mostly anthropologists, to Maui on Aug. 17, 2023, after the wildfires.
"[The Maui families] were, I think, experiencing the same kind of anxiety and grief that our POW/MIA families experience. Because when you don't know what happened to somebody and you can't take care of their remains and make sure they're properly buried, it creates like a gap in people, and a gap in the family, and a gap in the individuals until they can get some final closure to it," Byrd said.
The DPAA said it operates the largest skeletal identification laboratory in the world. Two locations are in Hawaiʻi at Pearl Harbor-Hickam, and one is in Nebraska.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Sept. 19, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
