North Carolina VFW POW/MIA

New POW/MIA Chairman for 2008-2009

Tuesday 21 July 2009 at 16:38

by POW/MIA Chairman

Department Commander Larry Flood has appointed Chuck Wright (Post 7031) as North Carolina's 2008-2009 POW/MIA Chairman.

Chuck can be reached at 828-264-4462

 

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Government To Update Families Here On Missing Soldiers

Monday 21 July 2008 at 10:52

by POW/MIA Chairman

WBBM780 - Chicago, IL, USA

Posted: Monday, 21 July 2008 8:28AM

Government To Update Families Here On Missing Soldiers
 
CHICAGO (WBBM) - Few answers have come out about the fate of tens of thousands of American soldiers still missing, going back to World War II.

This weekend, on Saturday July 26, the defense department is sending representatives to Chicago to update families here, as WBBM's Steve Miller reports.

The defense department is inviting Chicago area families whose loved ones are still missing in action to meet at a hotel ballroom near O'Hare on Saturday - the 26th - to get an update.

The Chicago Family Update meeting will be held at the Sheraton Gateway Suites Chicago O'Hare, 6501 N. Manheim Road, Rosemont, Ill.

More information can be found at www.dtic.mil/dpmo/index.htm

It has been about nine years since the defense department had one of these "Family Update" meetings in Chicago.

Leading the update meeting will be Adrian Cronauer, whose own service as a radio DJ in Vietnam was profiled by actor Robin Williams in "Good Morning Vietnam."

Cronauer says about 200 families have been invited to learn about the search for their loved ones - and, perhaps, to get new information.

"About 80 percent of our cases now are confirmed by DNA analysis, but we don't have reference samples from anybody back in Vietnam or Korea or World War Two.

"So if you are a relative, there's a good chance we might be able to take a swab from your cheek and use that as a sample what we think is a possible set of remains and their identification."

Cronauer says all families who have missing military personnel are welcome to come.

He says there are 88,000 people still missing from all conflicts; 78,000 of them are from World War Two.

It was Christmas Eve 1965 when Captain Dennis Eilers disappeared.  It's believed that his  plane went down along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.

No wreckage.  No bodies.  At least, none the U.S. government knows about.

Eilers' son Curt was three years old.

Curt Eilers is 45 now, with his own family in Naperville.

Despite making a trip to Vietnam with his brother in the mid-'90s, he doesn't have much information on his father.

Curt Eilers says he has a sense of obligation to find out what happened.

"I definitely wish I had known him better.  Obviously, (my) genetic material came from him.  And so there's a lot of curiosity and respect, and it's hard to know how to show that."

Eilers says the search site for his father's remains has been narrowed down, and he says he's still hopeful he can get more information.

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Chattanooga: Missing service members’ biggest enemy: time

Monday 21 July 2008 at 10:30

by POW/MIA Chairman

Chattanooga Times Free Press - Chattanooga, TN, USA

Monday, July 21, 2008
Chattanooga: Missing service members’ biggest enemy: time

By: Lauren Gregory
 
Sgt. John Hershel White’s remains came home from Korea last week after 58 years, and he may be among the last of that war’s missing soldiers to be identified.

The window of opportunity to bring lost service members home is closing, said Jo Anne Shirley, board chairwoman of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.

“The further away you get from the conflict, the less people are interested,” said the Dalton, Ga., resident, who has been looking for information about her brother, Air Force flight surgeon Maj. Bobby Jones, since he disappeared in Vietnam in 1972. “I think we’re at a real critical stage now.”

Of the 8,156 Korean War veterans unaccounted for after the conflict ended in 1953, 8,055 still are missing, according to the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. There are still 1,757 unaccounted for troops from the Vietnam War, and 80,693 missing during World War II, the league reports.

Sgt. White’s sister, Nina Ruth Clark, of Bryant, Ala., said she feels incredibly lucky that she was alive to contribute to her brother’s Korean War case, which concluded last weekend with a funeral and burial service in Bryant.

Though the 73-year-old provided a blood sample to the government seven years ago, she had given up on seeing any results.

“I really didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime,” she said. “It really helps, you know, to know he’s home. I still cry every day, but I figure I’ll begin to get over (my loss) now.”

Tracking Troops

Troops serving in ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are required to provide the military with blood samples to help identify their remains should something happen to them, said Larry Greer, spokesman for the Defense Department’s Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office in Arlington, Va.

The troops also are equipped with the communications technology to decrease the chances they are separated from fellow service members in the first place, he said.

But troops from previous conflicts weren’t set up for such easy tracking, he said.

So the government is left with the daunting task of locating family members generations later for DNA samples. Although DNA technology is improving, Mr. Greer said, the relatives of these long-gone people are dying or deciding to move on with their grief after so many years, making it harder to close the loop on many older cases.

Chances are the slimmest for those still buried in Southeast Asia, where the soil is especially acidic and corrosive and national leaders often are skittish about letting foreigners excavate remains, he said.

“It’s like working a detective case that may be 50 or 60 years old, and you’re keeping your fingers crossed that you can have access to the archives you need, that you can have access to witnesses you need, and that you can have access to battlefield you need,” Mr. Greer said. “We tell the families that this is like (the popular television show) ‘CSI,’ but this doesn’t get wrapped up in 20 minutes.”

Government Efforts

The Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office was established in 1993 to coordinate personnel recovery and identification efforts from past conflicts. About 600 staffers work around the globe with a budget of $105 million to $106 million a year to make it happen, Mr. Greer said.

The office begins with records of where each service member last was seen by fellow service members and other witnesses. Once a location likely to contain American remains is established, a team of anthropologists is airlifted to excavate it.

A team of negotiators lobbies for access to former enemies’ records and access to dig sites in foreign countries, Mr. Greer said.

Scientists at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command’s Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, are part of the team and use various types of evidence to identify the remains, said Dr. Alec Christensen, a DNA coordinator and forensic anthropologist at the lab.

While scientists can use nuclear DNA and fingerprints in newer cases, they can’t gather that type of evidence for older cases. Instead they must rely on dental records and mitochondrial DNA, which is more plentiful and therefore easier to extract from old bones.

The DNA is processed from anonymous samples at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md., then sent to the Joint POW/MIA lab for analysis and comparison to known samples from relatives.

Mitochondrial DNA, which passes directly through maternal lines, can be compared easily across several generations because, unlike nuclear DNA, it will not mutate, Dr. Christensen said.

“It isn’t the only evidence we use,” he said, “because a mitochondrial match is simply proof that the casualty could be related to that reference, not proof that that person is that particular individual.”

So a complex, meticulous investigation must be launched to look at everything from dental records to items found on or near the remains.

Civilian Participation

Mrs. Shirley says she has been frustrated with progress in her brother’s case and wonders if investigators always are as thorough as they can be.

She and her mother, Christine Jones, said they fully understand that Maj. Jones has died, and they have been able to grieve the loss and move forward with their lives. But they say they don’t want to stop until all avenues in his investigation have been exhausted.

So far, she is having trouble sustaining widespread interest in the issue. While her organization’s Washington, D.C.-based office once had seven employees, a drastic reduction in public contributions has slashed that to one.

Some families don’t want to be involved in looking for their missing loved ones, Mrs. Shirley said, perhaps because they are not ready to reopen their emotional wounds. But that doesn’t make their loved ones any less deserving of attention, she said.

“But that guy sacrificed for you and for me,” she said. “So we need to bring him home, because for him, that is a victory.”

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Noted veterans' advocate Earl Hopper dies

Sunday 20 July 2008 at 10:42

by POW/MIA Chairman

AZ Central.com - AZ, USA

Noted veterans' advocate Earl Hopper dies
by Lily Leung - Jul. 20, 2008 08:47 PM
The Arizona Republic

Earl P. Hopper Sr.'s fight for the rights of servicemen who were captured or missing in action began when his oldest son went missing in North Vietnam in January 1968.

Though his mission began with one person, Earl P. Hopper Jr., what fueled it was a band of brothers who had been "knowingly, wantingly" left behind by the U.S. government, said his wife, Patty.

Hopper Sr., an 86-year-old Glendale native and a noted POW/MIA advocate, died July 11.
Services for the retired Army colonel will be Friday at the Chapel of Chimes Mortuary, 7924 N. 59th Avenue, Glendale, from 5 to 8 p.m.

On numerous occasions, Hopper Sr. served as a leading expert before Congressional hearings on behalf of those missing or captured in war. He was also a key figure in two lawsuits in the 1970s that were integral in the eventual reform of the Missing Persons Act.

"He would do anything, work with anyone who would work with him to help resolve this issue and to help make sure these kinds of travesties never happen again," said Patty Hopper.

The couple met through their work with the National League of Families, an organization for family members of POW/MIA's from the Vietnam War.

She had lost a classmate. He had lost his son.

Hopper Sr., who had a 30-year military career, was elected to the board of directors in 1973 and served until 1984, when he was chairman.

He and his wife continued their work with families of POWS/MIAs when they became two of four founders of Task Force Omega, which began in 1983. The research-driven organization has concentrated its effort on the return of the POWs abandoned in Vietnam and Laos after the Vietnam War.

The group regularly researches POWs and MIAs, resulting in comprehensive biographies.

Hopper Sr. was the youngest of eight children and had grown up on a farm in then-rural Glendale. He had a paper route as a kid, loved pranks and was considered a good athlete at Glendale High School, his wife said.

He enlisted in with the Arizona National Guard in 1940 and served with distinction in the World War II with the 101st Airborne Division.

During the Korean War, he was with military intelligence, and he was an advisor to a South Vietnamese Brigade during the Vietnam War.

"He had an extremely finite sense of right and wrong, and he had the most remarkable mind," said Patty Hopper.

Donations in Hopper Sr.'s name may be sent to Task Force Omega, 14043 N. 64th Drive, Glendale.

Information: 623-979-5651.

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More lab space at Hickam to help identify missing personnel faster

Sunday 20 July 2008 at 10:19

by POW/MIA Chairman

Honolulu Advertiser - Honolulu, HI, USA

More lab space at Hickam to help identify missing personnel faster
Faster identification of missing personnel expected

By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawai'i is tripling its lab space for the analysis of American war dead, a move that should help speed up identification for families around the nation whose wait may seem like a lifetime — and sometimes is — for the repatriation of loved ones.

By October, the approximately 22-table lab space will grow to about 65 tables with the completion of a $700,000 addition to existing facilities at Hickam Air Force Base, along with the opening of a second lab in Building 220 at Pearl Harbor, being renovated for $1.8 million.

The current 57,000 square feet of office and lab space is growing to 81,000 feet, with an even larger 140,000-square-foot replacement facility expected to be built at Hickam beginning in 2010, officials said.

A dozen mobile units and trailers used for office space will be eliminated under the plan.

The mission of the 354-member unit, which this year has a budget of $53.7 million, is to achieve the "fullest possible accounting of all Americans missing as a result of the nation's past conflicts."

JPAC investigates losses, recovers the remains of missing Americans, and identifies and returns service members to families for burial, but the challenge the lab faces in terms of the sheer number of missing is daunting.

Short of a budget increase sufficient to significantly add to the number of overseas missions and personnel in Hawai'i, the lab has been making smaller improvements with help from Congress.

Change In Mandate

In addition to the new lab space, by the end of the year, the command expects the Defense Department to adjust the unit's mandate, which currently focuses almost two-thirds of its efforts to Vietnam War troops, with Korean War and World War II troops roughly splitting up the remainder.

For the Hawai'i-based command that grew out of Southeast Asia recovery efforts started in 1973, such a change would likely provide greater parity to families who have family members missing from World War II and Korea.

That may or may not benefit Janice Watterson Snyder, 63, an Indianola, Wash., resident whose father's B-17 bomber went down in Germany in March 1945, two weeks after she was born.

A German researcher found the crash site in 2000, and the information was passed on to JPAC in 2003, Snyder said. She hopes they'll investigate and make a recovery, but the intervening years add up quickly.

JPAC is able to make about 70 identifications a year. U.S. Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., recently said 1,200 to 1,400 sets of remains are at the Hawai'i lab for identification.

The lab JPAC is setting up in Building 220 at Pearl Harbor will be used to lay out 208 boxes of Korean War remains — perhaps representing 400 U.S. service members — that North Korea turned over to the U.S. between 1990 and 1994.

'Waiting And Hoping'

DNA samples already have been taken, some IDs have been made, and having the space to lay out the remains should facilitate further identification, officials said.

But Snyder, whose father is among the largest group of missing service members — those from World War II — worries she may not live long enough to see the day his body is returned to U.S. soil.

To date, the U.S. effort has led to the identification of more than 1,400 individuals. According to one Congressional count, 74,374 remain missing from World War II; 8,055 from Korea; 1,757 from the Vietnam War; 127 from the Cold War; and one from the Gulf War.

"When I go to the family updates (hosted by JPAC), there are so many people waiting and hoping," Snyder said. "The challenge to JPAC is just monumental when you know the numbers."

Talking over the phone about such a loss is a cold and somewhat sterile exchange compared to living it and hoping for recovery, she said.

"These folks have had their whole lives changed in some way by this person who did not come home," Snyder said. Her father, 2nd Lt. Dale Watterson, was a 24-year-old navigator flying out of England when his bomber was hit by German flak and crashed late in the war.

In recent years, the families of Korea and World War II missing have made vocal entreaties for greater recovery efforts as they reach old age, and amateur sleuthing via the Internet has provided tantalizing clues.

Delay Uacceptable

For the first time in a decade, and reflecting renewed concern, an oversight hearing was held on July 10 by a House armed services subcommittee on POW/MIA activities, including those of JPAC and the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.

Charles A. Ray, deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW/MIA affairs, said the mission of accounting for the missing "is the embodiment of this nation's commitment to those it sends into harm's way."

From an original number of more than 2,500 missing from the Vietnam War, 889 have been accounted for and returned, he said.

Ray said he tells families the recovery work "is not 'CSI: Miami.' This is the real world, where JPAC scientists and team members don't have the luxury of writing a script so that the case is solved in less than an hour."

But Ray added that, "Even though we speak proudly of what we've been able to accomplish with your (Congress') help, it's simply not acceptable that many family members have had to wait decades for answers."

Advances In Science

Johnie E. Webb Jr., deputy commander of JPAC, said identifications can be made in as short as a month. Dental comparisons, DNA, X-rays, prescription eyeglass examination, wedding rings and watches are among the evidence used to make an identification.

On the other end of the time spectrum, an identification recently was made from remains turned over from Vietnam to the United States in 1988.

Webb said the lab early on wasn't able to extract usable DNA, but advances more recently in science made that possible using a demineralization process and the ability to use less bone for testing.

Testifying at the July 10 subcommittee hearing, Rear Adm. Donna L. Crisp, commander of JPAC, pointed to demineralization as an improvement in the lab, saying that should accelerate the time between recovery and identification, particularly for the smaller bone fragments recovered in Vietnam.

Many recoveries in Vietnam are made at sites where aircraft crashed at high speeds, fragmenting and dispersing remains, officials said. By contrast, World War II bombers that went down in places such as Papua New Guinea often crashed with less violence, and full crews often are recovered.

Crisp also noted that the extra lab space will allow the 208 boxes of Korean War remains to be laid out for analysis.

"So those are the two things that come to mind, innovative things that have happened in the last couple of years to decrease recovery and ID time," she said.

Webb said when the Central Identification Laboratory Hawai'i — which became part of JPAC — opened here in 1976, its only responsibility was the Vietnam War.

"Now we have the responsibility to do the Korean War. We have the responsibility to do World War II. We have a worldwide mission which includes Europe," Webb said. "So the mission has expanded."

Robert Mann, the deputy scientific director at the lab, said staffing has increased, and when he started in 1992, there were about six anthropologists. Now there are more than 20, he said.

Limited Resources

Part of the identification problem comes when anthropologists deploy, and their carefully laid-out remains sometimes have to be boxed back up for storage.

Crisp said JPAC does about 70 missions a year. This year, the command has gone to 15 countries, including Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Palau, the Solomon Islands, South Korea, Japan, Pagan Island, Canada, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Germany and France.

Crisp said there have been 46 missions for the Vietnam War, 16 for World War II, and five for Korea. She added that "we're starting to go back to the Republic of China," and planning has begun for the first missions to India.

Hundreds of Americans perished and are missing from World War II flights over the Himalayan "Hump."

Complications remain should JPAC's mission become less Vietnam War-focused, meanwhile.

Webb said the acidic soil in Vietnam and Laos causes remains to deteriorate much more quickly than remains out of Korea.

"So in a very short period of time, there's not going to be anything to recover in Vietnam," he said.

There hasn't been recovery access to North Korea since 2005, and Webb said there's a limited amount of work that can be done in South Korea.

There are JPAC detachments in Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. Snyder, who is part of a group called the World War II MIA Recovery Working Group, would like to see the creation of JPAC "field branches" in the South Pacific and Europe, and a closer working relationship with amateur historians.

Webb said a limiting factor in recovery is that JPAC only can field about 15 teams. Part of the reason for that is war demands and competition for personnel and resources.

Webb also fully realizes what's at stake.

"We know that there are families out there that are waiting," he said. "We know that family members are dying every day. We're pushing ourselves to figure out, how can we do this better? How can we do it faster, and get the answer to families?"

McHugh, the representative from New York, said at the recent hearing that neither the Defense Department nor U.S. Pacific Command "have been fully committed to fully resourcing the accounting effort."

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com.

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