Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.

Military ‘not hiding’
IDs of unknown soldiers

---

By Gregg K. Kakesako
Star-Bulletin

The military says it would only be speculating if it released the names and the locations of graves of Korean War soldiers buried under headstones marked "Unknown" for the past five decades.

Johnie Webb, deputy director of the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, said he is aware of repeated calls by organizations, including the Coalition of Families of Korean and Cold War POW-MIAs, to tell the families the possible places where their loved ones could be buried.

But Webb said that only after exhaustive scientific and historical research does his office release any information concerning soldiers listed as missing in action or buried in some cemetery and labeled as "Unknown."

"We're not hiding anything," said Webb, whose staff of 177 at Hickam Air Force Base has been able to identify the remains of 933 servicemen -- 658 from Southeast Asia; 20 from the Korean War; 240 from World War II; and 15 from the Cold War -- since its inception in 1973.

"We're not in the business of hiding. We want to share information, but we want to share factual information."

Donna Knox, head of the Virginia-based POW-MIA family coalition, said she has been told that at least 239 of the 866 Korean War soldiers buried in plots with the headstone "Unknown" at the National Cemetery of the Pacific were returned to U.S. soil complete with names, military service number, burial sites with map grid coordinates and other pertinent information.

Some of these 239 remains -- about 70 of them released by North Koreans under "Operation Glory" in 1954 -- are tagged with names and in some cases were accompanied by personal effects such as a wallet, wristwatch and a ring.

But even with many of the remains tagged with names, grave registration officials in Japan after the war could not conclusively identify them.

The National POW/MIA Committee officially lists 8,122 military personnel still unaccounted for from the Korean War. In total, 7,140 military men were taken as prisoners in that war.

Webb acknowledges that his facility's database can track many Korean War unknowns even to a plot at Punchbowl, but in many cases there are discrepancies that could lead to speculation.

He also notes that there was no Department of Defense policy until May 1999 that certified the use of the now commonly accepted forensic process known as mitochondrial DNA testing. That involves using microscopic blood or bone samples from a soldiers' maternal side of the family to make DNA comparisons.

The DNA comparisons are conducted at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md.

A year earlier the military took DNA from the remains of an Air Force pilot killed in Vietnam in 1972, who was buried in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington Cemetery, and matched it with those from the family of 1st Lt. Michael Blassie.

Webb said this opened up "a totally new field and led to the expectation that the test could be used to identify other unknowns," Webb said.

That led to the adoption of the Pentagon policy allowing DNA testing two years ago. On Sep. 15, 1999, two sets of Korean War remains were disinterred from Punchbowl with the expectation that 50 to 70 could eventually be identified.

Besides identifying the Punchbowl unknowns, the Army laboratory also has teams in Tunisia trying to recover remains of the crew of a World War II B-26 bomber; in Tibet exploring a glacier thought to hold a C-46 cargo plane; and in Alaska, Cambodia, Laos and New Guinea.