On my desk there are two bracelets, one nested in the other, off to the side but within ready view. One is for the “Wisconsin 37”—a copper band bearing the names of the thirty-seven original unaccounted-for from the state of Wisconsin that Larry “Bootin” Soulier gave me the first time we met in 2014. The other is a slimmer, green-colored aluminum POW / MIA bracelet for Colonel Oscar Mauterer, father to Pam Cain. She presented it to me recently, explaining that I shouldn’t feel compelled to wear it but that she wanted me to have it. I cherish them both.
This book is born of myriad gifts, acts of generosity big and small stretched across a decade of research and writing. It’s not just that it’s richer for them; this book could not exist without them. And so I have many gifts to acknowledge, and yet I acknowledge from the onset that words of gratitude and recognition can only convey so much.
To the families of the missing and unaccounted for who shared their stories with me, welcomed me into their homes, spoke with me over meals or coffee, over the phone and through emails, I am profoundly grateful for your trust. Many of you I met through formal functions such as the jointly held National League of POW / MIA Families annual meeting and government briefing, smaller regional family updates, and tours of the Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command facilities. Others I encountered along more serendipitous routes. The conversations and exchanges, no matter how brief, built the foundation for my reflections on what accounting means to surviving kin.
And yet upon that foundation rest the specific stories of several individual service members, whose lives infuse this book with meaning. I wish to thank in particular the Allen family, for all your patience and for sharing your memories of your brother, both his loss and his homecoming—Marilyn Neff, Casey (Alden) Allen, Cindy Hawkins, Sheila Kelly, Sean Allen, and Jeff Savelkoul. Thank you as well, Boot and Rose Soulier and Jimmy Heipel, for your generous hospitality and for including me in Wotsy’s remembrance gathering; that invitation meant more than you can imagine. Thank you, Dwayne Spinler, for your extraordinary candor and grace in telling your family’s story and for your encouragement along the way. Thank you, Deanna Klenda, for your metaphors, sunsets, and bundles of wheat. And thank you, Pam Cain, for your courage and your friendship. To all of you: through your willingness to share your experiences, you let me glimpse your loved one and helped me understand how his absence and memory have forever shaped your lives. I cannot thank you enough.
To the veterans of the Duwayne Soulier Memorial VFW Post 8239 in Red Cliff, Wisconsin, most especially Randy Bresette and Butch Kuepfer, and to Diane Fizell of the Ladies Auxiliary, please know how much I value the support you have given me over the past few years. From the moment I stepped through that screen door, you welcomed a stranger—a particularly talkative one at that—into your community and taught me about its history. Mary Defoe, thank you for your poetry and your conversations, including those you shared with me of your late husband Ken. Joanna Hessing Rothermund and Bill Hessing, thank you for helping me get to know Jimmy and, through her careful clippings, photographs, and mementos, his loving mother, Florence. To Vietnam War veterans Ken “Polack” Pezewski and Bob “Hogman” Thompson, thank you for telling me the story of the MIA bike.
Alongside the families of the unaccounted for are those who seek to find them and bring them home: the personnel, civilian and military, of what was formerly the Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), now part of the Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL). I am deeply indebted to a whole slew of people in these agencies. First and foremost, the forensic scientists and staff at the (former) Central Identification Laboratory—this book depended on their willingness to host me, to allow me to shadow them as they went about their daily tasks, explaining the science and fielding my questions, no matter how rudimentary. Some have retired or gone on to work elsewhere, while others continue at the lab. I’m grateful to the entire staff, especially Greg Fox, John Byrd, Bill Belcher, Laurel Freas, Hugh Tuller, Derek Congram, Denise To, Greg Berg, Paul Emanovski, Marin Pilloud, Joe Hefner, Carl Stephan, Pierre Guyomarc’h, Carrie Brown, Chris Pink, Jennie Jin, Ashley Burch, Mary Megyesi, Owen O’Leary, Cullen Black, Sean Tallman, Cal Shiroma, Vince Sava, and Ben Sorensen. My appreciation also goes to Bob Maves at JPAC (now DPAA), Larry Greer of the Defense Prisoner of War / Missing Personnel Office, and Hattie Johnson, Head of the US Marine Corps POW / MIA Section. At AFDIL, Tim McMahon helped me translate the complex science of genetic testing into lay terms; thank you as well to Jim Canik and Suni Edson. In May 2012, I had the extraordinary opportunity to take part in a JPAC recovery mission in central Vietnam. My fellow team members made sure that I learned the work, stayed safe, and, above all, felt welcome among their ranks. To all twelve of 12-3VM (aka Team Knee Sweat), it was an honor to dig and screen alongside you. My particular thanks go to Laurel Freas, Nicole McMinamin, Jimmy Gasaway, Mark Bryant, Hau Le, Seth Barker, and my dig partner, Andrew Childs. And on behalf of the team, to the Vietnamese workers on the site, I extend a heartfelt cảm ơn.
But none of that—my fieldwork at the lab or the opportunity to participate in a recovery mission—would have been possible without the support of Tom Holland, one of the finest people I know and my mentor throughout this project. He believed in the value of this research and in me. Of all the gifts this book has given me, his friendship is among the most treasured.
In one of my favorite passages of the seminal text, The Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs explains that memories are always collective because, though individuals, we are each social beings. “In reality, we are never alone. Other[s] need not be physically present, since we always carry with us and in us a number of distinct persons.” By this he means that other people, the people who fill our lives, have taught us to see, experience, and know the world in different ways. That intellectual sociality is especially true—and critical—in academic endeavors. I was never alone in this project because I had constant companions, both brilliant and thoughtful, helping to steer my ethnographic gaze and tease out deeper social meanings. First and foremost, thank you to my principal interlocutor, the historian who never let me off easy, Michael Dolski. This book is so much stronger for your engagements along the way and your close readings, down to the final draft. I am similarly grateful for conversations, feedback, and support from Sarah Daynes, Arthur Murphy, Joan Paluzzi, Tom Matyók, Eric Jones, Adam Rosenblatt, Luis Fondebrider, Paco Ferrándiz, Natan Sznaider, Sabrina Perić, Admir Jugo, Robin Reneike, Andy Bickford, Gerard Toal, Marilyn London, Amy Mundorff, and Dawnie Steadman. Through her subtle prompting, Tâm Ngô helped me recognize and address gaps in my analysis. Students in my War and Memory seminars at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and at George Washington University have helped push my thinking in important ways, as did the students in my Forensic Science and Technology of Truth seminar in fall 2018. At GWU, I had the great fortune to work through ideas and to fine tune passages from this book with several graduate students: thank you, Görkem Aydemir, Devin Proctor, Evy Vourlides, Scott Ross, Emma Backe, and Shweta Krishnan for your insights. Sarah Richardson, thank you for your exacting eye and eleventh-hour encouragement.
From the early stages of fieldwork to the final writing-up process, this project has received generous funding, including support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Science Foundation (#1027457), the National Institutes of Health (#R01HG0057020), the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, both a Summer Stipend grant and a Public Scholar Program award (FZ-256468-17); please note, any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. At critical points in the project, I benefited from two workshops, the first funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation that explored the theme “The Gift of Death,” and the second, a “book incubator” supported by GWU’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, and the Institute for Ethnographic Research. This second workshop convened several colleagues who read drafts of the manuscript and provided invaluable comments. Leading the charge in urging more clarity and force at key moments in the analysis was Jay Winter, whose own writing has served as an inspiration and model for me since my research in Bosnia and Herzegovina. To the other participants, my attentive, generous readers Richard Grinker, Ruth Toulson, Andy Bickford, and Tom Holland, I hope there will be the chance to repay you for the care you showed this work. In the past year, I had the opportunity to present—and thus try out—some of the book’s central claims to a range of different audiences. Thank you to Paco Ferrándiz for including me in the illustrious “Las políticas de memoria” research team and for the invitation to participate in the 2018 conference organized by the Center for Human and Social Sciences (CCHS), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC); the same goes to Tâm Ngô for including me in her workshop, “The Sociopolitical Lives of the Dead,” at Radboud University in the Netherlands; Alice Kelly and the CultCommWar Workshop Four: American Wars, American Memory, at the Rothemere American Institute, University of Oxford; Barbara Heath and the University of Tennessee 2018 graduate seminar; Josh Rivers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and Jelena Subotić at Georgia State University.
“Only in appearance did I take a walk alone.” The collective intellectual work behind this book extends as well into the final strides of refining its argument and polishing its prose. Here, I reaped the benefits of my external reviewers’ keen assessments, including those of Thomas Laqueur. I am deeply appreciative for his incisive and honest comments; the book is better for his readings. Though he wasn’t directly part of this project, classicist James Tatum long ago taught me the creative possibilities of interdisciplinarity; his lessons and example are never far away, and I hope he will recognize their traces among the pages of this book.
At Harvard University Press, Andrew Kinney’s light but deft editorial hand helped the text take its final shape, both in structure and voice. With his gift for language, Richard Feit smoothed off this work’s rough edges and caught my errors; any that remain are mine alone. Thank you as well to Kate Brick and Olivia Woods for their careful attention to detail. Isabelle Lewis created the maps, and Amanda Wilmot generously allowed me to include images from her stirring chronicle of Merlin Allen’s homecoming. This project spanned a decade, and thus many of its concepts have been percolating for a while, finding slivers of daylight in earlier publications. Chapter 1 builds on ideas first discussed in “Monumental Change: The Shifting Politics of Obligation at the Tomb of the Unknowns,” an article I coauthored with Thomas Matyók and published in History & Memory 30, no. 1 (Spring / Summer 2018): 40–74. Chapters 1 and 4 continue lines of inquiry first discussed in “A Curious Trade: The Recovery and Repatriation of U.S. Missing in Action from the Vietnam War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 1 (January 2015): 161–90. Portions of Chapter 1 were first published in “The Making and Unmaking of an Unknown Soldier,” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 5: 631–56 and are reprinted here with permission of Sage Publications. Jim Northrup’s poem “wahbegan” is reprinted from Walking the Rez Road, 20th anniversary ed. (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2013) by kind permission of Fulcrum, Inc.
I have researched and written this book warmed by the sunlight of my family’s love. To my mother, Shannon McCune Wagner, I marvel at your courage and am grateful each day for what you have always given me—your love, support, and guidance. To Wallace Watson and Johanna McCune Wagner, thank you for every page you read and idea you heard out, and for your abiding understanding—of me and this project. To Jonathan Wagner, Nat and Christy Wagner, Rob Wagner, and Carin and Sue Ruff, please know how much I appreciate your encouragement and care over these past several years.
Alejandro and Emilio Pérez, you have brought such joy to my life—the effervescent, wondrous kind but also that deep, everyday, grounding kind. And you’ve been so very patient with me writing this book, word by word, page by page. Thank you, Emilio, y gracias poochon.