Introduction

THE FIRST TIME I WATCHED a military burial at Arlington National Cemetery, I was riveted by the hands. The hands of the honor guard detail had all the mesmerizing otherworldly energy of a burning fire. White gloves glided along clean edges, pulling taut the fabric of the flag suspended just above the wooden casket in a delicately choreographed motion. Fold after fold, the red, white, and blue receded into itself until all that remained was a tight triangular package, a gift from the nation presented on bended knee to the bereaved.

Burials, as a form of ritual, shed light on what a community or society values—not only what it holds dear or deems essential, but also what obligations arise and what rites are required. The famous sociologist Émile Durkheim, whose own son died in combat during World War I, once said that through rituals, “society never stops creating new sacred things.”¹ Rituals consecrate objects, ideas, individuals, even nations. They guard against transgressions, defining how we orient and comport ourselves in the presence of sacred things.² Rituals also help make sense of the unfathomable, like aberrant or untimely death. In such circumstances, they do important work for both the living and the dead. In the words of Durkheim’s student Robert Hertz, rituals help the mourning society return to a “state of peace,” and thus “triumph over death.”³

But what rituals suffice when there is nothing of the dead to bury or to care for—when there are no bodies to “ritual about” or “ritual with?” Rituals often turn on material objects, and in the case of the dead, the body itself becomes that focal point. Think of the cult of the saints in early Christianity: their relic bones serve as powerful, tangible symbols for their supplicants, consecrating the spaces and artifacts around them. But what happens when those powerful symbols are missing? Our story, the story of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, begins with that fundamental conundrum—when the remains of war dead go unrecovered and their fates unaccounted for—and explores its consequences. By no means the first or even the most extreme instance of armed conflict to introduce such a conundrum, the war in Southeast Asia, at least within the American experience, inaugurated a new way of confronting war’s destruction: through science, in its capacity to recognize the sacred and to enable rituals of remembrance and mourning.⁴ The forensic science of accounting for the missing in action (MIA) presented the nation, the state, and its military, local communities, veterans, and, most important of all, surviving kin with a new means by which to respond to mass death and counter the sting of the war’s defeat.

It’s a jarring notion; we tend to think of science as grounded in the traditions of empiricism and objectivity, not as the stuff of social rites and sacred objects.⁵ And of course, science is, indeed, empirical and objective. But it is also deeply social; reflecting the values of the society in which it exists, scientific inquiry produces knowledge and baseline facts, and in doing so, shapes the way people approach problems and seek their resolution. Science can help render the unfathomable less so, including the devastating effects of war. This was the case—though belatedly—for the Vietnam War. The forensic efforts of recovering and identifying remains of service members missing in action or killed in action / body not recovered—since 1973 collectively known as the “unaccounted for”—gave rise to new rituals, creating “new sacred things” in the wake of violent rupture.⁶ Chief among those new things is a different way of talking about and thus apprehending war’s human tolls; forensic science has given families of the unaccounted for a new language of remembrance, one that seeks to address the ambiguities of unknown fates and unreturned remains through the promise of accuracy, calculability, and efficiency.⁷ In this novel lexicon of individuated loss and sacrifice, the science of MIA accounting has also affected how this country remembers its war dead, raising expectations for what is possible and what is necessary in honoring those who died fighting on its behalf.

Why Vietnam?

“Missing in action” is a deceptively neat phrase for the messy category of remains unrecovered and fates unaccounted for in any modern war. The ambiguity surrounding their physical remains and the facts of their absence elude easy resolution. But with the Vietnam War and, in particular, its postwar politics, the disjuncture between language and experience was especially sharp. To begin with, the MIA category represented merely one column within a larger account book of destruction—from ravaged land and property to decimated communities, families, lives, and bodies. Some five million tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam, another two million on Laos, and an estimated half a million on Cambodia—in total, three times the amount dropped over both Europe and the Pacific during World War II.⁸ The United States and its South Vietnamese allies spread seventy-three million liters of chemical agents, 62 percent of it Agent Orange, an herbicide whose full impact, particularly with its deadly dioxin, is not yet known, even three and four generations later.⁹ In Vietnam alone, an estimated three million people were killed between 1954 and 1975, most of them by the United States and its allies, while 58,220 US forces are counted as killed in action (KIA) or as non-combat deaths.¹⁰ At the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, the United States listed 2,646 Americans as unaccounted for from the war, “with roughly equal numbers of those missing in action, or killed in action / body not recovered”;¹¹ of those, 1,589 US service members are still missing.¹² The number for Vietnamese missing, estimated at three hundred thousand, is harder to tabulate as the postwar country confronts not only a significantly greater scale of loss, but also the question of which lives and what forms of sacrifice merit remembering.¹³

With its number of unaccounted for less than 4 percent of the total listed fatalities (2,646 of 58,220), the Vietnam War was by no means exceptional in the history of US military engagement.¹⁴ On the contrary, the percentage paled in comparison to that of the missing and unknown American war dead from World War II—19 percent (79,000 of 400,000 dead)—and the Korean War—22 percent (8,000 of 36,500).¹⁵ The Civil War’s carnage dwarfed those numbers, as “hundreds of thousands of men—more than 40 percent of deceased Yankees and a far greater proportion of Confederates—perished without names, identified only, as Walt Whitman put it, ‘by the significant word UNKNOWN.’ ”¹⁶ But in the postwar politics of reckoning with defeat, the unaccounted for from the war in Southeast Asia assumed a qualitatively different force than their antecedents. In part, that force derived from how closely connected the categories of POW and MIA became during and after the war.¹⁷ Uncertainty bred hope and anxiety; wartime contentions bred postwar frustrations. For example, in the early years, for some surviving relatives, the status of “missing in action” left the door of survival cracked open. It meant an entirely different order of knowledge, or more precisely, the lack thereof, than that of “killed in action but body not recovered,” where an individual was known to have died but whose remains were not located and repatriated, owing to the circumstances of the loss. “Missing means you don’t know what happened to them.… Missing means you have uncertainty about what happened to them.”¹⁸ Given that uncertainty, might the MIA someday reappear—alive—as a POW released or escaped from captivity? On the national stage, both during the war and after the signing of the peace accords, voices within the POW / MIA advocacy movement sought to preserve this connection, stoking the fires of hope, for political purposes as well as for personal needs.¹⁹ But away from that spotlight, in households across the United States, MIA status often introduced a delicate, strained position of dependence that compounded the uncertainty, as spouses and children continued to receive benefits of an active-duty service member. Whether remains came home, an official finding of death had profound material and social consequences.²⁰ In these trying circumstances, Vietnam War POW / MIA families and returned veterans waged their own private battles of hope, fear, anger, and resignation. More often than not, they were left to navigate the murky waters of MIA status, of uncertain fate and absent remains, with little help from the government.

“You are not forgotten.” Even as the POW / MIA movement’s slogan insisted that the country hold the war’s unaccounted for in the clear light of memory, on some level, not forgetting was not enough. National attention focused on fates of the living and remains of the dead—a different kind of “body count” from the one evoked by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s statistical measure of enemy attrition.²¹ Vietnam War veterans issued their own challenge: “Bring them home or send us back!” They argued that the missing deserved to be located and repatriated; indeed, their sacrifice required it. In pushing for the “fullest possible accounting”—the phrase first adopted by the National League of POW / MIA Families (arguably the most politically powerful such organization in the country) and used by President Nixon when he announced the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 and again in his State of the Union Address in 1974—both the POW / MIA families and the Vietnam vets were demanding that the US government fulfill its obligation to those sacrificed in its service.²²

Yet accounting, especially for the missing and presumed dead, wasn’t merely about tabulating and documenting. It was about care, a system of social value and practice that understood those dead as more than just organic remnants, bones subject to decay; rather, they were “social beings” in need of posthumous care.²³ For historian Thomas Laqueur, that sensibility is inherently human: “We as a species care for the dead; we live among them; we make of them ciphers of memory.”²⁴ The living have ethical obligations to the dead, “creatures who need to be eased out of this world and settled safely into the next and into memory.”²⁵ But what to do when there is nothing tangible to “ease out,” or to “settle safely?” And what to do when those “creatures” are young men and women who died fighting on behalf of the abstraction that is the nation? Though joining a much longer lineage of American unknowns and unrecovered from past conflicts stretching back to the Civil War, the unaccounted for from the Vietnam War prompted new rituals of meaning making. For in its ambiguity, the missing-in-action label proved both too vast and too empty to contain the hopes, anxieties, and demands of surviving kin. A different response to their absence had to be devised, one that centered on caring for the physical remains of the missing through scientific means—recovering, repatriating, identifying, and returning them to their families and their communities of mourning.

Rituals for the Missing

I didn’t start out thinking of science as a source of ritual. On the contrary, from the beginning I was struck by much more obvious forms of ritual activity in American military life. Perhaps because I came to the story of the missing in action as an uninitiated observer—only one person in my family, my mother’s brother, had served in the Vietnam War, and of my generation, only two older cousins had joined the military, one the air force and the other the navy. To my eye, there seemed a symbol, or symbolic act, for everything; one just needed to know how to recognize and translate it. Part of the task of anthropological research is to undertake a long-term, fine-grained analysis, what we call ethnographic study—of a community, a social practice or institution, a set of beliefs, and so on—and attempt to understand it according to the internal logics of that society, for example, to tease out the meanings of symbols and rituals, how they’ve come to be, and how, why, and by whom they’re employed. It takes time and requires patience; it depends on people’s willingness to share their insights and experiences and the anthropologist’s ability to aggregate and juxtapose those views until a clearer picture emerges.

Thus, only later did I begin to appreciate that the surfeit of ritual surrounding the MIA’s ambiguous fate stemmed from the context of the war itself: in the absence of military funeral honors with the three volleys of rifle fire, folded flag, and marked headstone, the missing in action from the prolonged and contentious war in Southeast Asia have generated their own repertoire of symbols and rituals. Take, for example, the Missing Man Table ceremony. In Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, at Memorial Day gatherings and MIA commemorative events across the country, a table is set and chairs arrayed to honor those still absent. While it’s now used to commemorate the unaccounted for from other conflicts—World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the First Gulf War—the ritual originated in response to the Vietnam War. Little is left to the imagination, as the accompanying script, often read aloud at commemorative events, explains each symbol, its meaning, and the audience’s expected response:

The table is round—to show our everlasting concern.

The cloth is white—symbolizing the purity of their motives when answering the call to serve.

The single red rose reminds us of the lives of these Americans … and their loved ones and friends who keep the faith, while seeking answers.

The yellow ribbon symbolizes our continued uncertainty, hope for their return and determination to account for them.

A slice of lemon reminds us of their bitter fate, captured and missing in a foreign land.

A pinch of salt symbolizes the tears of our missing and their families—who long for answers after decades of uncertainty.

The lighted candle reflects our hope for their return—alive or dead.

The Bible represents the strength gained through faith to sustain us and those lost from our country, founded as one nation under God.

The glass is inverted—to symbolize their inability to share a toast.

The chairs are empty—they are missing.²⁶

With its symbolic elements subsuming individual experience into collective categories—draftees and enlistees are leveled in purity of motive; faith is explicitly Judeo-Christian; families are uniformly unwavering in their hope and grief—the ceremony sets apart both the missing and their surviving kin as sacred. It lets us know how to think and feel and act in the face of one of war’s most destructive ends: to be still missing; or, more to the point, not yet home, indefinitely.

The Missing Man Table ceremony itself incorporates another important symbol of the war in Southeast Asia—the iconic image from the POW / MIA flag. Conceived and commissioned by an MIA wife in 1970, the flag is black and white, with the silhouette of a service member.²⁷ Behind him, one sees a prison watchtower; in front of him there is a strand of barbed wire. Atop flagpoles in small towns and big cities across the United States, decorating pickups and stitched on leather jackets, the flag has become a recognized national symbol. Most Americans old enough to remember the war understand the consciously yoked categories of POW and MIA, even if they don’t know the individual stories behind the flag or the specifics of the policies that enshrined it at municipal buildings, fire stations and police stations, rest stops and toll plazas.²⁸ For many, the silhouette of the bowed head recalls the era’s fractious politics that reverberate to this day in public debates about foreign policy and entanglements abroad. However they choose to acknowledge or embrace it, Americans young and old recognize the flag’s call to action: the printed pledge “You are not forgotten” that defies time’s threat (and the threat of a potentially indifferent society) to blur, even to erase, memories of absent service members and of war’s tolls.

Next to these more obvious ceremonies and symbols of the Vietnam War’s POW / MIA movement, science seems an unlikely source or catalyst for ritual. But its role in generating “new sacred things” becomes clearer in light of the conundrum of the war’s missing service members and the thorny questions invited by their absence. Beyond raising flags and setting tables, how should a nation, a surviving parent, sibling, or child, a veteran or a current military member commemorate a combatant whose fate has yet to be known with certainty? On a more abstract level, how does one remember a person who is neither definitively dead nor positively alive? What works to ease such absence? What brings about an end to uncertainty? While almost every war waged sooner or later provides its own, if partial, answers to these questions, for the United States, the Vietnam War heightened and expanded a national tradition of individuated recovery, repatriation, and identification that stretched back to the Civil War, one in which “bringing them home” trumped “burying them where they fell.” Sharpened by the postwar politics of duty and debt, the cultural demand of repatriating and identifying remains from the conflict in Southeast Asia required more advanced technologies and different forms of expertise. That demand in turn has given rise to a forensic enterprise, which, in its attempts to order facts and bodies, has spanned decades, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and returned thousands of absent American war dead to their surviving families and to the nation.

In this shifting set of practice and ideals, the named individual come home has become the expected end, the final act in the nation’s proper response to its missing fallen. The forensic work of MIA accounting has helped create a “new sacred thing”: an ethos of exceptional care. The point about this exceptionalism isn’t that the United States is, in fact, the only country that goes to such lengths and spends such resources (approximately $130 million annually) to recover, repatriate, and scientifically individuate its war dead.²⁹ Rather, it is about what that ethos of promised, indeed obliged, care—the fullest possible accounting for every possible case—itself enables. On an ideological plane, this notion of exceptional care provides the state an expedient narrative to push past the Vietnam War’s embittering divisiveness and instead train attention on its unparalleled efforts to bring its fallen home. Named and returned missing war dead become powerful symbols to rehabilitate or reanimate the memory of past wars for present and future use, buttressing claims of contemporary military valor. Seen in this light, science offers a potent response to defeat and death.

Yet the ethos of exceptional care also exposes the fragmented and unstable nature of memory itself. The state may go to extraordinary lengths to bring fallen service members home, but their memory belongs to more than the nation in the abstract. Homecomings are just that—highly localized and personalized—not merely fodder for national celebration. Here, the exceptional exists in the unusual and unexpected, with the commonplace itself suddenly transformed into the sacred. For as sites of collective burial and commemoration have gradually given way to opportunities and spaces for individuated remembrance, memory takes shape idiosyncratically and according to local traditions. Sometimes, those traditions challenge narrow understandings of national belonging.

Regardless of the tradition invoked, with returned and named remains come stories, and with stories come the possibility to reconnect a life to a family and friends, to classmates, neighbors, and communities, and even to strangers in acts of local (rather than exclusively national) remembrance. This last point is perhaps the most important: the return of scientifically identified remains—their physical homecoming—allow the living to participate in the rituals of exceptional care otherwise afforded to the state. Sometimes that care and those stories fray the edges of the tightly woven script of national sacrifice, insisting on recounting a life lived before and beyond the flattening biography of military service. Moreover, for Vietnam War families and veterans especially, the return of remains also offers a chance to correct past injury; forty and fifty years later, long-absent war dead are welcomed home in ways never thought possible by those who survived and returned to their country during the war. Geography matters, but not always in a directly correlating sense. These homecomings are public, yet intimate, affairs, as individual families and communities reconstitute themselves, if only temporarily, around the event of return; home may be the missing service member’s birthplace, or the place where surviving kin now reside, or even military burial grounds such as Arlington National Cemetery. Whatever the final destination, homecomings enabled by forensic scientific innovations entwine the living with the dead in the project of national belonging, but they do so on local terms and according to the particular histories of loss and remembrance.

Things Carried and Left

The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities.

—SALMAN RUSHDIE, “Imaginary Homelands”³⁰

War and memory, missing persons and social repair. Before turning to the MIA accounting mission here in the United States, I had already spent years exploring these themes in a very different place—Bosnia and Herzegovina. For almost a decade, I studied the forensic scientific efforts to identify the victims of the Srebrenica genocide, working with families of the more than eight thousand missing men and boys, the majority of whom were killed in groups and their bodies dumped into mass graves, and the forensic practitioners who labored to recover and return those remains. Though civilian victims of state-sponsored violence and members of a nation’s armed forces—whether draftees, enlistees, or officers—occupy inherently estranged positions vis-à-vis the experience of violent conflict, there are nevertheless commonalities across incidents of prolonged absence, the memory politics that seeps into its crevices, and the tools forensic science brings to bear in its wake. And so my anthropological sensibilities were already attuned to the potential overlaps among absence, memory, and science when I shifted my ethnographic gaze homeward.

As strange as it may sound, Bosnia helped make sense of what I was observing not just of the science of MIA accounting, but also of the war’s material legacy of commemoration. When I first began researching the topic in the spring of 2008, I visited a museum exhibit at the Department of the Interior, a display about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and objects left at the monument. The memorial’s stone panels with their chronicle of etched names pay tribute to the Americans killed and missing from the war. It’s a popular site on the National Mall, drawing an estimated four million visitors annually. For years, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and the National Park Service, which jointly oversee the monument, had been collecting, cataloging, and storing the items, everything from letters and photos to Zippos and dog tags, that accumulated each day at the base of the monument. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the memorial’s dedication, the organizations decided to put together an exhibition.

The idea of a curated selection of mementos left for the war’s dead and the missing immediately called to mind a different, though connected, set of mundane and exceptional wartime items. In his collection of short stories, The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien, himself a Vietnam War veteran, opens with an essay about the various burdens, physical and psychological, that soldiers “humped” across the foreign terrain. Unfolding sporadically and evoked by the essay’s different characters, his lists mix specificity and metaphor:

Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books.…

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.…

They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces.…

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die.³¹

As I approached the building, I wondered how the material artifacts on display at the museum might echo or add to O’Brien’s compendium.

The exhibit filled a single room. To the left, a textual and photographic display laid out the war in compact narratives and timelines and then turned to the memorial itself (what has come to be known as the Wall)—its genesis, the design competition, twenty-one-year-old Maya Lin’s winning entry, its construction, and finally its reception. For all the descriptions and quotations, images and maps, it was the right-hand side of the room that conveyed the human side of the war most powerfully. Badges, buttons, patches, metals, bracelets, coins, lighters, caps, photographs, letters, a single stiletto heel, a pair of lace panties, a tube sock, dog tags, cigars, helmets—objects of war, of camaraderie, of love and lives cut short, of habit and ritual—all told the story not of the war per se but of the people who fought it, of those who survived it, those who died in it, and those left behind to remember it.³² These were not mere artifacts. They were encapsulated biographies, “objects,” as Stephen Greenblatt explains, “of resonance and wonder.”³³

The centerpiece of the display was the so-called Hero Bike, a custom-built, 1960s-era chopper fashioned from Harley Davidson parts. It stood on a platform set off from all the other objects, an artwork of polished chrome, leather, and detailing. Like O’Brien’s description of Vietnam’s soil, “a powdery orange-red dust,” the bike’s hand-painted panoramas evoked the wartime landscape through color. On the gas tank, two dark HU-1A helicopters—the “Hueys” that became so emblematic of the Vietnam War era—emerged against the orange glow of a setting sun, the horizon merging with a jungle scene of “a GI in distress in front of a crumbling wall, inscribed with the names of Wisconsin’s MIAs.”³⁴ Dog tags stamped with the names of those same thirty-seven missing service members hung at the front of the bike, and a hand-stitched leather seat cover bore the signature veteran’s slogan, “POW / MIAs—Bring ‘em home or send us back.” A placard nearby explained that the bike, which had been built by several Vietnam vets from Wisconsin, was dedicated to that state’s missing on the condition that each of its MIAs would have the chance to ride it when he returned, but it “was not to be ridden until the last one comes home.”

In that simple equation, the dedication captured the ambiguity of the missing-in-action status and the obligations owed the individuals who shared its uncertain fate. At the same time, it acknowledged the sad truth of that fate, so many years later. Conceived and assembled in 1994, driven from Wisconsin to Washington, DC, as part of the Rolling Thunder commemorative motorcycle ride through the capital on Memorial Day, 1995, the bike appeared at the Wall over two decades after the last living POWs came home from Vietnam. For its creators, little if any doubt remained about whether the thirty-seven men from Wisconsin were still alive. Yet the dedication staked its claim to an imagined, impossible future in which the long-absent men come home; until then, the bike would only ever exist as homage to their absence and the certain sacrifice that stood behind it.

The Arc of MIA Accounting

The Vietnam War MIA experience in the United States is anything but black and white, and families’ and veterans’ ways of responding to the unaccounted for are anything but monolithic. Nevertheless, there are themes that emerge in the contemporary practice of accounting for the war’s missing and commemorating their return—from scientific advances to shifting modes of remembrance. Often we look to the pageantry of national holidays to gauge how a nation recalls and honors those who fought and died for it, but this book invites a view onto places of the average and the everyday, of small-town America, alongside more frequented sites of memory and mourning.³⁵ Through their examples, we glimpse not only the unstable, fragmented nature of memory itself, but also the possibilities for ethical or just memory within the bounded efforts to remember national sacrifice on a local scale and within a particular community.³⁶ It is a different kind of memory work taking place in those tight circles of grief—and sometimes laughter—that seek to recall the absent through seemingly mundane, even trivial, gestures. But those too, I discovered, are acts of exceptional care.

One place where such memory work unfolds is in the neighboring communities of Bayfield and Red Cliff, Wisconsin. It’s a region that has its own unique story of loss from the Vietnam War, with a significant Native American population and history of military service, but also one that reflects the broader experience of MIA accounting, from prolonged absence to eventual resolution. I first visited the area, the Bayfield Peninsula, in July 2014, two years after having participated in a US military-led excavation in central Vietnam that had recovered the remains of Lance Corporal Merlin Allen, one of the town’s two missing in action from that war. In Bayfield, I wanted to follow the accounting process to its logical end, the official homecoming and burial of the identified service member. I had arranged to meet a few people who had welcomed LCpl Allen home the previous year and helped bury him next to his parents on York Island in Lake Superior. I hoped to learn more about Merlin Allen himself and what his return had meant to his surviving family, friends, fellow service members, and veterans of the community.

On the morning of the appointed day, I set out on the 150-mile drive west through the North Woods and along the Lake Superior shore to reach Bayfield and the nearby town of Red Cliff, which is the administrative center for the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. My first meeting was with one of Merl Allen’s high school friends, Dan. It was his last day working at the local casino’s gift shop in Red Cliff, and so we agreed to meet at 9:30 a.m. for a coffee before his shift began.

The early-morning drive along Highway 2 was quiet, with few cars on the road and long stretches of woodlands between towns and the occasional traffic light. “Friday Fish Fry” signs appeared in almost every town, German Catholic roots still firmly in place, along with other emblems of of life in northern Wisconsin and Upper Peninsula Michigan—pasty stands, diners and bars, Miller Lite signs, and Green Bay Packers satellite dishes; National Park entrances; a small house boasting a Museum of Finland. On the radio, a Swedish restaurant advertised between NPR shows. The Bad River Casino (owned by the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa) had a half-full parking lot. The highway cut its narrow strip through this segment of the Upper Midwest, revealing a history of immigration, forest conservation, and Native American territorial rights, all of which played a role in Bayfield’s own past.

At 9:25 a.m., I panicked a bit, still a few miles shy of Red Cliff and the casino. I called Dan’s number and got his wife. “He’ll just get some coffee and wait,” she assured me. When I arrived in Bayfield several minutes later, there was little time for more than a quick glance at the shops that lined the main street. Even from that snapshot, Bayfield stood out from the other small towns I had passed on my way there, including Washburn just a few miles back. It looked a lot wealthier. Later I would learn of the Twin City weekenders who come up to enjoy the lake, with their sailboats and yachts docked in the marina.

That first meeting was at the heart of another important site within the local economy, the Legendary Waters Resort and Casino, run by the Red Cliff Band. A large complex that boasts 240 slot machines, blackjack and poker games, a marina, and a campground, the casino is a recent addition, built in 2011. Once there and the car parked, I hustled through the main entrance and into the scene of dim lights and dark carpet. Above me, signs pointed right, down the foyer that led to the adjacent hotel and restaurant. I was fifteen minutes late. My heart sank a little; it seemed a bad way to start the day’s meetings.

Map of Northern Wisconsin.

Seated at a table several yards away were two men who looked to be in their mid-sixties, each wearing a black baseball cap with patches, the kind you’d see at Rolling Thunder or Veterans Day parades. They had spotted me already. One had to be Dan. I took a deep breath as he called out, “Are you Sarah?” We shook hands and he immediately introduced me to Bootin (Larry), the brother of Duwayne Soulier, the other MIA / KIA from the Red Cliff community. I apologized for keeping them, and they kindly brushed it off.

More than anything in those first few minutes, I remember Dan and Bootin’s willingness to sit and wait for a stranger on a bright summer morning in the foyer of a casino. If they were wary, they didn’t let on, though nerves seemed to have us all a bit tongue tied. Just as we were grasping for the right direction, Bootin pulled out a thin copper bracelet and handed it to me. Printed in black lettering were the names of all the MIAs (or more precisely, unaccounted for) from the state. My eyes snapped up toward him. “Are these the thirty-seven?” At first, he didn’t quite understand what I meant. I tried to explain. “The thirty-seven MIAs from Wisconsin?”³⁷ Yes, he nodded, yes, it was. His brother’s name was on it, as was Merlin Allen’s. I rushed to say that I had a story to tell them, about this number, about the first time I learned of the thirty-seven missing men from their state.

For anthropologists, there are invariably scenes from our fieldwork, our research in particular places and with particular communities, that tend to stick with us, encounters whose force lingers in our memory long after the study has ended. I can remember sitting in the back room of the Women of Srebrenica’s office in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, poring over a book of photographs of clothing exhumed with remains, leafing through page after page of tattered T-shirts and jackets, pondering the wretchedness of the mass graves, the bodies they contained, and those pieces of cloth. I can remember the sound of the earth falling on the coffins, the hollow thump of dirt on the pine boxes, as a whole community of mourners labored under the hot July sun to bury their slain, once missing but now identified fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers.

The encounter at the casino that morning was one such scene. After Bootin left, Dan let me pick our spot in the restaurant, and I found a booth in the corner, next to the wall of glass windows that opened out onto the bay, the expanse of Lake Superior’s cool silver water. The booth itself was classic diner decor: burnished yellow vinyl seats and a faux-wood tabletop. Silverware lay tightly bundled in thin paper napkins, cream and sugar packets to the side. We both ordered coffee, almost apologizing to the waitress for our meager tab.

And then we began. The conversation that ensued was far ranging, almost peripatetic in its course, leapfrogging sporadically from Dan’s life and career, to Bayfield, to the nearby Chippewa Reservation, to the Allen family, to the past summer’s burial, to Merl himself. Merl was the touchstone, the subject we would return to if it seemed to Dan that we might have strayed too far afield, into his own life (“but that’s just a little about me”). I took occasional notes, but it was not that kind of conversation.

Duwayne and Merl had been good friends, students in the same class at Bayfield High School, just one year below Dan. Dan had brought his yearbook and tried to find photos of Merl and Merl’s older sister to show me. He flipped through pages, sliding the book toward me to point out faces among the black-and-white portraits. It was a small high school with maybe two hundred students in total. The two boys had graduated in 1965, and by 1966, both were enlisted in the marines. In those days, as a vet explained to me later, “Either you enlisted, or the army would get you.” Enlisting at least gave you a choice from among the other branches, maybe a better shot at surviving. Otherwise, the army would draft you, and in Vietnam, he continued, it was the army that saw the most combat. But the two friends’ choice didn’t spare them. Both Duwayne and Merl were killed within weeks of each other, in the spring and summer of 1967.

At one point, when we circled back to Merl, I asked him, too abruptly, too nonchalantly, “So what was he like?” The question hung in the air for a split second before Dan looked away. His eyes watering, he replied in a choked-up voice, “He was nice.” As he fought back the tears and wiped away at his eyes, we sat in silence for a few moments. It was such a simple utterance, yet it had such tremendous weight. For all the fanfare the year before, all the news coverage of a fallen hero recovered and returned, Dan remembered Merl as he knew him from his own youth—as a high school friend, a nice boy with a wide grin and a mischievous streak. In that instant, he mourned the loss of a person, not a symbol. Collecting himself, Dan apologized, and we spoke about how powerful some memories are, their pull, even so many years later.

After we finished up our conversation and he left for his last shift at the casino, I made my way to the next meeting. It was at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States (VFW) post down the road. There, just inside the screen door in the main room, Bootin and the post’s quartermaster, Randy Bresette, had been busy pulling material from the post’s archive about Merlin Allen’s memorial service. Newspaper clippings, photos, and assorted documents were spread out on a table for me to look through. In a few short minutes, they chronicled the area’s unique and yet all-too-common history of military service and wartime losses, including Merl’s death. They pointed to the wall covered with framed photos of the post’s current and deceased members. In the center, three pictures marked the threshold between the living and the dead: the three young men sent off to fight the war in Southeast Asia, whose fates represented the span of the missing and killed in action. Randy summed it up: “One came home right away. One came home forty-six years later. One will never come home.”

Red Cliff’s VFW Post 8239 is named the Duwayne Soulier Memorial Post after Bootin’s brother. While Merl Allen returned home in 2013, Duwayne “Wotsy” Soulier will remain an MIA (in fact, killed in action / body not recovered) for years to come. Lost at sea when the helicopter transporting him to a hospital ship crashed into the water, his mortal remains, whatever bones now rest at the bottom of the South China Sea, are unlikely ever to be recovered. Having both joined the marine corps and died within weeks of each other, the two friends shared the ambiguous “unaccounted for” status for over four decades, until Merl’s identification the year before. Their stories, their intertwined lives and ends, make vivid the Wisconsin “Hero Bike” dedication. Among one of the few recovered of the thirty-seven missing, Merl can’t ride the bike until his high school friend Wotsy comes home too.

Duties and Debts

For the American men and women who take up arms on behalf of a nation, as conscripts or volunteers, to die in that service and yet be forgotten represents a sacrilege of an extraordinary kind. Influenced by the Civil War, the two world wars, and the Korean War, the conflict in Southeast Asia produced a new sensibility among members of the US military and their families. More than just memories, bodies too need to be tended—the nation that sent them off to do its bidding had an obligation to care for their remains, with a forensic precision, to help “ease them into the next world.” And if the state wouldn’t do it, veterans challenged, at least it should send them back to get the job done.

Lance Corporal Allen, the single tooth that constituted his mortal remains forty-six years after his death, came home in the end because the state faced a new cultural demand. The cost of leaving MIAs unaccounted for from the Vietnam War (and, later, other wars and conflicts, as the MIA accounting mandate gradually expanded) was too great. Though born of a longer tradition of repatriation, since the early 1990s, this cultural imperative to return individually identified remains of missing war dead has mobilized a vast technological apparatus and enormous human and financial resources. That apparatus now seeks to locate, repatriate, and identify as many of the missing and unknown service members from conflicts of the past century as possible. The Vietnam War was the impetus. As Ann Mills-Griffiths, one of the leading figures of the POW / MIA movement, once argued before a congressional hearing, “It all started with the Vietnam War. If it wasn’t for the Vietnam War, we wouldn’t have the organization, the personnel, the assets and resources devoted that are today.”³⁸ Beyond dedicated resources, many of the innovations in knowledge and practice have flowed from the contentious politics of the state’s unmet obligations to that specific group of missing war dead.

Over the past decade, I have traced the arc of Vietnam War MIA accounting along the line of science and its social import, paying particular attention to how its advances have influenced, indeed changed, the way the United States as a nation remembers and honors its fallen service members. I have come to appreciate science as another “language of memory”—it too frames how we see and understand war’s human tolls and shapes what recovery efforts and identifications mean to families of the missing and veterans, most of them far removed from the inner circles of Beltway policy making.³⁹ In that regard, forensic science offers a partial view onto the complex enterprise and infrastructure of the US government’s MIA accounting mission. There are other components integral to making homecomings possible—the operational and policy-oriented wings of the mission, the service casualty offices, intelligence gathering, and archival and historical analysis. Though my research touched on these different realms within the government’s accounting branches, I focused most heavily on the science of the mission. This choice was driven partly by my own interests and expertise, partly by what I see as a broader public intrigue with forensic science, and partly by the state’s own choice to develop such a vast forensic scientific program to account for its missing war dead. Yet even in an era of popular fascination with forensic science—with television hits such as Bones, CSI, Forensic Files, and NCIS—its expertise has also come under fire, increasingly challenged in national conversations about the military’s care for its absent dead. Like the burials they enable, the scientific pursuit of locating and naming the unaccounted for reveals the values the United States as a nation holds most dear—a moral commitment to reunite the individual and the homeland, and faith in what Walt Whitman called “real science,” that is, “the science of the soul and science of the body.”⁴⁰ At the same time, the work of recovery and identification reminds us of the limits of knowledge and practice. The forensic efforts at MIA accounting continually bump up against the messy realities of war’s destruction and thus frequently invites outsized expectations of what science can and cannot achieve.

“Science,” renowned paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once argued, “is a socially embedded activity.”⁴¹ Given that science never exists in a vacuum (rather that people make it happen and people feel its force), this story travels beyond the laboratory and into the social spaces where the war and its absent war dead are recalled.⁴² It moves from excavation sites in Southeast Asia to US military forensic facilities in Hawaii, Maryland, and Delaware, from small-town memorials to national cemeteries, from MIA family updates to spontaneous and scripted gatherings at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall. The stories that arise across these diverse sites help explain why, in the pursuit and performance of exceptional care, the United States goes to such efforts and spends such resources to recover its missing service members. Collectively, they show how the nation seeks to remember its past debts and strives to honor its current obligations, how communities welcome home long-absent fallen, and how powerful war dead remain in our national and local imagination, even decades later.