1. According to the US military’s formal system of categorization, Allen’s precise status was killed in action / body not recovered, but until his recovery in 2012, he was listed in less formal contexts as missing in action, for example, as one of the state of Wisconsin’s thirty-seven MIAs.
2. Adam Rosenblatt uses this phrase to capture the communal side of mourning and advocating for the dead, especially the missing. Rosenblatt, “International Forensic Investigations and the Human Rights of the Dead,” Human Rights Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2010): 934. Similarly, Jay Winter writes of the expanding bonds of bereavement and “communities in mourning” after World War I. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 29–53.
1. Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 215. His son’s death was “a blow from which Durkheim did not recover.” Joy Damousi, “Mourning Practices,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3, Civil Society, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 369.
2. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 34–38.
3. Robert Hertz, “A Contribution to a Study of the Collective Representation of Death,” in Saints, Heroes, Myths, and Rites, eds. and trans. Alexander Riley, Sarah Daynes, and Cyril Isnart (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2009), 145.
4. Chapter 1 examines the American response to mass death in war, beginning with the Civil War, whose “work of death” redefined the nation and its culture. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), xviii. Both that chapter and the book as a whole have been informed by a rich body of anthropological scholarship on missing persons as victims of state-sponsored violence and human rights abuses; see, for example, Isaias Rojas-Perez, Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017); Adam Rosenblatt, Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Francisco Ferrándiz, “Exhuming the Defeated: Civil War Mass Graves in 21st-century Spain,” American Ethnologist 40, no. 1 (2013): 38–54; Layla Renshaw, Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011); Paul Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory, and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); Victoria Sanford, Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and the edited volumes, Derek Congram, ed., Missing Persons: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Disappeared (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2016); and Francisco Ferrándiz and Antonius C. G. M. Robben, eds., Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
5. Arguing a similar point in his ethnographic study of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Hugh Gusterson notes that “some of our most expensive scientific experiments are saturated with elements of myth and ritual.” Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 152.
6. By 1973, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, the US government aggregated not just prisoners of war (POWs) and MIAs, but also those killed in action / body not recovered into this collective group of the “unaccounted for.” See H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A or Mythmaking in America (New York: Lawrence Hill Books), 96–98. In his discussion of the three “wartime categories” of unaccounted for—namely, POW, MIA, and KIA / BNR—Thomas Hawley notes “the acronym MIA has become a sort of cultural shorthand for the entire issue of unaccounted-for [service members], a fact which, among other things, has effaced the evidentiary differences that formerly sought to distinguish the three categories with as much precision as possible.” Thomas M. Hawley, The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 45.
7. In identifying science as a language of remembrance, I am building on Jay Winter’s argument that language (which he defines through the “different creative arts”) frames memory and thus our “meditations on war.” Winter, War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 2.
8. Ariel Garfinkel, Scofflaw: International Law and America’s Deadly Weapons in Vietnam (Sunnyvale, CA: Lucità, 2018), 10–11; Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, “Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications,” Japan Focus: Asia-Pacific Journal 13, no. 17 (2015): 1–3.
9. Edwin A. Martini, Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 2–3; see also, Susan Hammond, “Redefining Agent Orange: Mitigating Its Impacts,” in Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, eds. Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013), 186–215. For an ethnographic study of the biomedical effects of dioxin, namely within the realm of prenatal screening and diagnoses, see Tine Gammeltoft, Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
10. Vietnam War US Military Fatal Casualty Statistics, Electronic Records Reference Report, National Archives, accessed December 13, 2018, https://
11. Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency, “Vietnam War Accounting: History,” accessed December 13, 2018, http://
12. This figure is as of May 2019. The Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency routinely updates the status of unaccounted-for Americans lost in the Vietnam War on its website: http://
13. Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam, 48–49; Shaun Malarney, “ ‘The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice’: Commemorating War Dead in North Vietnam,” in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 46–76; and Tâm T. T. Ngô, “Bones of Contention: Placing the Dead of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese Border War” (paper presented, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, November 1, 2018).
14. Thomas Hawley notes that “even in 1973, the Vietnam War was the most accounted for war in US history.” Hawley, The Remains of War, 34.
15. These numbers are approximations. See related discussions in Franklin, M.I.A or Mythmaking in America, 12; and Michael Dolski, “When X Doesn’t Mark the Spot: Historical Investigation and Identifying Remains from the Korean War,” in Missing Persons: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Disappeared, ed. Derek Congram (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2016), 149–50.
16. Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 102.
17. H. Bruce Franklin argues that the conflation of these two categories, embodied by the POW / MIA flag, served as a “myth” that, harnessed by consecutive administrations, not only worked to justify the war’s extension but also profoundly influenced American foreign policy well into the 1990s (Franklin, M.I.A or Mythmaking in America). Though he also draws on popular cultural representations, Franklin’s analysis primarily concerns governmental policies, special reports, hearings, etc., “investigations” that, as Thomas Hawley notes, “are constrained by the rhetorical and representational milieus in which they are produced.” Hawley, The Remains of War, 11–12. On this “myth” and its object of critique, see also Michael Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 158, 180.
18. Ann Mills-Griffiths, interview with author, November 17, 2017. On the military’s MIA status determination process, see Douglas L. Clarke, The Missing Man: Politics and the MIA (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1979), 13–25.
19. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 101–78; Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America; Hawley, The Remains of War, 39–67, 218–19; and Clarke, The Missing Man, 2–3, 27–49.
20. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 140–48. The practice of presumptive findings of death was a particularly divisive issue within the POW / MIA movement, “often pitting wives who wished to get on with their lives against parents who told them it was ‘easier to get a new husband than a new son.’ ” Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, 84; see also Clarke, The Missing Man, 42–45.
21. Hawley, The Remains of War, 14–15. On the statistical reporting of the body count, see Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1977), 8, 72–75; Edward L. King, The Death of the Army (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), 101, 105, 106; on body count production and performance, see Fred Turner, Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 26–27; and Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 7–8.
22. Clarke, The Missing Man, 53. Richard Nixon, “Address on the State of the Union Delivered Before a Joint Session of the Congress,” January 30, 1974, https://
23. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 10. See also Adam Rosenblatt’s discussion of the forensic work that both enables and constitutes such care, Digging for the Disappeared, 167–98, and “Forensic Investigations and Human Rights of the Dead,” Human Rights Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2010), 949; Jackie Leach Scully, “Naming the Dead: DNA-based Identification of Historical Remains as an Act of Care,” New Genetics and Society 33, no. 3 (2014): 313–32; and Layla Renshaw, “Forensic Science as Right and Ritual in the Recovery of World War I Soldiers from the Mass Graves at Fromelles” in Un siècle de sites funéraires de la Grande Guerre. De l’histoire à la valorisation patrimoniale, eds. Annette Becker and Stéphane Tison (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2018), 205–25. Often drawing on French philosopher Emmanual Levinas’s ethics of responsibility, the concept of care in anthropology has become increasingly central to discussions of “biomedicine, biopolitics, affective states, forms of moral experience and obligation, structures of exploitation.” Elana D. Buch, “Anthropology of Aging and Care,” Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (2015): 279.
24. Thomas Laqueur, “The Deep Time of the Dead,” Social Research 78, no. 3 (2011): 800; see also Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 8–10.
25. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 10. In this passage, Laqueur summarizes Robert Hertz’s seminal 1907 essay, “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death.”
26. The National League of POW / MIA Families, “The Missing Man Table and Honor Ceremony,” accessed December 13, 2018, http://
27. See the National League of POW / MIA Families, “History of the POW / MIA Flag,” accessed December 13, 2018, https://
28. Franklin, M.I.A or Mythmaking in America, 4. For a careful critique of the flag’s symbolism and commemorative politics, see Hawley, The Remains of War, 202–10.
29. The figure of $130 million leaves out significant expenses associated with the MIA accounting mission. See Chapter 3, footnote 6. Other countries have undertaken efforts to recover and identify remains of their war dead, including Australia, Israel, Portugal, South Korea, Argentina, and France. On France’s repatriation efforts after World War II, see Jean-Marc Dreyfus, “Renationalizing Bodies? The French Search Mission for the Corpses of Deportees in Germany, 1946–58,” in Human Remains and Mass Violence: Methodological Approaches, eds. Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Élisabeth Anstett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 129–45; and on their repatriation efforts after the Indochinese War, see Clarke, The Missing Man: Politics and the MIA, 55–58; and M. Kathryn Edwards, Contesting Indochina: French Remembrance between Decolonization and Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 93–96. However, no other country has developed a comprehensive forensic scientific infrastructure comparable to the US MIA accounting mission. See Chapter 1, footnote 5.
30. Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 12.
31. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990), 3, 7, 15, 21.
32. For an analysis of the objects left at Vietnam Veterans Memorial and their commemorative work, see Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Paulette G. Curtis, “Filling in the Blanks: Discerning Meaning in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection,” Practicing Anthropology 33, no. 2 (2011): 11–15.
33. Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1991), 42.
34. “The Harley (from Wisconsin) Left at the Wall,” Vietnam Magazine, April 11, 2012, history.net, http://
35. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
36. For his definition of ethical or just memory that aspires to remembering both one’s self and the other and their respective depths of humanity and inhumanity, see Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 4–19.
37. See Miller’s biographical sketches of those thirty-seven individuals, Wisconsin’s 37. Of the original thirty-seven men, sixteen have been accounted for as of June 2019. Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency, “US Accounted-For from the Vietnam War” (Reported For: Wisconsin),” http://
38. “POW / MIA Recovery and Accounting, Panel 1, Part 2,” April 2, 2009, C-SPAN, https://
39. As Winter explains, “All the languages of memory bear traces of the different ways the wars of the twentieth century have changed our lives.” War beyond Words, 208.
40. Horace Trauben, With Walt Whitman in Camden: July 16–October 31, 1888 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1908), 88.
41. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (1981; repr., New York: Norton, 1996), 53.
42. In this sense, sketching the forensic work of MIA accounting focuses on “science in action,” both in the laboratory and as its facts circulate among wider publics. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Important models for this approach have included Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation after the Genome (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016); Kimberly Tallbear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Gusterson, Nuclear Rites.
1. Leah Thorson, “Feeding Deer Is a Growing Tradition at Jefferson Barracks,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 2, 2014, http://
2. As the chief of the mitochondrial DNA section of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, Huffine appeared at the Defense Department press briefing on the identification of the Vietnam War Unknown Soldier, held on June 30, 1998. US Department of Defense, News Transcript, Press Briefing, June 30, 1998, http://
3. See Micki McElya, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–2; and Sarah Wagner and Thomas Matyók, “Monumental Change: The Shifting Politics of Obligation at the Tomb of the Unknowns,” History & Memory 30, no. 1 (2018): 40–75.
4. Ken Inglis, “Entombing Unknown Soldiers: From London and Paris to Baghdad,” History & Memory 5, no. 2 (1993): 17. On the commemorative aspects of World War I monuments to unknown and missing soldiers, see Laura Wittman, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27–28, 78–116; Thomas Laqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 156–58; George Lachmann Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 94–98; and Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme (New York: Vintage, 1994).
5. “While other countries attend to their missing, the time, money, and importance attributed to this mission in the US far exceeds them.” Michael Dolski, “When X Doesn’t Mark the Spot: Historical Investigation and Identifying Remains from the Korean War,” in Missing Persons: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Disappeared, ed. Derek Congram (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2016), 164.
6. Historian Christian Appy argues that “the Vietnam War shattered the central tenet of American national identity,” namely American exceptionalism. It is through Vietnam, he notes, that Americans learned “hard truths about themselves and their nation on the backs of a people they dehumanized and killed and whose country they wrecked. It was an expensive education and Vietnam bore by far its greatest costs.” American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York: Viking, 2015), xiii–xiv.
7. Antoine Prost explains that the “primacy of increasingly powerful and available artillery dominated the effects of a war in which industry could produce seemingly unlimited torrents of steel to destroy the enemy.” “The Dead,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3, Civil Society, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 563. In this same chapter, he discusses the challenges in calculating the war’s military and civilian losses; table 22.1 provides estimates by country. “The Dead,” 587–88.
8. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 2.
9. Jay Winter, War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 96–97.
10. Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” in The Great War Reader, ed. James Hannah (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), 370. Owen was killed one week before the Armistice in November 1918. From Horace’s Roman Odes, the Latin phrase of the poem’s closing couplet—Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori—whose first line was taken as the poem’s title, means “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” By quoting Horace, Hew Strachan argues that Owen placed himself “along a continuum that embraces two millennia,” saying “little, if anything, about the peculiarities” of the war in which he served and died. The First World War (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), xvii.
11. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 418.
12. Laqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” 152; and The Work of the Dead, 417–20. On the “cult of the fallen” (war dead) manifest in the proliferation of military cemeteries and war monuments, including tombs for unknown soldiers, see Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 70–106.
13. Laqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” 162.
14. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 27.
15. Prost, “The Dead,” 579. On Kipling’s response to his son’s disappearance, see John Horne, “The Living,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 3, Civil Society, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 596–97.
16. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 95.
17. Laqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” 158, 163. On this point, as well as on the tension between private mourning and public commemoration in France, see also David J. Sherman, “Bodies and Names: The Emergence of Commemoration in Interwar France,” American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 463–66.
18. Winter notes that in their own “symbolic gestures of the return of the fallen,” the United States, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal honored their own unknown soldiers the next year in 1921, with most countries following suit. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 27.
19. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 95.
20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (1983; repr., New York: Verso, 2006), 9.
21. Michael J. Allen, “ ‘Sacrilege of a Strange, Contemporary Kind’: The Unknown Soldier and the Imagined Community after the Vietnam War,” History & Memory 23, no. 2 (2011): 92.
22. Marin Pilloud, interview with author, July 26, 2012.
23. Michael Thompson, “Helping Guide Our Fallen Heroes Home,” November 11, 2014. Delta Air Lines blog, accessed November 27, 2017, http://
24. Marin Pilloud, interview with author, July 26, 2012.
25. See David Finkel’s candid look at the reflexive discourse of gratitude in his stories of US infantrymen returned from Iraq, Thank You for Your Service (New York: Picador, 2013).
26. Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (New York: Harper Collins, 2012), 37. Fountain’s fictional portrait mirrors the experience of historical figures, such as Ira Hayes and others from the flag raising at Mt. Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. “ ‘How can I feel like a hero,’ [Hayes] asked, ‘when I hit the beach with two hundred and fifty buddies and only twenty-seven of us walked off alive?’ ” James Bradley with Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), 12.
27. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 24–25.
28. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 28.
29. Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, 29.
30. Robert M. Poole, On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery (New York: Walker & Company, 2009), 66. On US Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs’s plan to strip the Lee family of their plantation and create the cemetery, see McElya, The Politics of Memory, 96.
31. McElya, The Politics of Memory, 111–12.
32. On national differences in burials, cemeteries, and memorials to the missing, see Prost, “The Dead,” 570–84; and Lisa M. Budreau, Bodies of War: World War I and the Politics of Commemoration in America, 1919–1933 (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 47. In the case of France, families hired funeral undertakers to exhume and transport the remains of their fallen, a practice that eventually forced the state to recognize formally their right to the restoration and transport of the body.
33. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 271. See also John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005).
34. Notably, the repatriation of remains from military action on the continent (e.g., of US troops killed during the Plains Wars) was not always carried out.
35. Budreau, Bodies of War, 25, 27–36; G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 94; and Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 102–3.
36. Piehler, Remembering War the American Way, 95; and Budreau, Bodies of War, 43–44.
37. Piehler, Remembering War the American Way, 97; and Budreau, Bodies of War, 75–78.
38. Steven Trout, On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 227. In 1955, Quentin Roosevelt’s body was relocated to the Normandy American Cemetery and interred beside his brother Theodore Jr., who died of a heart attack during the Normandy invasion of World War II. Piehler, Remembering War the American Way, 132. See also, Elizabeth Borja, “The Grave of Quentin Roosevelt,” National Air and Space Museum, https://
39. Piehler, Remembering War the American Way, 95. Antoine Prost argues that the cemeteries “constitute a manifesto of the United States on the old continent” (“The Dead,” 574).
40. Budreau, Bodies of War, 21.
41. Piehler, Remembering War the American Way, 129, 130.
42. The four non-European permanent national cemeteries were located in the Philippines, the US territories of Hawaii and Alaska, and Tunisia. The American cemeteries in Europe and bodies of the dead buried thus became enlistees in projects of commemorative diplomacy meant to strengthen transatlantic unity in the decades that followed. Sam Edwards, Allies in Memory: World War II and the Politics of Transatlantic Commemoration, c. 1941–2001 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
43. Edwards, Allies in Memory, 73.
44. The processing stations were located at Marbo on Saipan, Manila in the Philippines, Japan, and on Oahu for the Pacific Zone; at Fontainbleau (formerly at Strasbourg) and Carenton, France, and at Margraten near Maastricht in the Netherlands for the European Command; in Naples and Leghorn, Italy, for the Mediterranean area; and in Carthage, North Africa. There was also a mobile unit with headquarters outside of Paris. Mildred Trotter, “Operations at Central Identification Laboratory, A.G.R.S.,” 1949, accessed January 29, 2019, http://
45. Trotter, “Operations at Central Identification Laboratory, A.G.R.S.”
46. Michael J. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 129; Dolski, “When X Doesn’t Mark the Spot,” 137–70; Paul M. Cole, POW / MIA Issues, vol. 1, The Korean War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1994), 55–56; and Michael Sledge, Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen (New York: Columbia University Press), 39–42.
47. My thanks to Michael Dolski for providing this historical context.
48. Piehler, Remembering War the American Way, 155.
49. Piehler, Remembering War the American Way, 132.
50. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 129.
51. On the changes to US military recovery efforts and forensic practice introduced by the Korean War, see Cole, POW / MIA Issues, 62–74.
52. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 119. The phrase “pure sex” comes from a quotation in Michael Herr’s Dispatches (New York, Vintage, 1991), 160; see Nguyen’s analysis of the passage, Nothing Ever Dies, 117–19; as well as Fred Turner, Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (New York: Anchor, 1996), 76–77; and Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 9–10. On helicopters’ role in the war, see Philip D. Chinnery, Vietnam: The Helicopter War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991).
53. Piehler, Remembering War the American Way, 168. In a related discussion as to why the Vietnam War produced so few unidentified remains (unknowns), see Allen, “ ‘Sacrilege of a Strange, Contemporary Kind,’ ” 105.
54. Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 28. Between 7,500 and 11,000 women served in Vietnam, more than 80 percent of them nurses, and an estimated 55,000 civilian women worked in Vietnam. Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7.
55. Quoted in Douglas L. Clarke, The Missing Man: Politics and the MIA (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1979), 52.
56. Article 21 specified that “the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.” Quoted in Clarke, The Missing Man, 53. On the linking of MIA accounting and reparations (Article 8[b], Article 21, and the February 1, 1973, letter from President Nixon to Premier Pham Van Dong in which he purportedly made an “unconditional” promise of reparations totaling $3.25 billion), see Clarke, The Missing Man, 62, 71–72; and Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 87–91.
57. On the asymmetrical expectations surrounding MIA accounting and its role in normalization, see Christina Schwenkel, The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 1–5; 182–85.
58. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 90.
59. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 84–87. See also, Paul D. Mather, M.I.A.: Accounting for the Missing in Southeast Asia (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1994).
60. Clarke, The Missing Man, 53. The phrase was originally coined by members of the National League of POW / MIA Families (see Introduction, footnote 22).
61. On the divisions among Vietnam War veterans regarding how best to memorialize the war, including whether to inter a Vietnam unknown, see Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 10–11, 18–20, 140–65; and Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 56–58.
62. Allen, “ ‘Sacrilege of a Strange, Contemporary Kind,’ ” 105–7.
63. Christian Appy explains that “to revive proud faith in American exceptionalism required some serious scrubbing of the historical record,” and that “Reagan believed that antiwar memories of the Vietnam War posed an especially dangerous threat to his restoration project.” American Reckoning, 285.
64. “Remarks at Memorial Day Ceremonies Honoring an Unknown Serviceman of the Vietnam Conflict,” May 28, 1984, https://
65. “Remarks at Memorial Day Ceremonies.”
66. “Remarks at Memorial Day Ceremonies.” See also, Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 239.
67. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 239; see also, Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory, 1–21, 181–83. It is worth noting that just over a week later, Reagan would deliver his famous D-Day / Boys of Pointe du Hoc speech in which he championed the “American-dominated response to restore moral order to the world.” See Michael R. Dolski, D-Day Remembered: The Normandy Landings in American Collective Memory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016), 127.
68. Jim Garamone, “Vietnam Unknown Disinterred,” DoD News, US Department of Defense, May 14, 1998, http://
69. Thomas Lynch, “Why We Must Know,” The Washington Post, May 14, 1998, A23.
70. There are several detailed accounts of the selection process and 1st Lt. Blassie’s eventual identification: Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 230–50; Allen, “ ‘Sacrilege of a Strange, Contemporary Kind’ ”; Sarah E. Wagner, “The Making and Unmaking of an Unknown Soldier,” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 5 (2013), 631–56; Robert Mann, Forensic Detective: How I Cracked the World’s Toughest Cases (New York: Ballentine Books, 2007), 94–120; and Michael Sledge, Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 127–29. On the political import of 1st Lt. Blassie’s identification, see Thomas Hawley, The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1–3, 190–99.
71. Public Law 93-42 was approved by Congress on June 18, 1973.
72. Though formed at the end of the war, the Joint Casualty Resolution Center didn’t start from scratch; rather, it took over for the wartime casualty processing organization, the Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC), which operated in-theater, with mortuary facilities at the Da Nang Air Base and Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. In 1973, US Army mortuary operations were relocated to Thailand, and three years later, the laboratory was transferred to Honolulu and reopened as the Central Identification Laboratory Hawaii (CILHI). (At the time of the relocation, with every plane headed from the mainland to Asia refueling in Hawaii and Camp H. M. Smith on Oahu, the headquarters of the United States Pacific Command [USPACOM], it made good sense to station the teams and equipment on the island.) In 1992, the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA) was established as a finite entity with a finite mandate; nine years later, in 2003, the JTF-FA and CILHI merged to become the Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), which included the laboratory, now called the Central Identification Laboratory (CIL), located at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.
73. Johnie Webb, interview with author, July 15, 2011. See also Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 240–41.
74. Report, “Status Review of Unidentified Remains from Southeast Asia (SEA) Now at the Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii (CILHI),” n.d., attached to “Memorandum Thru [sic] Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel Chief of Staff, Army,” by Brigadier General Robert M. Joyce, 15 June 1981. J-2 Records Room, file 1998-078, JPAC, Hawaii.
75. In the vacuum of unknowability, the racial subtext of national belonging rose to the surface, a subtext that stretched back to the Tomb of the Unknowns dedication in 1921 and through the subsequent interments for WWII and the Korean War unknowns. As Micki McElya argues, though “framed as a universal body,” all three unknowns “remained inherently male and white in popular and official understandings.” The Politics of Mourning, 230.
76. Johnie Webb, interview with author, July 15, 2011. See also Mann, Forensic Detective, 106.
77. Donald Lunday, Joint Personnel Recovery Center, Memorandum for Record, Subject: Phonecon with Mr. Rogers, USA Mortuary, TSN, November 5, 1972, J-2 Records Room, file 1998-046, JPAC, Hawaii.
78. The formal decision to approve the deletion of the “Believed to Be” name association was taken on May 7, 1980.
79. Patrick Clifford, interview with author, August 4, 2011.
80. US Department of Defense, News Transcript, “Press Briefing Tuesday June 30 1998,” http://
81. Ted Sampley, “The Vietnam Unknown Soldier Can Be Identified,” US Veteran Dispatch, July 1994.
82. Sampley, “The Vietnam Unknown Soldier Can Be Identified.”
83. Gonzales was required to file several Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain information about Blassie’s case. The X-26 file had already been “purged” according to Pentagon directive, and thus documentary evidence pertaining to forensic anthropological analyses, material evidence, and intelligence reports was spotty and scattered at best.
84. CNN, “Soldier in Tomb of Unknowns May Actually Be Known,” January 20, 1998, http://
85. The forensic anthropologists who evaluated the evidence (Thomas Holland, P. Willey, and Hugh Berryman) were board certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. The certification “denotes the highest recognized level of professional qualification in the field of forensic anthropology.” The American Board of Forensic Anthropology, accessed December 28, 2018, http://
86. Thomas Holland to commander, US Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, memorandum, “Proposed Identification of CILHI 1998-046-I-01,” June 22, 1998, Central Identification Library, Hawaii.
87. Holland, “Proposed Identification of CILHI 1998-046-I-01.” One of the nine families refused to provide a DNA sample, while another had no surviving maternal relatives from whom the lab could obtain a sample.
88. P. Willey, memorandum to Thomas Holland, “Proposed Identification of CILHI 1998-046-I-01 as 1Lt Michael J. BLASSIE, 490-52-6882, USAF,” June 30, 1998, J-2 Records Room, file 1998-046, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command, Hawaii.
89. US Department of Defense, News Release, “Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen’s Statement Concerning the Identification of the Vietnam Unknown,” Release No. 332-98, June 30, 1998, http://
90. National Museum of Health and Medicine, “Case Study: Michael J. Blassie.” Past Exhibit, “Resolved: Advances in Forensic Identification of U.S. War Dead,” accessed November 28, 2017, http://
1. Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton explore this fascination with the forensic investigation and the broader cultural demands that led to it in Murder and the Making of English CSI (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); see also Christopher Hamlin on the evolution of “forensic cultures,” including within contemporary American popular culture, in “Forensic Cultures in Historical Perspective: Technologies of Witness, Testimony, Judgment (and Justice?),” Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44, no. 1 (2013): 4–15.
2. “Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, accessed December 29, 2018, https:
3. Zoë Crossland, “Writing Forensic Anthropology: Transgressive Representations,” in Disturbing Bodies: Perspectives on Forensic Anthropology, eds. Zoë Crossland and Rosemary A. Joyce (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2015), 116.
4. The Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency was established in 2015, and I visited its new facility on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in April 2018 (see Conclusion). DPAA consolidated three of the previous separate entities of the MIA accounting mission—the Defense Prisoner of War / Missing Personnel Office, the Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command (which included the Central Identification Laboratory), and the Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory. For further discussion of this restructuring, see Chapter 3.
5. This figure has continued to expand. In 2018, the Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency had a staff of approximately six hundred personnel.
6. Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency, “Past Conflicts,” December 14, 2018, http:
7. There were originally 867 unidentified sets of remains from the Korean War buried in the Punchbowl, and more than two thousand from World War II.
8. Such protocols, as Amâde M’charek notes in her study of a forensic laboratory in the Netherlands, are measures “aimed at the transparency and repeatability of research, even after years have passed.” M’charek, “Technologies of Population: Forensic DNA Testing Practices and the Making of Differences and Similarities,” Configurations 8, no. 1 (2000): 126.
9. Trust in scientific knowledge production hinges on credibility. On the origins of such credibility and the experimental production of matters of fact, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s classic study of the seventeenth-century debate about pneumatics between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
10. Michael J. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 243.
11. Susan Sheehan, A Missing Plane (New York: Berkeley Books, 1986), 50–51.
12. On the Hart case and its fallout, see Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 240–42; Thomas Hawley, The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 108–14.
13. Josh Getlin, “Hearts & Bones: Thirteen Years after Lt. Col. Thomas Hart Disappeared in Laos, the Army Said It Had Found His Remains,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, October 12, 1986, http:
14. Madeline J. Hinkes, “Ellis Kerley’s Service to the Military,” Journal of Forensic Science 46, no. 4 (2001): 782–83. As one example of recurring errors, the external consultants noticed that estimations of stature consistently fell dead center of the predicted range, a virtual impossibility. There should be about 30 percent off, or outside, that range.
15. The Armed Services Graves Registration Office review board (later known as the Armed Forces Identification Review Board) was responsible for reviewing case files and either approving or disapproving an identification recommended by the CIL; prior to the 1985 recommendations, the board did not include scientific personnel. Appendix VI, “1985 Army Consultants’ Recommendation of CILHI Operations and Army’s Response,” “POW / MIA Affairs: Issues Related to the Identification of Human Remains from the Vietnam Conflict,” Report to the Chairman and Vice Chairman, Select Committee on POW / MIA Affairs, US Senate, United States General Accountability Office, October 1992, https:
16. Hinkes, “Ellis Kerley’s Service to the Military,” 783.
17. In his ethnographic study of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Hugh Gusterson notes that the WWII physicists’ success in “penetrat[ing] the secrets of the atom” led to the pursuit of the hydrogen bomb, “an important milestone in the postwar militarization of American physics,” one that scientists such as Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein fought to prevent. Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 20–21.
18. Thomas Holland, interview with author, July 25, 2012.
19. Robert Mann, interview with author, May 9, 2012.
20. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, “Accreditation versus Certification,” accessed December 18, 2018, https:
21. In 2000, forensic anthropology and skeletal identification were not recognized as forensic disciplines for accreditation purposes. By 2017, because of the CIL’s efforts, those fields became fully recognized, and in 2018, the CIL, renamed the Scientific Analysis Directorate, was accredited in five disciplines for forensic science testing: anthropology, which also includes archaeology, among other components; biology (specifically the collection of biological evidence such as DNA); crime scene investigation (related to aircraft wreckage and life support equipment); materials (trace), which includes recovered military equipment and individuals’ personal effects; and odontology. ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board, “Scope of Accreditation to: ISO / IEC 17025:2005; ANAB 17025:2005 Forensic Science Testing Laboratories Accreditation Requirements: 2017,” issued February 28, 2018.
22. In some respects, this tension between the civilian and military components within the Command reflected what scholars have characterized as the “widening gap” between civil-military spheres in American society. See, for example, Ole R. Holsti, “A Widening Gap between the U.S. Military and Civilian Society? Some Evidence, 1976–96,” International Security 23, no. 3 (1998 / 99): 5–42; Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957); Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Military Portrait (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960); Elliot Cohen, “Why the Gap Matters,” National Interest 61 (2000): 38–48; and Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, eds., Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
23. William Belcher, interview with the author, August 3, 2012. The DOD’s emerging emphasis on the importance of education has further widened this disconnect in experience and expertise. With educational opportunities available to its personnel through the use of online and correspondence courses offered by colleges and universities willing to offer credit for “life experience,” coupled with an increasing number of enlisted personnel obtaining bachelor’s degrees, there is upward pressure for officers to obtain graduate degrees—usually one-year, no-thesis master’s degrees. As Holland explained, “If your only frame of reference is a one-year online MA, there is even less respect shown to civilian academics.”
24. K. Phillips, interview with author, July 27, 2012.
25. Michael Dolski, “When X Doesn’t Mark the Spot: Historical Investigation and Identifying Remains from the Korean War,” in Missing Persons: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Disappeared, ed. Derek Congram (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2016), 161. JPAC (now DPAA) employs more than a dozen historians to cover historical analysis for the three major conflicts—World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. There are also full-time analysts and casualty resolution specialists working in Hawaii, Washington, DC, and in Southeast Asia, in addition to support from Defense Intelligence Agency staff assigned to regional offices in Cambodia and Laos.
26. Though the North Koreans “claimed that each box represented a single U.S. service member lost during the Korean War,” the minimum number of individuals is estimated to be approximately six hundred, including at least twelve Korean nationals. Jennie Jin et al., “The Korea 208: A Large-Scale Commingling Case of American Remains from the Korean War,” in Commingled Human Remains: Methods in Recovery, Analysis, and Identification, eds. Bradley J. Adams and John E. Byrd (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2014), 409, 421.
27. While disinterments occurred on an ad hoc basis since the 1980s and a more formalized program emerged in 2009, it was not until April 2015 that the DOD began to coordinate efforts with the Department of Veterans Affairs to disinter remains from the USS Oklahoma and created explicit “thresholds for the disinterment of remains from any permanent U.S. military cemetery.” Inspector General, US Department of Defense, Report No. DODIG-2018-138, “DoD’s Organizational Changes to the Past Conflict Personnel Accounting Community,” July 18, 2018, https:
28. See, for example, Debra Komar, “Patterns of Mortuary Practice Associated with Genocide: Implications for Archaeological Research,” Current Anthropology 49, no. 1 (2008): 123–33. On the indexicality of the dead in archaeology, see Zoë Crossland, “Of Clues and Signs: The Dead Body and Its Evidential Traces,” American Anthropologist 111, no. 1 (2009): 69–80.
29. In the case of fragmentary remains, each fragment “must share a unique landmark to ensure that fragments do not originate from the same skeletal element.” Lyle W. Konigsberg and Bradley Adams, “Estimating the Number of Individuals Represented by Commingled Human Remains: A Critical Evaluation of Methods,” in Commingled Remains: Methods in Recovery, Analysis and Identification, eds., Bradley J. Adams and John E. Byrd (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2014), 195.
30. Microscopic analysis (such as histological analysis) is frequently used to determine whether the fragment is human or nonhuman osseous material. See Mariateresa A. Tersini-Tarrant, “Taphonomic Processes: Analysis of Fragmentary Remains,” in Forensic Anthropology: An Introduction, eds. Mariateresa A. Tersini-Tarrant and Natalie R. Shirley (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013), 386.
Ancestry refers to an individual’s biological affinity with phenotypic characters that appear with greater frequency within human populations of a given geographic space, for example Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. In the field of forensic anthropology, ancestral background has generally supplanted race as an analytic category. As a case in point, in February 2013, the CIL revised its SOP for this aspect of the biological profile, replacing race with ancestry.
31. Assessing phenotypic expressions of human variation has been a source of significant, at times contentious, debate in the field of physical anthropology, particularly regarding the concept of race and its associations with racist science. See, for example, Stephen Jay Gould on craniometry, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (1981; repr., New York: Norton, 1996); and James H. Mielke, Lyle W. Konigsberg, and John H. Relethford, Human Biological Variation (New York: Oxford University Press), 3–22. For an overview of the concept of race in forensic anthropology and its medico-legal application, see Sabrina C. Ta’ala, “A Brief History of the Race Concept in Physical Anthropology,” in Greg E. Berg and Sabrina C. Ta’ala, eds., Biological Affinity in Forensic Identifications of Human Skeletal Remains (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2015), 1–15; Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, “But Professor, Why Teach Race Identification if Races Don’t Exist?” Journal of Forensic Sciences 40, no. 5 (1995): 797–800; Norm J. Sauer, “Forensic Anthropology and the Concept of Race: If Races Don’t Exist, Why Are Forensic Anthropologists So Good at Identifying Them?” Social Science & Medicine 34, no. 2 (1992): 107–11; and Stephen Ousley, Richard Jantz, and Donna Freid, “Understanding Race and Human Variation: Why Forensic Anthropologists Are Good at Identifying Race,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139, no. 1 (2009): 68–76.
32. Ismail Kadare, The General of the Dead Army, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Arcade, 2011), 23.
33. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3.
34. See, for example, Jay Aronson, Who Owns the Dead: The Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Sarah Wagner, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Iosif Kovras, Grassroots Activism and the Evolution of Transitional Justice: The Families of the Disappeared (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 99–104; Victor Toom, “Whose Body Is It? Technolegal Materialization of Victims’ Bodies and Remains after the World Trade Center Terrorist Attacks,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 4 (2017): 686–708; and Lindsay Smith, “The Missing, the Martyred and the Disappeared: Global Networks, Technical Intensification and the End of Human Rights Genetics,” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 3 (2017): 398–441.
35. Since 1991, all active-duty, reserve, and National Guard service members are required to give a DNA blood card. The card is collected for medical use, specifically for the identification of service members who have died in current theaters of operations. The samples are stored at the Armed Forces Repository of Specimen Samples for the Identification of Remains in Delaware, and the card is only pulled (and DNA genotyped) when needed. There is no DNA database for US service members.
36. The US military’s dental records are comprehensive, though not consistently so. For example, records date back to World War I, with a small number even earlier, and have been the basis for multiple WWI identifications at the laboratory. Radiographic films, however, have been less effective. Whereas they are used extensively in Vietnam War cases, for World War II and Korean War cases, extant films were not culled and set aside as an independent collection for postmortem comparative use.
37. Radiographic matches can be as definitive as DNA testing, as in the example of two identical twins. Genetic profiles would reveal them as identical, thus indistinguishable, but their dental charts and radiographs would be different.
38. Timothy McMahon, director of the DNA Registry (Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and Armed Forces Medical System), explained, “We use a dental bur to cut around the crown to maintain the integrity of the dental probative nature. The crown is removed and then we drill out the dentin from the inside. The tooth is then returned to the DPAA so that something is returned to the family.” Email to author, January 3, 2018.
39. Lynch et al., Truth Machine, xi. Explaining how DNA typing supplanted conventional fingerprinting as the “ultimate identification scheme,” Amâde M’charek describes the scientific practice of forensic genetics as “a number-generating machinery that produces facts out of human tissue” in “Technologies of Population,” 137. In the case of the World Trade Center attacks, scientists at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner faced a similar obstacle in families’ and the public’s preconceived notion of DNA’s infallibility. Aronson, Who Owns the Dead?, 81.
40. The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory pioneered the protocol in 2006, validating a “new demineralization technique” that enabled this significant reduction in the “input of skeletal material.” Suni M. Edson et al., “Flexibility in Testing Skeletonized Remains for DNA Analysis Can Lead to Increased Success: Suggestions and Case Studies,” in New Perspectives in Forensic Human Skeletal Identification, eds. Krista E. Latham, Eric J. Bartelink, and Michael Finnegan (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2018), 142. See also Odile M. Lorielle at al., “High Efficiency DNA Extraction from Bone by Total Demineralization,” Forensic Science International Genetics 1, no. 2 (2007): 191–95.
41. S. M. Edson et al., “Naming the Dead—Confronting the Realities of Rapid Identification of Degraded Skeletal Remains,” Forensic Science Review 16, no. 1 (2004): 77. Notably, AFDIL has maintained over a 90 percent success rate for obtaining mtDNA sequence from non-chemically treated samples submitted by the CIL (now the Scientific Analysis Directorate under the Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency), and over a 50 percent success rate for obtaining auSTR and Y-STR results from non-chemically treated samples.
42. Prior to its relocation to Dover Air Force Base in 2011, AFDIL was based in Rockville, Maryland.
43. For an excellent explanation of the science and practice of DNA testing used to identify victims of a mass fatality incident (in this case the World Trade Center attacks), see Aronson, Who Owns the Dead?, 81–89.
44. The use of “family reference samples” dates back to the First Gulf War. In 1991, the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System (which AFDIL falls under) had to utilize DNA to assist with the identification of service members from the conflict. This required obtaining references from the deceased service members’ immediate family. In 1991–92, the Department of Defense was mandated to set up the DNA Registry, which included the Armed Forces Repository of Specimen Samples for the Identification of Remains (AFRSSIR) and the Family Reference Specimen database. My thanks to Timothy McMahon for providing this information on historical and contemporary practice at AFDIL.
45. “A higher success rate is achieved with mtDNA compared with nuclear DNA, from old bones, severely decomposed or charred remains, or single hair shafts.” A. Carracedo et. al., “DNA Commission of the International Society for Forensic Genetics: Guidelines for Mitochondrial DNA Typing,” Forensic Science International 110, no. 2 (2000): 80.
46. AFIDL currently can use grandchildren as well, but due to the fact that they only share 25 percent of the DNA with the missing service member, more of those samples are required.
47. In 2006, AFDIL also began prioritizing the collection of paternal (Y-chromosomal STR [Short Tandem Repeat]) and nuclear (auSTR) family references. All samples are initially processed for mtDNA “to gauge the quality of the sample and to allow AFMES-AFDIL and DPAA scientists to segregate samples by mtDNA control region sequence. Once mtDNA profiles are obtained, and if paternal and / or nuclear references are available, Y-STR and auSTR testing is performed to help segregate samples with common mtDNA sequences or to aid further statistical relevance to the initial mtDNA results.” Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency, Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, DNA Identification Laboratory, “DNA FAQs,” accessed April 27, 2019, http:
48. Timothy McMahon. Email to author, January 3, 2018.
49. In the Vietnam War, loss incidents—cases of unrecovered or unaccounted for service members—were given “reference numbers,” or REFNOs. The REFNO for the helicopter crash that killed Lance Corporal Merlin Raye Allen in June 1967 was 0746, meaning that it was the 746th incident of MIA / KIA / BNR at that point in the war; in this case, Cdr. Green’s loss incident was the 1,895th.
50. Unless otherwise noted, the case summary, including direct quotations, comes from the Memorandum for the Record, “Identification of CIL 2009-156-I-01,” Thomas D. Holland, November 1, 2010, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command.
51. Sean D. Tallman, “Final Search and Recovery Report CIL 2009-156, an A-4F Crash Site Associated with REFNO 1895, in the Vicinity of Quang Son Village, Tam Diep District, Ninh Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, 31 October Through 25 November 2009,” January 11, 2010, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command Central Identification Laboratory.
52. Laurel Freas, “Forensic Anthropology Report CIL 2009-156-I-01,” October 6, 2010, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command Central Identification Laboratory.
53. The case summary, including direct quotations, comes from the Memorandum for the Record, “Identification of CIL 2010-185-I-01,” Thomas D. Holland, January 5, 2011, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command.
54. I caught the very end of this practice, as by early 2012, the Department of Defense had phased out the funding that subsidized families’ travel to the island for this purpose. Privately funded family visits still take place at the new DPAA facility, and occasionally relatives who are current service members act as the official military escort for the remains. These visits follow a format similar to what I witnessed in 2011 and 2012, with a Public Affairs Office photographer present to document each stage, including a more formal “final salute” ceremony when the hearse departs the grounds.
55. Each branch of the military has its own casualty office (army, navy, air force, and marine corps), and the service casualty officers are the ones responsible for communicating directly with the families of the unaccounted for.
1. Ismail Kadare, The General of the Dead Army, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Arcade, 2011), 126.
2. Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Soldiers Were Separated From Unit in Niger Ambush, Officials Say,” New York Times, October 26, 2017, https://
3. The controversy stemmed from conflicting accounts about the conversation President Trump had with Sgt. Johnson’s wife while she was en route to receive her husband’s remains. Ms. Johnson alleged that President Trump did not seem to know her husband’s name and told her that “he knew what he signed up for.” Yamiche Alcindor and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Soldier’s Widow Says Trump Struggled to Remember Sgt. La David Johnson’s Name,” New York Times, October 23, 2017, https://
4. On November 21, 2017, the Department of Defense announced that a US Africa Command investigation team had recovered “additional remains” for Sgt. Johnson, but they provided few details to the family or the media. Alex Horton, “More Remains Belonging to Sgt. La David Johnson Found in Niger, Military Says,” Washington Post, November 21, 2017, https://
5. “Transcript: Widow of Fallen Soldier La David Johnson Speaks Out,” ABC News, October 23, 2017, http://
6. From 2009 to 2014, the Department of Defense’s Prisoner of War / Missing Personnel Affairs Program annual spending, which included the Defense Prisoner of War / Missing Personnel Office (DPMO), Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL), and Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory (LSEL), was approximately $110 million. The annual budget for the Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which combined all but AFDIL into the same entity, was $127 million in 2015; $128 million in 2016; $112 million in 2017; and $131 million in 2018. It is important to note that the DPAA annual budget does not include markups (e.g., $15 million additional funds allocated in fiscal year 2018), nor does it capture the associated budgets of either AFDIL or the service casualty offices, or additional military pay, military airlift costs, etc.
7. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim define such concerns and assumptions as “sociotechnical imaginaries,” which are “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures,” animated by advances in science and technology. Sheila Jasanoff, “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity,” in Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrications of Power, eds. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017), 4.
8. Likewise, historical analyses of the Vietnam War POW / MIA movement have understandably focused on the archival record, on opinions and actions of those most politically active, and on popular cultural representations—all important sources, but by no means exhaustive or entirely representative of Vietnam War MIA families and veterans’ experiences. For example, see Michael Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Thomas Hawley, The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted For in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and H. Bruce Franklin’s M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America (Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992).
9. Ann Mills-Griffiths, interview with author, November 17, 2017.
10. Josh Getlin, “Unfriendly Fire: POW-MIA Activist Ann Mills Griffiths Is a Power Player in Washington,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1991, http://
11. Michael Allen, quoted in Jay Price, “Having Changed America, The League of POW / MIA Families Fades,” October 19, 2017, NPR, All Things Considered, https://
12. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, Pub. L. No. 111-84, §541 (2009), https://
13. Of those eighty-two thousand, over forty-one thousand are presumed lost at sea, for example with ship losses, known aircraft water losses, etc., and therefore considered non-recoverable. For the Persian Gulf War, two service members are missing from the 1991 Operation Desert Storm.
14. Brenda S. Farrell, “DOD’s POW / MIA Mission: Capability and Capacity to Account for Missing Persons Undermined by Leadership Weaknesses and Fragmented Organizational Structure,” Testimony before the Subcommittee on Military Personnel, Committee on Armed Services, US House of Representatives, August 1, 2013, United States Government Accountability Office, https://
15. 10 U.S.C. § 1513, accessed December 18, 2018, https://
16. Thomas Holland, interview with author, July 25, 2012.
17. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. In its 2018 assessment report, the Department of Defense inspector general reinforced this point, noting that “in order for an identification made by DPAA to count toward their goal of 200, DPAA must recover and identify that person’s biological remains.” Inspector General, US Department of Defense, Report No. DODIG-2018-138, “DoD’s Organizational Changes to the Past Conflict Personnel Accounting Community,” July 18, 2018, https://
18. Not included here is the Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory (LSEL). Though part of the DOD agencies tasked with MIA accounting, LSEL deals with military equipment artifacts rather than with human remains, and unlike the other two laboratories (Central Identification Laboratory, now Scientific Analysis Directorate, and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory), LSEL is neither accredited nor does it employ any scientists.
19. John Byrd, interview with author, July 24, 2012.
20. Claire McCaskill, “Mismanagement of POW / MIA Accounting,” Hearing before the Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Washington, DC, August 1, 2013, https://
21. United States Government Accountability Office, “POW / MIA Affairs: Issues Related to the Identification of Human Remains from the Vietnam Conflict,” Report to the Chairman and Vice Chairman, Select Committee on POW / MIA Affairs, US Senate, October 1992, https://
22. In addition to assessing the mission according to the benchmarks set by the NDAA 2010, the 2013 GAO study also addressed allegations of inefficiency and waste set out by Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education fellow Paul Cole in his draft “Information Value Chain Study,” commissioned by the Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command. See Cole’s August 1, 2013, statement before the House Armed Services Committee, Military Personnel Subcommittee: http://
23. Opening Statement of Chairman Claire McCaskill, “Mismanagement of POW / MIA Accounting,” August 1, 2013, https://
24. McCaskill, “Mismanagement of POW / MIA Accounting.” Senator McCaskill said that during her preparation for the hearing, “echoes of Arlington began resonating with me.” On the Arlington National Cemetery scandal, see Micki McElya, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 307–9.
25. Requested by Congress and the Department of Defense, the inspector general also undertook an assessment of the MIA accounting community in 2014 and issued a report that found, among other obstacles, a lack of coordination among agencies and “duplication of personnel and functions.” Inspector General, US Department of Defense, “Assessment of the Department of Defense Prisoner of War / Missing In Action Accounting Community,” Report No. DODIG-2015-001, October 17, 2014, https://
26. Ayotte, “Mismanagement of POW / MIA Accounting.”
27. “The War’s Not Over Until the Last Man Comes Home,” was the advertising slogan for Chuck Norris’s film, Missing in Action. Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, 142.
28. The 2018 Inspector General Report notes that “as of August 2017, DPAA records showed that the DoD considered nearly 60 percent of the 82,500 missing persons from past conflicts as non-recoverable.” “DoD’s Organizational Changes to the Past Conflict Personnel Accounting Community,” 29. This figure, however, remains somewhat fluid, given the potential for scientific and technological advances, collaborations with third-party entities, including universities, developed by the agency’s Strategic Partnerships Directorate, and ongoing internal DOD discussions regarding the policy for burial at sea. On this final point, see “DoD’s Organizational Changes to the Past Conflict Personnel Accounting Community,” 58.
29. On the early postwar demands made of Vietnam to account for US service members missing in action, see Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, 129–30; and Edwin A. Martini, Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975–2000 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 22–24. On the “mercurial nature of North Korean–US relations,” Michael Dolski notes that “the negotiations of field missions were often tense and subject to mutual recriminations, and in 2005 this activity halted entirely.” Dolski, “When X Doesn’t Mark the Spot: Historical Investigation and Identifying Remains from the Korean War,” in Missing Persons: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Disappeared, ed. Derek Congram (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2016), 153.
30. Nick Simeone, “Hagel Orders Overhaul of POW / MIA Identification Agencies,” DoD News, US Department of Defense, March 31, 2014, http://
31. The final bill for the consulting firm ended up significantly larger: the Clearing was paid a total of $9,207,754 for services rendered between September 30, 2013, and February 26, 2015, through three separate awards under the parent award GS10F0065X. These data are available at usaspending.gov.
32. Megan Towey, “Families Frustrated by Changes to POW / MIA System,” CBS News, October 15, 2014, https://
33. Alan Brochstein, “How Alisa Stack Jumped from the Department of Defense into the Cannabis Industry,” New Cannabis Ventures, July 18, 2017, https://
34. Michael Lumpkin, “Government Accountability Office Review of the Prisoner of War / Missing In Action (POW / MIA) Community and the Restructuring of These Agencies as Proposed by the Department of Defense,” Hearing before the Subcommittee on Military Personnel of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives [H.A.S.C. No. 113-117], July 15, 2014, https://
35. Michael Lumpkin, “Government Accountability Office Review.”
36. Like CIL, AFDIL is accredited by an independent institution, the American National Standards Institute—American Society of Quality Control National Accreditation Board. In 2018, it received zero findings of non-conformance during their quadrennial quality assessment.
37. Odile M. Lorielle et al., “High Efficiency DNA Extraction from Bone by Total Demineralization,” Forensic Science International Genetics 1, no. 2 (2007): 191–95.
38. Under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the group eventually became the Anthropology Subcommittee of the Organization of Scientific Area Committees. National Institute for Standards and Technology, “Scientific Working Groups,” accessed December 18, 2018, https://
39. For example, Robert Burns, “AP Impact: MIA Accounting ‘Acutely Dysfunctional,’ ” July 7, 2013, San Diego Union Tribune, http://
40. NPR, “Grave Science,” March 6, 2014, https://
41. “Dated Methods Mean Slow Return for Fallen Soldiers—Or None At All,” NPR, All Things Considered, March 6, 2014, https://
42. ProPublica, “The Military Is Leaving the Missing Behind.”
43. NPR, “Grave Science.”
44. Lindsay Smith demonstrates how the NPR / ProPublica critique fit within an emerging field of security-focused forensic genetics, marked by an “increasing precedence” of the DNA-led (rather than a “holistic, investigatory”) approach. “The Missing, the Martyred and the Disappeared: Global Networks, Technical Intensification and the End of Human Rights Genetics,” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 3 (2017): 412, 414n9.
45. NPR, “Grave Science.”
46. On Bode and US congressional funding of missing person identification efforts in Latin America, see Smith, “The Missing, the Martyred and the Disappeared,” 404–7.
47. “Bode Technology Uses DNA to Help Identify Missing World War II Soldier,” PRWeb, April 7, 2014, http://
48. Sarah Wagner, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 82–122.
49. In its 1995 report, the Department of Defense Science Board confirmed that mtDNA testing offered the best means to identify skeletal remains that cannot be identified through traditional methods. It also noted that “bone samples from Southeast Asia,” in contrast to remains recovered from North Korea, “have demonstrated that they harbor only small amounts of mtDNA, and that it is severely fragmented.” Report of the Department of Defense Science Board Task Force, “Use of DNA Technology for Identification of Ancient Remains,” July 1995, 15. On the effectiveness of mtDNA testing in its early application by ADFIL, see Mitchell M. Holland et al., “Mitochondrial Sequence Analysis of Human Skeletal Remains: Identification of Remains from The Vietnam War,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 38, no. 3 (1993): 542–53.
50. Because the remains are older and the DNA extracted of lower quality than in a modern case, there is a greater possibility for a modern contaminant to get amplified over the low-quality authentic DNA profile. Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency, Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, DNA Identification Laboratory, “DNA FAQs,” June 25, 2018, http://
51. Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency, “DNA FAQs.”
52. On NGS and its implications for forensic genetics and human identification, see Jennifer Templeton et al., “DNA Capture and Next-Generation Sequencing Can Recover Whole Mitochondrial Genomes from Highly Degraded Samples for Human Identification,” Investigative Genetics 4, no. 1 (2013): 26; Claus Børsting and Niels Morling, “Next Generation Sequencing and Its Applications in Forensic Genetics,” Forensic Science International: Genetics 18 (2015): 78–89; and Terry Melton, “Digging Deep: Next Generation Sequencing for Mitochondrial DNA Forensics,” Forensic Magazine, January 4, 2014, https://
53. NPR, “Grave Science.”
54. NPR, “Grave Science.”
55. One of the few exceptions ran in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. The article quoted a group of scientists, including former JPAC staff, who argued in a letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel that JPAC “was the gold standard of scientific rigor and excellence that all other laboratories that undertake the identification of skeletonized human remains strive to achieve.” William Cole, “JPAC Leadership Changes Criticized,” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, October 19, 2014.
56. Smith, “The Missing, the Martyred and the Disappeared,” 414n9. The same group of scientists writing to Secretary Hagel decried plans to remove Holland and install a medical examiner at the helm of the scientific process: “To replace him with a medical examiner—a (medical doctor) whose science and experience evolves around fleshed bodies—is inconceivable.” Cole, “JPAC Leadership Changes Criticized.”
57. Statement of Honorable Michael D. Lumpkin, Assistant Secretary of Defense, Special Operations / Low-Intensity Conflict, Performing the Duties of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Department of Defense, “GAO Review of the POW / MIA Community and the Restructuring of These Agencies.”
58. Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America.
59. Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, 145.
60. McKeague, “Mismanagement of POW / MIA Accounting.”
61. Layla Renshaw describes that imaginary as a “forensic gaze” adopted by the layperson from crime fiction, film, and television. “The Forensic Gaze: Reconstituting Bodies and Objects as Evidence,” in Mapping the “Forensic Turn”: Engagements with Materialities of Mass Death in Holocaust Studies and Beyond, ed. Zuzanna Dziuban (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2017), 219. The notion of a “CSI effect”—that is, the impact of fictitious depictions of forensic science in the CSI television series and related programs—has been widely debated in academic and mainstream media, particularly regarding whether its effect on public perception influences criminal justice proceedings. See, for example, N. J. Schweitzer and Michael J. Saks, “The CSI Effect: Popular Fiction about Forensic Science Affects the Public’s Expectations about Real Forensic Science,” Jurimetrics 47, no. 3 (2007): 357–64; Simon Cole and Rachel Dioso-Villa, “CSI and Its Effects: Media, Juries, and the Burden of Proof,” New England Law Review 41, no. 3 (2007): 435–69; and Corinna Kruse, “Producing Absolute Truth: CSI Science as Wishful Thinking,” American Anthropologist 112, no. 1 (2010): 79–91.
62. Extending a Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command initiative, the Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency has set aside a chest radiograph collection of several million (an estimated eight to thirteen million) images but has not been able to process them to date. Those radiographs are from 1941 to 1955, and they belong to service members from the US Marine Corps and US Navy.
63. Kate Webber, “Forensic Technique Developed by Brisbane Researcher Helps Identify Missing Soldiers,” ABC News, May 2, 2016, http://
64. Carl N. Stephan et al., “Skeletal Identification by Radiographic Comparison: Blind Tests of a Morphoscopic Method Using Antemortem Chest Radiographs,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 56, no. 2 (2011): 320–32; and Carl N. Stephan and Pierre Guyomarc’h, “Quantification of Perspective-Induced Shape Change of Clavicles at Radiography and 3D Scanning to Assist Human Identification,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 59, no. 2 (2014): 447–53. Stephan won the Ellis R. Kerley Research Award in 2013, presented at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting, for his research on the radiographic comparison technique. The ProPublica report briefly mentions the technique but dismisses its import.
65. Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton, Murder and the Making of English CSI (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 1.
66. David A. Kirby, “Forensic Fictions: Science, Television Production, and Modern Storytelling,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 44 (2013): 94.
67. Kirby, “Forensic Fictions,” 94–95; see also, Zoë Crossland, “Writing Forensic Anthropology: Transgressive Representations,” in Disturbing Bodies: Perspectives on Forensic Anthropology, eds. Zoë Crossland and Rosemary A. Joyce (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2015); and Kruse, “Producing Absolute Truth.”
68. Sheila Jasanoff and Hilton R. Simmet, “No Funeral Bells: Public Reason in a ‘Post-truth’ Age,” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 5 (2017): 757.
69. Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 6.
70. Jasanoff and Simmet, “No Funeral Bells,” 756.
71. ProPublica, “The Military Is Leaving the Missing Behind.”
72. Jay Winter, War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 67.
73. Dave Philipps, “War Hero’s Family Suing in Its Decades-Long Fight to Identify Remains,” New York Times, May 29, 2017, https://
74. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
75. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 21.
76. Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 131–34. See also, Hugh Gusterson, Drones: Remote Control Warfare (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
1. Mary included part of that letter in a note she left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dated August 22, 2015.
2. From Mary Defoe’s August 22, 2015, letter to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
3. Mary Defoe, interview with the author, Red Cliff, Wisconsin, July 28, 2017.
4. Alan “Butch” Kuepfer, interview with the author, Red Cliff, Wisconsin, July 30, 2017.
5. The Iwo Jima image was a stock photograph used by the Taylor Publishing Company, which was one of the leading publishers of yearbooks in the United States. The company had made a name for itself during World War II publishing “memory books to the military” before expanding into the school yearbook market. “Taylor Publishing Company,” International Directory of Company Histories, Encyclopedia.com, accessed December 18, 2018, http://
6. In mapping proportionate losses across different types of communities (e.g., urban, suburban, rural), Christian Appy notes that “In the 1960s only about 2 percent of Americans lived in towns with fewer than 1,000 people. Among those who died in Vietnam, however, roughly four times that portion, 8 percent, came from American hamlets of that size.” Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 14. So too in his chronicle of the “Morenci Nine” (the nine marines who served in the Vietnam War from Morenci, Arizona, six of whom died in it), Kyle Longley argues that “the blood sacrifice made in Vietnam was uneven for small towns and working-class and lower-class communities. They experienced death on a much greater scale compared to areas of affluence or communities with strong anti-war cultures.” Longley, The Morenci Marines: A Tale of Small-Town American and the Vietnam War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013), 5.
7. For a discussion of this more expansive notion of dispossession, see Angela Garcia, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 83–84.
8. For a detailed history of the national park’s creation, see Harold C. Jordahl Jr. and Annie Booth, Environmental Politics and the Creation of a Dream: Establishing the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).
9. See Alan Solomon, “After 6 Weeks, 8,000 Miles and 139 Towns, This Is the Place,” Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1997, http://
10. Bayfield Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Bureau, accessed December 18, 2018, http://
11. On the anti-war demonstrations at the University of Wisconsin Madison, including the October 18, 1967, “Dow riots,” see David Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
12. James W. Feldman, A Storied Wilderness: Rewilding the Apostle Islands (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 21.
13. Jordahl and Booth, Environmental Politics and the Creation of a Dream, 79–85; Feldman, A Storied Wilderness, 176.
14. The US House of Representatives and the Senate held two sets of hearings respectively between 1967 and 1970. Feldman, A Storied Wilderness, 179.
15. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Parks and Recreation of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, United States Senate, Ninetieth Congress, First Session on S. 778, “A Bill to Provide for the Establishment of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in the State of Wisconsin, and for Other Purposes,” May 9, June 1 and 2, 1967 (US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC: 1967), 229–30.
16. “A Bill to Provide for the Establishment of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore,” 230.
17. From the “massive buildup”—15,000 in 1964 to 550,000 in 1968—to the “gradual withdrawal of ground troops” beginning in 1969, the “bell curve of escalation and withdrawal spread the commitment into a decade-long chain of one-year long tours of duty.” Appy, Working-Class War, 17–18.
18. “A Bill to Provide for the Establishment of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore,” 148.
19. Feldman notes that as the movement to create the park gained momentum in the 1960s, “only the people most directly affected by the park proposal—property owners and residents of the Red Cliff and Bad River reservations—maintained their opposition.” A Storied Wilderness, 175.
20. “A Bill to Provide for the Establishment of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore,” 246.
21. “A Bill to Provide for the Establishment of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore,” 242.
22. “A Bill to Provide for the Establishment of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore,” 241–42.
23. Ronald N. Satz, Chippewa Treaty Rights: The Reserved Rights of Wisconsin’s Chippewa Indians in Historical Perspective (Madison: The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Art and letters, 1991), 51–82. See also, Chantal Norrgard, Seasons of Change: Labor, Treaty Rights, and Ojibwe Nationhood (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
24. Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, “Origins and History,” accessed December 18, 2018, http://
25. Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, “Origins and History.” Moningwanikoning means “home of the yellow-breasted woodpecker.”
26. Andy Gokee, “Tribal Histories Q&A: Andy Gokee,” Wisconsin Public Television, WPT blog, November 22, 2016, https://
27. On the “century-old pattern of Native American land loss” and historical significance of the Red Cliff and Bad River Band’s victory in keeping reservation land out of the national park plan, see Feldman, A Storied Wilderness, 185–89.
28. On June 2, 1924, through the Indian Citizenship Act, the United States Congress granted full citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.
29. Feldman, A Storied Wilderness, 193.
1. In this chapter and its map, the spelling of Vietnamese names, including place names, correspond to either how they appear in US military documents or as they are written—with diacritics—in the Vietnamese language.
2. Jeff Savelkoul, “Team Striker Story,” (unpublished document), shared with the author, September 15, 2016.
3. “Socialist Republic of Vietnam Recovery Assessment: Case 0746,” March 20, 2006. Case file, REFNO 0746, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.
4. Savelkoul, “Team Striker Story,” and interview with author, September 17, 2016.
5. Savelkoul, “Team Striker Story.” Lawrence C. Vetter Jr. provides a similar account in Never without Heroes: Marine Third Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam, 1965–70 (New York: Ivy Books, 1996). See also the details and chronicle provided by the Alpha Reconn Association, “Search and Recovery, a CH-46A Crash Site Associated with REFNO 0746, Phu Loc District, Thua Thien-Hue Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” accessed October 24, 2017, http://
6. Savelkoul, “Team Striker Story.”
7. Jay Winter, “Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War,” in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, eds. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 40–60.
8. Winter, “Forms of Kinship and Remembrance,” 40, 41.
9. Winter, “Forms of Kinship and Remembrance,” 41.
10. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 19.
11. Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 10.
12. Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 19.
13. In 2006, a Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command investigative team documented “the purported recovery scene has been extensively scavenged leaving only tiny fragments of wreckage.” “Detailed Report of Investigation of Case 0746 (VM-01464) Conducted during the 83rd Joint Field Activity in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” September 7, 2006. Case file, REFNO 0746, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.
14. Although there were no visible examples of the CH-46 wreckage used on private property along the route traveled by JPAC and VNO teams to and from the excavation site, photographs of such practice can be found in JPAC archives, including images of machetes cut from airplane propeller blades and sandals made of rubber tires. An MIA daughter described traveling to the site where her father’s plane crashed and local villagers showing her a cooking pot that had been fashioned from the metal of the downed plane. On the “vigorous trade in war scrap metal” that “emerged in the informal economies” of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (her focus), see Christina Schwenkel, “War Debris in a Postwar Society: Managing Risk and Uncertainty in the DMZ,” in Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, eds. Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013), 135–56.
15. For example, see “Telegram From JCRC Liaison Bangkok TH To CDR JCRC Barbers Pt. HI—re: JCRC Report M85-118; Dog Tag of Allen and House (REFNO 0746),” February 13, 1986, 11270804038, Garnett Bell Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University; and “Telegram From JCRC Liaison Bangkok TH To CDR JCRC Barbers Pt. HI—re: JCRC Prt. S86-012, Dale A. Pearce (REFNO 1747) and G. L. Runnels (REFNO 0746),” October 6, 1986, 11270823019, Garnett Bell Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University.
16. James W. Wold, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Letter to Mrs. Amy House, December 11, 1995. Case file, REFNO 0746, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.
17. Sarah Wagner, “A Curious Trade: The Recovery and Repatriation of Vietnam MIAs,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 1 (2015): 161–90; and Michael J. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 227. On forensic traces of remains trading, see Robert Mann et al., “A Blue Encrustation Found on Skeletal Remains of Americans Missing in Action in Vietnam,” Forensic Science International 97, no. 2 (1998): 79–86.
18. “Socialist Republic of Vietnam Recovery Assessment: Case 0746,” March 20, 2006. Case file, REFNO 0746, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii. On the artifacts, see “Memorandum for J2212,” Subject: Case 0746 Research, April 19, 2005. Case file, REFNO 0746, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.
19. “Detailed Report of Investigation of Case 0746 (VM-01464) Conducted during the 83rd Joint Field Activity in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” September 7, 2006.
20. Just north of Thừa Thiên–Huế Province, where the excavation site was located, and abutting the former demilitarization zone (DMZ), Quảng Trị Province in Central Vietnam is considered to have “the highest density of explosive remnants of war” in the country. Christina Schwenkel, “War Debris in a Postwar Society,” 135.
21. “Contamination Situation,” Technology Centre for Bomb and Mine Disposal Engineering Command, accessed December 19, 2018, http://
22. Christina Schwenkel writes powerfully about the disconnect between US veterans’ experiences of reckoning with the war by returning to Vietnam, sometimes for humanitarian projects, and that of Vietnamese MIA families and veterans, cautioning against narratives of shared suffering and loss that minimize or neglect the “tremendous discrepancies in wartime and postwar trauma and dislocation.” The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 47.
23. Included in the first Detailed Report of Investigation, from May 1993, is testimony from a local “witness” who came across the site in 1991 while he was searching for wood. The man explained that “the site [had] been heavily scavenged and all large metal pieces [had] been removed.” “Detailed Report of Investigation of Case 0746,” 23rd Joint Field Activity, May 28, 1993. Case file, REFNO 0746, Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.
24. My thanks go to Tâm Ngô for locating this information in the Thừa Thiên–Huế provincial report, dated May 14, 2013. She noted that the GDP increased to $2,020 by 2016.
25. Thomas M. Hawley, The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 92.
26. “Collectively, Southeast Asia represented 48 percent (90 of 187) of the number of planned missions for FYs 2017 and 2018, and nearly 70 percent ($70.2 million of $101.8 million) of the total mission budget for those 2 years.” Inspector General, US Department of Defense, Report No. DODIG-2018-138, “DoD’s Organizational Changes to the Past Conflict Personnel Accounting Community,” July 18, 2018, https://
27. Mark Bryant, interview with the author, June 14, 2012.
28. Hau Le, interview with the author, June 19, 2012.
29. Nicole McMinamin, interview with author, June 15, 2012.
30. Andrew Childs, interview with the author, June 15, 2012.
31. The site was officially closed in August 2014, a little over two years after our recovery team had opened it.
32. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, rev. ed. (1969; repr., New Brunswick: AldineTransaction, 2011), 95.
33. Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, rev. ed. (1960; repr., New York: Routledge, 2004), 12.
34. Van Gennep defined rites of passage as “rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age” (quoted in Turner, The Ritual Process, 94).
1. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 10.
2. Mark Brunswick, “After 44 Years, Browns Valley Will Bury One of Its Own,” Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, June 8, 2011, 1B.
3. Dwayne Spinler, “Bringing Dad Home,” United States Military Historical Collection, accessed December 19, 2018, http://
4. Spinler, “Bringing Dad Home.”
5. This and the following two excerpts are taken from the author’s interview with Dwayne Spinler, October 24, 2017.
6. Spinler, “Bringing Dad Home.”
7. Jeff Savelkoul, “Team Striker Story,” (unpublished document), shared with the author, September 15, 2016. For an account of Merl’s service, his friendship with Jeff Savelkoul, and his eventual homecoming, see also Erin Miller, Wisconsin’s 37: The Lives of Those Missing in Action in the Vietnam War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018), 53–57.
8. Louise Olesen, “American Heroes Outdoors Partners with Wounded Warriors,” Devils Lake Journal, May 25, 2015, http://
9. Savelkoul, “Team Striker Story.”
10. Savelkoul, “Team Striker Story.”
11. US troops left the ace of spades, a psychological warfare “calling card” that warned of death and, in some versions, urged the North Vietnamese to defect, at the entrances and exits of villages they “cleared” and on the bodies of dead NVA soldiers. Charles Brown, “How the Ace of Spades Became One of the Enduring Legends of Vietnam Psychological Warfare,” Vietnam 20, no. 3 (2007): 13–15.
12. Savelkoul, “Team Striker Story.”
13. Savelkoul, “Team Striker Story.”
14. According to the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files, there were 11,363 deaths in 1967; 16,899 in 1968; and 11,780 in 1969. Vietnam War US Military Fatal Casualty Statistics, Electronic Records Reference Report, National Archives, accessed December 19, 2018, https://
15. Laura McCallum, “Minnesota Marine Receives Bronze Star for Heroism in Vietnam,” Minnesota Public Radio, August 19, 2004, http://
16. Dineshe Ramde, “Wisconsin: 46 Years after Marine Died in Vietnam, Remains Coming Home to Be Buried,” Pioneer Press, June 24, 2013, https://
17. Jeff Savelkoul, email to the author with attached copy of the letter, March 24, 2018.
18. Jeff Savelkoul, email to the author, March 24, 2018.
19. Patriot Guard Riders, “Thread: LCpl Merlin Raye ‘Merl’ Allen, USMC, KIA Vietnam, Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN / Washburn, WI, 26, 28, 29 JUN 13,” accessed February 16, 2018, https://
20. Holding up placards with the slogan “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” the Westboro Baptist Church views military deaths as the just reward for a nation and its armed forces that “condone homosexuality.” Alan Feuer, “Revving Their Engines, Remembering a War’s Toll,” New York Times, May 29, 2006, http://
21. Patriot Guard Riders, “Our Vision,” accessed December 19, 2018, https://
22. Scott Walker, Office of the Governor, the State of Wisconsin, Executive Order #106, “Relating to a Proclamation that the Flag of the United States and the Flag of the State of Wisconsin be Flown at Half-Staff as a Mark of Respect for Lance Corporal Merlin Raye Allen of the United States Marines Corps Who Lost His Life While Serving His Country During the Vietnam War,” June 25, 2013, https://
23. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 29.
24. Spinler, “Bringing Dad Home.”
25. G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 186.
26. Ramde, “Wisconsin: 46 Years after Marine Died in Vietnam.”
27. Meg Jones, “46 years after His Death in Vietnam, Marine Returns Home for Funeral,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 29, 2013, http://
28. Meg Jones, “46 years after His Death in Vietnam, Marine Returns Home for Funeral.” See also Ramde, “Wisconsin: 46 Years after Marine Died in Vietnam”; David C. Kennedy, “Bayfield Community Honors Fallen Marine Merlin Allen: Final Goodbye Comes 46 Years after His Death in Vietnam,” Ashland Daily Press, June 30, 2013, http://
29. Viet Thanh Nyugen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 231.
30. Marilyn Neff, email to the author, February 19, 2018.
31. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), 91–92.
32. The PBS show History Detectives profiled the vessel in an episode, tracing its history from storming the beaches of France in August 1944 to its present-day role in dredging, construction, and transport on Lake Superior. “Episode 3 2004—LCT 103—Bayfield, Wisconsin,” accessed December 19, 2018, http://
33. Casey Alden Allen, email to the author, February 18, 2018.
34. Casey Alden Allen, email to the author, February 18, 2018.
35. Spinler, “Bringing Dad Home.”
1. “Florence V. Hessing | 1916–2015 | Obituary,” Bratley Family Funeral Homes, accessed December 19, 2018, http://
2. Vietnam War US Military Fatal Casualty Statistics, Electronic Records Reference Report, National Archives, accessed December 19, 2018, https://
3. “James William Hessing,” the Wall of Faces, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, accessed December 19, 2018, http://
1. Pioneer Press, “Red Cliff / Little VFW Post Comes Back to Life in a Big Way,” June 12, 2010, https://
2. Randy Bresette, interview with author, July 30, 2017.
3. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 97.
4. Alan “Butch” Kuepfer, interview with author, July 30, 2017.
5. David C. Kennedy, “Bayfield Community Honors Fallen Marine Merlin Allen: Final Goodbye Comes 46 Years after His Death in Vietnam,” Ashland Daily Press, June 30, 2013, http://
6. Randy Bresette, interview with author, July 30, 2017.
7. Randy explained that he got the idea from a veterans display at the Bad River casino in Odanah, Wisconsin, and that it quickly took off among the post members in Red Cliff. “A lot of [them] starting out bringing pictures of their own, and letting other people know. Soon, members were saying, ‘I gotta get mine up there, I gotta get mine up there.’ ” Interview with author, July 30, 2017.
8. Tom Holm, Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas, 1996), 10, 123. See also John A. Little, “Between Cultures: Sioux Warriors and the Vietnam War,” Great Plains Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2015): 357–58; and Theresa D. O’Nell, “ ‘Coming Home’ among Northern Plains Vietnam Veterans: Psychological Transformations in Pragmatic Perspective,” Ethos 27, no. 4 (1999), 445.
9. In an official letter to Mrs. Caroline Newago, Wotsy’s mother, Lieutenant Colonel W. N. Clelland, US Marine Corps, wrote that “at approximately 8:00 p.m. Duwayne was being medically evacuated for a fever of unknown origin when the helicopter he was in had an engine failure and went down at sea. To this date [May 5, 1967] his body has not been recovered. A Requiem Mass was held in Duwayne’s honor on 4 May 1967.” LtCol W. N. Clelland, Headquarters, Seventh Communications Battalion, First Marine Division, May 5, 1967. Stan Pace’s account, however, aligns with the American Legion Auxiliary “Wisconsin” POW / MIA Profile on Duwyane Soulier, which reports that Soulier “had been wounded during a combat operation and transported to the hospital at Chu Lai, Quang Tin Province, South Vietnam, for medical treatment.” The profile is among the VFW post’s archival material, displayed near Soulier’s photograph. See also Miller, Wisconsin’s 37, 44.
10. Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, “Father’s Day 2012 at the Vietnam Wall with Pam Cain,” YouTube video, 1:06, June 19, 2012, https://
11. In her study of the ambiguity of presence and absence, Pauline Boss touches on the Vietnam War MIA families’ experience (particularly that of MIA wives), noting that “families could not complete their mourning when their loss remained so uncertain.” Boss, Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 27.
12. Department of the Air Force, “Continuance of Missing in Action Status Beyond 12 Months—Case #53,” February 14, 1967, USAFMPC, Randolph AFB Texas, accessed December 19, 2018, https://
13. This and the following two excerpts, as well as the other quotations in this section of the chapter, are taken from the author’s interview with Pam Cain, December 2, 2017.
14. Historian Christian Appy explores the “baby-killer” rhetoric associated with the antiwar movement as an “essential way of getting at one of the central moral legacies of military service in Vietnam,” interrogating the “axiomatic” notion that the antiwar movement considered veterans “immoral killers.” Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 303–5. See also Jerry Lembcke’s discussion of the “baby-killer” epithet in The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press), 83; and Michael A. Messner, Guys Like Me: Five Wars, Five Veterans for Peace (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 18–19, 122–23.
15. According to Ann Mills-Griffiths, “presumptive findings of death were made on those listed as MIA and POW” as a “matter of law and administration” based on a “lapse of time without information to prove the man is still living.” Interview with author, November 17, 2017.
16. Pauline Boss and Donna Carnes, “The Myth of Closure,” Family Process 51, no. 4 (2012): 457.
17. Boss argues that while “religious rituals for mourning loss are reserved for the clearly dead,” families experiencing ambiguous loss “are left on their own to figure out how to cope.” Ambiguous Loss, 50.
18. A Vietnam War veteran and strong supporter of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation, Tom Carhart had also decried Lin’s design as a “trench” and a “scar” and asked, “Can America truly mean that we are to be honored by a black pit?” Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 102–3.
19. Maya Lin, Address before the Veterans Day Ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, November 11, 2017, https://
20. Christian Appy invites us to imagine a memorial like the Wall dedicated “to the Indochinese who died in what they call the American, not the Vietnam, War”: “If similar to the Vietnam Memorial, with every name etched in granite, it would have to be forty times larger than the wall in Washington.” For Appy, “to insist that we recognize the disparity in causalities between the United States and Indochina is not to diminish the tragedy or significance of American losses, nor does it deflect attention from our effort to understand American soldiers. Without some awareness of the war’s full destructiveness we cannot begin to understand their experience.” Working-Class War, 17.
21. Michael Allen and H. Bruce Franklin have argued that eliding the two categories raised the profile of the MIA issue and thus the political pressure to resolve it. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 209. H. Bruce Frankin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, 11–13, 96–99. Indeed, Allen notes that the decision in 1980 to collapse the distinction among POWs, MIAs, and KIA / BNRs into the “unaccounted for” label reflected “league worries that MIA ranks were nearing zero as the missing were presumed dead.” Until the Last Man Comes Home, 211. On debates within the league and some members’ early opposition to plans to bury an Unknown Soldier for the Vietnam War, see Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, 237–39.
22. Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory, 147.
23. Ann Mills-Griffiths, interview with author, November 17, 2017. Mills-Griffiths specifies the objection to “missing men” identified as killed in action, but it is worth noting that not all the dead were men. There are eight women, all nurses, listed on the Wall; all eight are accounted for. On women’s military service in Vietnam and their presence as civilian contractors, see Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
24. Ann Mills-Griffiths, interview with author, November 17, 2017.
25. Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory, 147.
26. Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 2. Hass sees the “gifts Americans bring to the Wall as part of a continuing public negotiation about patriotism and nationalism.” Carried to the Wall, 3. While such negotiations invariably take place, gifts left may also entail private reckonings and intimate gestures of sociality between the living and dead apart from, or at least not exclusively defined by, patriotic or national sensibilities.
27. Deanna Klenda, interview with author, June 21, 2017.
28. Dean Klenda’s REFNO was 0147, meaning that his was the 147th MIA / KIA / BNR case of the war.
29. Roy Wenzl, “A Sister’s Efforts to Find Her Missing Brother Finally Pay Off,” The Wichita Eagle, September 9, 2016, http://
30. Ashley M. Wright, “Airman Laid to Rest after Being Shot Down in 1965,” Twenty-Second Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs, Eighteenth Air Force, September 20, 2016, http://
31. Tom Holland, email to author, March 28, 2018.
32. Maya Lin, Address before the Veterans Day Ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
33. Bob “Hogman” Thompson, interview with author, July 24, 2017. In contrast to WWII veterans, who came home together after two-year periods, with “virtually the whole generation” having served in the conflict, “the men who returned from Vietnam drifted home in isolation, one at a time.… Old friends from the neighborhood who had gone to Vietnam might well have moved or never returned.” Appy, Working-Class War, 308.
34. G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 186.
35. Wisconsin Public Television, “The Origins of LZ Lambeau,” YouTube video, 14:10, June 9, 2011, https://
36. LZ Lambeau was sponsored by the state’s Department of Veterans Affairs, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Wisconsin Public Television.
37. Michael Messner argues that this kind of “manly silence” reflects “an all-too-common tendency for veterans to stuff inside and cordon off their memories of war,” which robs them of “emotional and moral healing” and deprives future generations the opportunity to hear the voices of veterans, including those who testify to the “inglorious realities of war.” Guys Like Me: Five Wars, Five Veterans for Peace (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), xvii.
38. Eliza Decorah, “LZ Lambeau: Long Overdue but Never Too Late,” Hocak Worak 24, no. 10, May 28, 2010, 1.
39. The Fond du Lac Band is part of the Lake Superior Band of Minnesota Chippewa.
40. The “born storyteller,” Jim Northrup died on August 1, 2016, in Sawyer, Minnesota. Sam Robert, “Jim Northrup, Vietnam Veteran Who Wrote About Reservation Life, Dies at 73,” New York Times, August 3, 2016, https://
41. Wisconsin Public Television, “LZ Lambeau: Jim Northrup,” YouTube video, 6:55, August 2, 2016, https://
42. Jim Northrup, Walking the Rez Road (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2013), 9.
43. On the psychological and cultural responses to memories of combat among Native American veterans and challenges they faced in seeking treatment at the Department of Veterans Affairs, see O’Nell, “ ‘Coming Home’ among Northern Plains Vietnam Veterans,” 441–65.
44. Mary Defoe, letter shared with the author, dated August 22, 2015.
1. Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency, New Releases, “Funeral Announcement For Marines Killed During Vietnam War (House, J., Killen, J., Runnels, G.),” September 21, 2018, https://
2. US Department of Defense, FY2019 Defense Budget, “Videos: End of a Mournful Tale,” accessed January 29, 2019, https://
1. The building was named after decorated World War II veteran and Medal of Honor recipient Daniel Inouye, who served in the US Senate, representing his home state of Hawaii from 1963 until his death in 2012. Formerly the Defense Prisoner of War / Missing Personnel Office, DPAA East is headquartered in Crystal City, Virginia.
2. Following the fiscal year calendar, identifications are tracked October 1 through September 30; thus, April 2018 is almost three-quarters into the year. In the end, DPAA accounted for a total of 203 individuals for FY2018, including ten from the Vietnam War.
3. The final quarter push, especially in September, reflects the annual cycle (and episodic delays during the winter) that forces a catch-up beginning in spring and running through the end of the final quarter. John Byrd, email to the author, January 11, 2018.
4. “In FY 2017, DPAA accounted for 183 missing personnel (131-WWII, 42-Korean War, 10-Vietnam War). Additionally, we individually identified the remains of 18 personnel who were previously accounted for in a group (12-WWII, 6-Vietnam War), bringing DPAA’s identification total for FY 2017 to 201.” Families / VSO / MSO and Partners DPAA Quarterly In Person / Teleconference Update Notes, October 6, 2017, Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency, http://
The 2018 Inspector General Report notes that “DPAA’s operational budget estimates for FYs 2017 and 2018 were heavily weighted toward missions in Southeast Asia (related to the Vietnam War), a conflict with just over 1,600 (2 percent) of more than 83,000 total unaccounted-for service members. Collectively, Southeast Asia represented 48 percent (90 of 187) of the number of planned missions for FYs 2017 and 2018, and nearly 70 percent ($70.2 million of $101.8 million) of the total mission budget for those 2 years.” Inspector General, US Department of Defense, Report No. DODIG-2018-138, “DoD’s Organizational Changes to the Past Conflict Personnel Accounting Community,” July 18, 2018, https://
5. The first group (commingled) disinterment project, that of the unknowns from the USS Oklahoma, was begun in 2015. After undergoing initial accession and dental analysis at DPAA’s Hawaii facility, the remains were transported to DPAA’s satellite laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, for anthropological examination and DNA sampling. Katherine Dodd, “USS Oklahoma Disinterments Complete,” Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency, November 9 and 10, 2015, http://
6. Jay Price, “Having Changed America, The League Of POW / MIA Families Fades,” NPR, October 19, 2017, https://
7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (1983; repr., New York: Verso, 2006), 7.
8. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 26.
9. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 10.
10. US Department of Defense, News Transcript, Press Briefing, Tuesday, June 30, 1998, http://
11. There are two service members missing from Desert Storm (January 17, 1991–February 28, 1991) in the First Gulf War, and the Department of Defense “continues to pursue the fullest possible accounting of one serviceman lost in 1986 during Operation El Dorado Canyon in Libya.” Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency, “Conflicts: Iraq Theater & Other Conflicts,” accessed December 19, 2018, http://
12. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 50.