Long after they died, military sees surge in identifications

Nearly 77 years after repeated torpedo strikes tore into the USS Oklahoma, killing hundreds of sailors and Marines, Carrie Brown leaned over the remains of a serviceman laid out on a table in her lab and was surprised the bones still smelled of burning oil from that horrific day at Pearl Harbor.

It was a visceral reminder of the catastrophic attack that pulled the United States into World War II, and it added an intimacy to the painstaking work Brown and hundreds of others are now doing to greatly increase the number of lost American servicemen who have been identified.

It's a monumental mission that combines science, history and intuition, and it's one Brown and her colleagues have recently been completing at ramped-up speed, with identifications expected to reach 200 annually, more than triple the figures from recent years.

"There are families still carrying the torch," said Brown, a forensic anthropologist with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's lab near Omaha, Nebraska. "It's just as important now as it was 77 years ago."
"My grandmother was very sad about it. She just wanted to know what happened, and she never knew."
Elmore was reported missing in action in December 1950 after an intense battle at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea and as deceased in 1953, but his great-niece April Speck said even decades later, her family would tell stories of "Joe going off to war and never coming home."
"There were people standing out with their signs and there were retired soldiers in their uniforms saluting, and then we get into Albany and it like was a sea of people with all the American flags," she recalled. "The county did an awesome job of showing respect."
"This work is very different from what most historians do," said Ian Spurgeon, an agency historian in Washington. "This is detective history."