Forensics, Archaeology Techniques Used in MIA Search

James Card in Daegu, South Korea
for National Geographic News

November 17, 2006

During his first-ever visit to Vietnam, U.S. President George W. Bush met this week with the country's leaders to discuss how lessons learned during the Vietnam War could be applied to the current conflict in Iraq.

One of the many topics under discussion was how U.S. and Vietnamese officials could better cooperate on retrieving information about the approximately 1,300 military personnel who are still considered missing in action (MIA) after the war ended in 1975.

As part of this effort, President Bush's agenda included a visit with a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).

JPAC teams work at sites around the world, searching for clues about the fates of the nearly 88,000 U.S. soldiers who have been listed as MIA since the end of World War II.

JPAC's motto is "Until they are home," and it is responsible for recovering the remains of MIA soldiers, whether they died during the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania or the early 1990s Gulf War in the Middle East.

(Related news: "Clues Emerge About Crewmen of Civil War-Era Wreck" [April 4, 2005].)

Tough Decisions

JPAC, based at Hickam Air Force Base in Oahu, Hawaii, has 18 teams working in rotation, opening and closing 70 to 90 sites a year.

This summer a JPAC team endured the sweltering humidity of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to recover the remains of soldiers lost during the Korean War, which officially lasted from 1950 to 1953.

(See photos of the Korean DMZ from National Geographic Magazine.)

Of the 54,000 U.S. soldiers reported missing during the Korean War, the death, capture, or whereabouts of 8,142 soldiers are still unknown.

This year's expedition "was our first joint mission side-by-side with the Korean military," said JPAC member and Marine Corps Captain Michael Craighead.

"They provided us with lots of help and with logistics. We couldn't have asked for a better mission."

The team was accompanied by a Korean War veteran, an eyewitness to a half-century-old battle who hoped to find the remains of a war buddy who had gone MIA.

Forensic anthropologist John Byrd, a North Carolina native who joined JPAC as a civilian expert in 1998, led the Korea DMZ mission.

Byrd's first major decision as team leader is whether to open a site, a call he will not make unless he feels sure the team can excavate it completely.

In one case, Byrd recalls needing to use a grader—a large tractor-like vehicle—to scrape the muddy topsoil from a rice paddy the team wanted to excavate.

The grader "might seem too obtuse and heavy, but [the site] was unmanageable," Byrd said. Calling in specialty equipment is "a necessary evil if the circumstance requires it."

Similarly, the team leader must determine when to call a site closed.

This is an all-or-nothing decision: Due to budget and resource issues, once a site is closed by JPAC, the team will not be coming back, so Byrd must make sure that every inch of the site is exhausted.

The Marine Corps' Craighead volunteered to be assigned to JPAC in July 2004 to help assess possible sites from a military perspective.

With a background in logistics, he handles the overall management of the recovery mission and serves as a liaison between the field team and the Hawaii headquarters.

All JPAC teams also have an ordnance technician equipped with metal detectors, because sites, such as the Korean DMZ, are laden with many unexploded bombs and forgotten land mines.

High-Tech Plotting

Once a site is opened, it is treated like a crime scene, albeit one that can be decades or even hundreds of years old, Byrd says.

Establishing spatial control, a principle in crime scene investigation and archaeological fieldwork, is the team's first priority. The land must be plotted into a grid and given coordinates to allow for a thorough search.

To do this, the team uses an advanced measuring instrument called the Sokkia Total Station, which plots grid coordinates, records distance, and computes angles of elevation on hillsides.

"You don't even have to think," Byrd said. The captured data is then entered into Surfer, a 3-D mapping program run on laptop computers.

"Before we had to use trigonometry, plot by pencil and connect the dots, and trace it over vellum paper," Byrd said.

"I remember walking around campus with my map tubes. It would take days to generate a map. Now [with this technology] it takes minutes to generate a [topographic] map."

After a site is plotted, the excavation begins. If a piece of evidence is found, its grid location is noted to create context if the site is reconstructed later to determine how a soldier found there died.

Everyone on the dig team is trained to spot bone fragments and fabrics. When a piece of evidence is detected, the workers stop digging immediately and switch to trowels, brushes, and dental picks.

Loose soil is dumped into buckets or wheelbarrows and hauled to the screening area, where dirt is sifted through quarter-inch (0.64 centimeter) mesh screens to find smaller particles.

When a bone fragment is discovered there is a buzz at the site, at least until Byrd declares it to be part of a pig, dog, cow, or chicken.

"You wouldn't believe how many animal bones are out there until you get out on one of these sites," he said.

Small Success

This summer's recovery effort didn't turn up the veteran's missing war buddy or any other lost soldiers, but it did eliminate places to search during future missions.

On missions where human remains are found in Korea, there is a repatriation ceremony by U.S., South Korean, and United Nations forces in full military dress.

The remains are then flown to the Hawaii headquarters for further examination at the Central Identification Laboratory, one of the largest forensic labs in the United States, before surviving family members are notified.

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