Lab aims to give military families a measure of peace

HONOLULU» A Christmas card arrives every December in Bill Belcher’s mailbox, sent by the daughter of a 1940s fighter pilot he unearthed in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.

The excavation was 20 years ago. But the woman’s gratitude for her father’s repatriated remains hasn’t diminished with time.

Nor has Belcher’s focus. The son of a Korean War and Vietnam War veteran, he manages a team of forensic anthropologists and dentists, medical examiners and historians with a daunting mission — to find and identify U.S. service members from conflicts dating to World War II.

“I grew up with the idea that we might see that black car come in and tell us that Dad was gone,” said Belcher, who is deputy director of the Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency’s $80 million forensic laboratory here. “And so, in the back of my mind, whenever I’m doing this work, I think, ‘This could be my father.’ ”

The lab and its mission are again in the spotlight. In an unusual collision of geopolitics and humanitarianism, North Korea recently handed over what could be the remains of more than 50 American service members still missing from the Korean War.

The transfer was the first in more than a decade, and DPAA Director Kelly McKeague called it a “confidence building, relationshipenhancing overture” that could someday allow the agency to resume its recovery efforts in that country.

For now, the most difficult work is taking place on 70 exam tables in the sterile, harshly lighted facility at Joint Base Pearl HarborHickam, where staffers probe and test fragments of past lives.

They puzzle over the abstract clues, trying to match a tooth filling with a missing soldier’s dental record or a clavicle bone with the chest Xray of a serviceman who once had a tuberculosis screening.

Even at the world’s preeminent forensic anthropology facility, progress is slow; an individual case can take from weeks to a decade. This year, 162 service men have been identified. But nearly 1,400 cases are pending — with more than 500 others listed as inactive because the clues ran out before an identification could be made.

The lab’s tradition dictates that bones be sorted, measured and displayed on tables in the shape of a skeleton, head positioned toward the room’s perimeter. If these bones could jolt to life, or so goes the thinking, the first thing they would see upon sitting up is the American flag hanging at the center.

“Every one of these peo ple we’re working on is a hero — I truly believe that,” Belcher said as he walked through the 3yearold lab, where every bone is assigned an identification number until it gets matched to a name. “Nobody really takes priority above anybody else.”