Not forgotten

At Pearl Harbor, honoring the dead doesn’t cease

In some ways, the smoke hasn’t cleared. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor 76 years ago today should remain fresh in America’s mind, partly because the military is still identifying and reburying some of the 2,400 who perished.

Only Wednesday, the recently identified remains of Navy Radioman 3rd Class Howard W. Bean, 27, of Everett, Mass., were to be laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. He served aboard the USS Oklahoma, which capsized and sank after being hit with Japanese torpedoes, and his remains had been buried with those of unidentified shipmates at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

In 2003 and 2015, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency exhumed caskets containing nearly 400 sets of unknown remains from the Oklahoma and began the painstaking process of trying to identify them with dental records, DNA and circumstantial evidence — tools and knowledge developed long after World War II. On Friday, DPAA announced its 100th identification, an important milestone. It has not publicly named that serviceman pending notification of his family.

The identifications have been coming at a rapid clip in recent months. On Dec. 16, Seaman 2nd Class George J. Wilcox, 19, too young to have had a family of his own, will be buried near his father in Evansville, Ind. Last month, Steward’s Mate 1st Class Cyril I. Dusset, 21, was buried in Southeast Louisiana Veterans Cemetery, and Pvt. Vernon P. “Buck” Keaton, 18, part of a group of Marines assigned to the Oklahoma, was laid to rest beside his parents in Lula, Okla., according to news reports.

So much time has passed since the attack on nearly 20 ships at Pearl Harbor that some of the servicemen are being returned to families who know virtually nothing about them. “My dad spoke of him very little,” Seaman Wilcox’s nephew, David Wilcox, told the Courier & Press of Evansville. “All we knew was he died in Pearl Harbor.” Task & Purpose, a website devoted to military and veterans issues, reported that DPAA tracked down a relative of Pvt. Keaton through ancestry.com and that she provided DNA for comparison even though she knew little about him except that he was her mother’s cousin.

By 2020, DPAA hopes to have identified 80 percent of Oklahoma’s unknown dead. But this represents one part of the agency’s work. It’s responsible for helping to identify all missing service members, including those lost on other ships and on the ground at Pearl Harbor, those from other WWII battle sites and those from other wars.

During wartime, military officers have the grim task of notifying family members of a loved one’s death. Now, thanks to technology, DPAA is able to provide families with long-awaited answers about the missing.

This is a day to remember not only those killed at Pearl Harbor but also the family members left behind, thousands of whom never got to bury their loved ones and went to their own deaths without closure.