Lab Works to Unravel Puzzle of Soldier’s ID

Last month, yet another flag-draped metal box was ceremoniously borne through the back doors of the Central Identification Laboratory by four solemn soldiers.

Since then, scientists have given the new arrival their customary attention -- a kind of intense scrutiny seldom given to the living.

They have weighed and measured and X-rayed the mummified remains of the man who was found Oct. 16 in a glacier in the Sierra Nevada.

If he was one of four young airmen whose World War II training plane crashed nearby, he would have been encased in ice for nearly 63 years.

At the lab, near Pearl Harbor, investigators have combed through every fiber of his tattered green pants, green underwear and green cable-knit sweater, looking for a name, for laundry marks, for sizes that would indicate height and weight.

They have puzzled over high-tech ways to make out a severely corroded metal name tag that was still pinned over his heart, figuring it might have belonged to one of the men on the ill-fated 1942 flight.

They have conferred with a rare-manuscript expert at the University of Hawaii, who plans to freeze-dry the man’s tiny red address book and tease open congealed pages that may be blank -- or may yield a wealth of clues to the man’s identity.

“We go through thousands of items,” said Robert Mann, deputy director of the lab, who is charged with identifying the remains of all American troops missing in action. “We take buttons and boots and grommets and lighters, and watches that stopped at the moment of impact. It all matters.”

The well-preserved remains from California’s Mt. Mendel are just another entry on the lab’s long list of active cases.

The oldest is a soldier from the War of 1812. There also are two Civil War sailors found three years ago in the wreckage of the naval warship Monitor; one of them, scientists theorize, was a pipe smoker in his 40s who was accustomed to heavy labor.

They are brought here from around the world, sometimes bone by bone.

The pilot who couldn’t make it over the Himalayas in World War II is flown from Tibet. The GI who disappeared in a blood-soaked German forest, the fighter jock who plunged into a Vietnamese rice paddy, the prisoners excavated from a mass grave in Korea -- America’s lost who now are found wind up here.

Some are discovered by local residents tilling a field or clearing a forest. Others are found by teams from the lab and its parent agency, the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command.

Each year, at least five expeditions are mounted to old battlegrounds and suspected crash sites, from Poland to Palau. Anthropologists, linguists and explosives experts travel to remote areas, interviewing locals and scouring the countryside for traces of missing American troops.

The fragments they find end up back at the lab.

In a large white room, scientists pore over 21 tables neatly arrayed with browning bones, patches of skull, shards of jaw -- all laid out head to toe, known only by the numbers they have been assigned.

When they are carried in, all are unknown soldiers. If they leave -- and some 1,100 unknowns are still shelved in boxes within the lab’s vault -- they are returned to their families and, often, buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Most other countries do not have similar operations, according to command officials. The agency operates on a budget of about $46 million annually. And about 100 service members are identified each year.

“It’s a promise made to every person in uniform: We leave no comrades behind,” said Maj. Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for the lab. “I don’t know why it’s uniquely American. Maybe it’s because we’re a relatively new country and don’t have many centuries of foreign battles behind us. But, to me, it makes absolute sense.”

The U.S. effort has not always enjoyed either success or support. At a congressional hearing in 1986, top forensic anthropologists blasted the lab for slipshod methods, contending that there was no scientific basis for identifying 13 airmen missing in Laos from bone chips no bigger than a quarter.

Under pressure from families, the lab, accused of “voodoo forensics,” was forced to rescind its conclusion in two of those cases.

The negative publicity helped spur a turnaround, said Tom Holland, the lab’s current director. The staff was expanded, and anthropologists skilled in investigative work replaced a mortician and a handful of assistants. With 31 forensic anthropologists and three forensic dentists, the lab today claims to be the largest facility of its kind in the world.

As if to underscore the credentials of the staff, dozens of their scholarly papers have been posted on a bulletin board: “Last Meals: Recovering Abdominal Contents from Skeletonized Remains”; “Radiographic Examination of Chinese Foot binding”; “On Morning Sickness and the Neolithic Revolution.”

Some of their most important research takes place out in the field, where the job gets harder with each passing year.

After decades, crash sites can be stripped of anything meaningful, said Mann, a slight man with a trim, gray beard who has made more than 75 forays into Southeast Asia.

“In Vietnam, I saw a man smoking a pipe made from a hydraulic fixture,” he said. “I found a villager who made machetes from a propeller he had stashed under his house. I saw a little boy in Papua New Guinea wearing a set of dog tags.”

In 2002, an American tourist purchased 1,440 dog tags from street vendors in Hue, Vietnam. Over the last few years, the lab determined their authenticity through extensive testing and has located more than 50 veterans who had lost them.

In an article in Vietnam magazine, Mann and his fellow researchers wrote that the ID tags had been “misplaced, given away as souvenirs, reissued, snagged and left on barbed wire, left hanging on bedposts or at out-processing stations, removed when wounds were treated, turned in while still tied to filthy, mud-covered boots or blown off their owners’ bodies in firefights.”

Sometimes human remains discovered by locals are treated with care -- but inadvertently destroyed.

In 1988, Vietnam handed over the nearly full skeleton and tentative ID of a missing serviceman, but his bones were all but ruined for testing by chemicals used to disinfect them and a charcoal fire used to dry them out.

“Sometimes you just want to bang your head against a wall,” lab director Holland said.

Finding evidence that is generations old can be a grindingly slow job. The lab relies heavily on dental records, but many have been destroyed.

The man trapped in the glacier had a full set of teeth, but no government dental records have been found for the four airmen in the 1942 crash. In fact, researchers have found no personnel files at all for one of the men aboard.

The nameless airman was a young, white male of average height. He carried a comb, a tiny tube of what may have been lip balm and 45 cents -- four dimes and five pennies, all minted no later than 1942.

His parachute, gingerly laid out like a silk jellyfish in a lab parking lot, bears a manufacturer’s stamp from November 1941.

The corroded name tag might prove valuable -- but even when remains arrive with what seems to be full identification, the lab steers clear of quick conclusions.

After mushroom hunters in the hills near Misawa, Japan, came upon the remains of a U.S. pilot strapped to his ejection seat, investigators discovered an ID card tucked between the seat cushions.

“We thought it was a eureka moment,” recalled Holland, “until we found out that the man on the ID card was alive and well and living in Ohio.”

The man, an aircraft mechanic, believes his ID might have slipped from his pocket when he was working on the doomed plane.

The lab has DNA tests performed in about half of its cases, and, according to Holland, will do so on the body from the Sierra. The testing, now done by government researchers in Maryland, only started in the early 1990s.

Unfortunately, nuclear DNA -- the kind required for virtually airtight identifications -- breaks down quickly in old bones. That means scientists generally have to settle for mitochondrial DNA, which can rule out erroneous IDs but can’t often pinpoint the correct one.

In some cases, the lab has had genealogists develop extensive family trees in order to locate relatives -- only those on the mother’s side are eligible -- who might provide a match.

Officials have even gotten court permission to open adoption records in their search.

In one case, scientists thought they were at an impasse because a man’s adoption records were unavailable.

His widow, though, provided the clue that clinched the case. She remembered her husband’s childhood scrapbook. And she remembered the sealed envelope inside marked “First Haircut.”

Tearing it open, she gave the lab all that was needed for scientific proof of the loss she knew all too well: A lock of her husband’s hair.