Pentagon’s Identification of the Fallen Questioned

It’s a wrenching day when somber officers in crisp suits and uniforms knock on the door of a soldier’s family, but Sgt. Glenn Miller’s sisters were actually looking forward to the visit.

Thirty-seven years after their beloved brother, a Green Beret, was last seen in battle in Vietnam, they were ready for the truth, for closure.

They set out some drinks and snacks and turned on the video camera to record this dramatic family story. But the story they recorded during the visit in May was not one of closure.

The “identification” that the military said it had made left them disappointed, they said, because it was based on circumstantial evidence.

For families like Miller’s, there is some inherent comfort in a fragment of bone, fingernail or skin. For decades, using dental and medical records and more recently DNA technology for verification, the Pentagon has been bringing that comfort to those who have lost loved ones in conflicts from World War II to the war in Iraq.

But the Associated Press has found that one-tenth of official identifications lack any biological evidence.

Miller’s case was one of these. For his sisters, that realization was hard.

Army mortician Johnny Johnson had flown across the country for this momentous day. He was joined by Army Maj. Anthony Koopman, a local college ROTC director who was assigned to be the casualty assistance officer.

Johnson opened an inch-thick book about Miller’s case and began a dignified presentation on the military’s proud practice of pursuing remains, no matter how old. He described an investigation in the 1990s that led archeologists to a battlefield near the Laos border.

“They excavated the hill,” he said on the sisters’ video, which was viewed by AP. “Out of that excavation site the remains that they were able to identify through dental and mitochondrial DNA was, first of all, it was Sgt. Glenn Miller.”

He went on to name 11 Marines who also reportedly died in the battle in May 1968.

Christy Jackman wiped sweat from her forehead as he spoke. Her sister, Marion Alschuler, sipped a cool drink, her hands fidgeting with the bottle. Christy’s daughter, Caroline, stroked a cat as she remembered her handsome uncle. Then, quietly at first but soon more aggressively, they began to ask questions.

“What did you find of Glenn specifically?” they asked. “A bone? A tooth? A fragment?”

Johnson asked for patience, and asked them to listen to “the authenticated, official government version,” but they pressed him to jump ahead.

“Was he burned?” they asked.

Johnson tried again, shifting the subject to a burial of the group remains that would be held in Arlington.

“And what are they?” interjected one sister.

“But what’s in there?” asked another.

“If you’ll hold your questions,” Johnson begged, “I will get to it. It’s just a matter of me explaining to you cut-and-dry.”

But the women, their voices rising, tears welling in their eyes, didn’t hold back.

Eventually Johnson dropped his even tone and blurted: “We didn’t find anything for Glenn! We have no remains for Glenn! We have a bunch of remains!”

There was a moment of silence.

“You don’t have any remains at all?” asked Jackman.

“No. No remains,” he said.

“Then how do you know he’s there?” she asked.

Johnson explained that Miller was reportedly last seen at the site. It was reasonable, he said, to assume that some of his tissue was mixed among the unidentifiable remains at the site.

“I don’t like that at all. There’s no remains and we’re supposed to buy that?” Jackman said.

“What I’m saying is, indulge me,” Johnson said.

This request, to trust that an identification was made through circumstantial rather than biological evidence, is one the Defense Department has made repeatedly.

Of the 1,260 servicemen declared recovered and identified since 1973, at least 10% had no distinctly verified remains, said Dr. Thomas Holland, scientific director of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii.

Instead, the investigators used testimony, archival documents and such evidence as a piece of uniform or an identification tag to tie the individual to the remains. In many cases, a handful of commingled remains -- which may not actually contain parts of the identified serviceman -- are buried under a group gravestone, Holland said.

It’s not unusual for a coffin to be nearly empty. Military officials usually include a new, decorated military uniform representing the highest-ranking soldier in the group.

Defenders of circumstantial-evidence IDs offer an analogy: If an airliner goes down with 300 passengers, and authorities can only individually identify half of them, isn’t it reasonable to believe that the remaining bones and fragments contain parts of the others?

But in battle, it’s not always clear where everyone is. And when scientists attempt to reconstruct events that took place decades earlier, facts can become even more obscure.

In Miller’s case, a forensic report delivered to his sisters says of the remains being buried under his name: “These remains may reasonably represent any or all of the missing 12 American servicemen as well as any of the other non-U.S. personnel known or presumed to have died on Little Ngok Tavak Hill.”

The report was signed by Holland, who said in a phone interview from Hawaii that, although “everybody is unhappy with group remains,” his office is clear about the source of identifications.

“They haven’t been misled by any report that comes out of this office. If there is a disconnect, that’s from something that happens further down the line,” he said.

Larry Greer, spokesman for the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office in Washington, D.C., said, “No one is trying to mislead any family member on anything.” Next of kin are briefed at length and in detail, he said.

Several times each month, Greer issues a news release about recovered remains that says, “Servicemen identified.”

“That word ‘identified’ is my word,” Greer said, “because it’s the only word I know of that will convey the fact that the government and the scientists have done everything they can to finalize the case, to account for the individual. I could say, sure, ‘These five were identified and these seven were accounted for,’ but going into an explanation of that would be really, really cumbersome.”

Not all family members agree.

“What they don’t understand is that families just want to know what happened, they don’t want to be lied to. ... If they [military investigators] don’t know, just tell us that,” said William Matthes of Port Charlotte, Fla., whose brother, Air Force Maj. Peter Matthes, disappeared in Vietnam after an airplane crash in 1969.

Despite Matthes’ written objections to the Secretary of the Air Force, a coffin bearing the names of his brother and seven other crew members was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 1995 as group remains.

“It’s a national disgrace. They have said time and time again we will leave nobody behind, but they do,” he said.

John Matejov, a retired Marine, is still searching for his brother, Air Force Sgt. Joseph Matejov, who was shot down over Laos a week after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords.

In 1993, the military recovered 30 bone fragments from the crash site. Three years later, the Defense Department buried a casket at Arlington National Cemetery that it said included the remains of Sgt. Joseph Matejov and six others, none of whom had been individually identified.

John Matejov doesn’t believe his brother’s bones are in that casket. He has been researching the incident, and says he has evidence that his brother didn’t die in the plane crash. “I honestly believe that the possibility exists that my brother is alive,” he said.

About 88,000 Americans are still missing from conflicts, including:

* 78,000 from World War II;

* 8,100 from the Korean War;

* 1,800 from the Vietnam War;

* 125 from aircraft shot down in Cold War spy-related incidents.

One serviceman, Capt. Michael “Scott” Speicher, is still officially considered “missing/captured” from the Persian Gulf War. The fighter pilot was shot down over Iraq in January 1991. Earlier this month, a Navy inquiry concluded that “elements of the former Iraqi regime know the whereabouts of Capt. Speicher,” although it is not known whether he is dead or alive.

These days, when soldiers die in Iraq, military officials are usually able to recover and individually identify remains. But not always: In August, for example, the remains of an Iraqi pilot and four U.S. airmen who died in an Iraqi air force crash were buried together at Arlington National Cemetery. Separate funerals had been held earlier.

Several advocacy groups press the government to adequately recover and identify remains of soldiers lost in conflict.

“Group burials provide a public scorecard, reducing the number of unaccounted-for servicemen,” said Dolores Alfond, who heads the Bellevue, Wash.-based National Alliance of Families. “There is a grave and a headstone; the only thing missing is the man or men whose name appears on that headstone.”

But Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the Arlington, Va.-based National League of POW/MIA Families, said that it was “pie in the sky” to expect an individual identification decades after the war, and that many families had been thankful for at least being part of a group identification.

Griffiths, whose brother never returned from the Vietnam War, said she would be grateful for any identification.

Charlotte Davis, a Chicago actress whose brother died in a World War II plane crash, didn’t question the Defense Department’s identification of her brother last year, even though “they didn’t find his DNA, or anything of him at all.”

Investigators found the plane he died in, and identified, with DNA, the remains of three of the other men aboard the bomber, she said.

“It’s hard when you have such hope that something will be found,” she said. “But I felt that he was being really honored even though he wasn’t there.”

Individual families have challenged the identifications, and one family even had a name taken off a gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery.

Glenn Miller’s sisters were given the option of appealing the identification, which entails hiring an attorney and going to a hearing.

Instead, they accepted the Defense Department’s offer to fly them across the country to attend the burial ceremony of their brother at Arlington National Cemetery.

Said Jackman: “We want to honor him in any way we can.”