Never Forgotten: Accounting for American MIAs

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The endless line of soil-filled buckets is passed from hand to hand in the energy-sapping 105-degree heat, then dumped onto thin-meshed screens. From time to time the screens turn up a bone chip, a boot eyelet or some fragmental clue about what happened to fellow servicemen in a war now 25 years and more in the past. No other nation in history has ever made such an effort to repatriate the remains of men lost in war.

The scenario is repeated nearly a dozen times each year in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The Americans involved, military and civilian personnel from several commands, are under the operational control of Joint Task Force–Full Accounting (JTF-FA), the organization created in 1992 and assigned responsibility for determining the fate of nearly 2,000 American military personnel still listed as unaccounted for from the Vietnam War.

JTF-FA itself is the analytical, investigative and negotiating arm of the mission. Its personnel compile dossiers on each person missing in action. They then work with host country governments to schedule investigation and recovery operations, locate and interview witnesses, and provide in-country logistical support to all field operations. JTF-FA operates three subordinate detachments in Southeast Asia. Detachment 1 in Bangkok conducts operations in Cambodia and also provides logistical support for all regional operations. Detachment 2 is in Hanoi [Colonel Haseman described Detachment 2 operations in the October 1996 issue of Vietnam] and Detachment 3 is in Vientiane, Laos. Bob Gahagan is one of many men and women participating in JTF-FA’s efforts who have suffered from the Laotian heat. More formally, he is Colonel Robert Gahagan, who served as the commander of JTF-FA Detachment 3 from 1998 to May 2000. After his two years in Laos, Gahagan, an armor officer and former battalion commander, became a department director at the U.S. Army Armor School at Fort Knox. Looking back on his time with JTF-FA, he said, ‘If I had to single out one thing that makes me proud of this effort, it’s the people I work with.’

JTF-FA’s partner in this important mission is the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii (CILHI), the operations and identification arm of the team. The CILHI has the scientific expertise to locate the crash sites and supervise field search and recovery operations. After repatriation of remains, the CILHI conducts the delicate, time-consuming work of identifying them at its state-of-the-art laboratory in Hawaii. The CILHI is actively involved in cases from World War II, the Korean War and other conflicts and contingencies — but most of its effort is spent on Vietnam War cases. Once remains are recovered, the CILHI is charged with their formal identification. Only then can a missing soldier, sailor, airman or Marine be removed from the MIA roster.

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, there were 2,583 Americans unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. Since then, recovery and identification efforts have reduced that number to 1,991, as of January 11, 2001. Of those, 642 may never be resolved — notably the several hundred American airmen whose aircraft went down at sea in water too deep for recovery operations.

JTF-FA Detachment 3 in Vientiane is the smallest of the three field detachments. It consists of a lieutenant-colonel commander, a senior civilian who acts as second-in-command, one logistics NCO and two NCOs who look after administration and operations. The detachment is augmented on a rotational basis by a Lao linguist who works on archival research. Also on hand are several Laotian foreign service nationals.

Detachment 3 was formed in 1992. Its personnel have their hands full. The detachment plans and coordinates all joint Lao–U.S. investigations and excavation operations, also coordinating closely with the Lao government on Laotian unilateral investigations. It strives to facilitate trilateral investigations in which U.S., Laotian and Vietnamese representatives work together to solve cases that cross national borders. Like its counterparts in Vietnam and Bangkok, the detachment investigates reports of live sightings, interviews walk-in witnesses, conducts an oral history program jointly with its host country officials and conducts joint archival research with military and civilian government offices.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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