Founded after the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command and the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office were folded into a single agency, the Defense P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Agency (D.P.A.A.) is an incredibly important part of the United States military. They’re responsible for the locating and identification of the remains of soldiers who were deemed to be Missing in Action or who died as prisoners of war.
Sometimes, the task of identifying and repatriating remains can be conducted with immediacy. In other cases, the realities of war–that a body can be torn asunder, rendering it near unidentifiable–or discovering the remains of skeletal remains of a soldier decades after they died, can slow this process down. In such cases, forensic experts are brought in to assist in identifying the dead.
This past August, the North Korean government allowed the U.S. military to repatriate 55 coffins full of the mixed skeletal remains of American soldiers who died in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. That nothing’s left of these soldiers but bones would make identifying them difficult enough. When the bones are mixed in with one another? That’s a puzzle that few people are qualified to deal with. Dr. Paul Emanovsky is one of those few. He’s a forensic anthropologist that’s worked to bring closure to the lives of the loved ones of missing military personnel since 2002. If you’re interested in a fascinating, morbid read, the New York Times recently published an interview with Dr. Emanovsky, where he talks about his work and the recovery projects that the D.P.A.A. are currently involved in.
From The New York Times:
When we make an identification, we tell the families that it’s more likely that additional portions of their loved one will be found. They decide whether they want to wait for the additional portions before they take the remains for their final disposition. They can say, “We don’t want to know anything more about that” and ask that we give them what we can already identify now for burial.
It’s grisly, gripping stuff.
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