 You have from the Department of New York State, she's out there working hard, Diane Pernum, the Vietnam Arab Veteran. From the Department of Massachusetts, we have Frank Whitton, our past Department Commander, of course, recent, and a Vietnam Navy sub-premier, and from the Department of Pennsylvania, Wayne Strauss, the Vietnam Veteran, and here at the panel at the table to my right, we have Dr. Veronica Keys, she's with the DPAA in Hawaii, she's going to have remarks for us later, and next to her is the Principal Director of DPAA from something English, and we're very glad to have her back again this year. I think we're going to start with the Pledge, please follow. Please all rise. Joining me in the Pledge of Allegiance, can't salute. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Two. And we're going to have Diane Pernum with a prayer. Please remain seated. Lord, please bless everyone here today as we gather to address the actions and the results of retrieving our missing and action soldiers as we have vowed to never leave a veteran behind. We ask you to bless all members and loved ones that are still waiting for the return of their soldiers. Continue to guide and bless the DPAA, and all those that continue to search, retrieve, and identify all the remains of the soldiers that are returned to us. So the family members and loved ones can lay their soldiers to rest alongside all other fellow soldiers and heroes. For the family members, provide solace in the knowing that the DPAA and the DAV will not rest until all our soldiers are returned. We ask this in your name, amen. Amen. Amen. And Lord, you may be seated. At this time, Wayne Stratus will read our DAV mission statement. We give it to a keeping of the most possible accounting for the United States personnel still held captive missing or unaccounted for all of our nation's wars, which includes bringing the remains of our fallen comrades home, repatriating and living in the American queue for the United States POWs. Our mission is to carry forward by demanding the immediate release of any American POW and obtaining the most up-to-date information and full accountability of those that remain in my aid. Preserving the legacy and memory of former, current, and future POWs and those missing in action to ensure that their inhumane experiences are calculated as part of the cost of war and are being part of the national consciousness. Creating awareness of the POW-MIA experience to include its lasting effects on families with those held captive or who will remain unaccounted for it. Engaging in local activities such as meetings, and ceremonies relative to the POW-MIA concerns, bringing awareness to their understanding and knowledge to all of us. Increasing awareness and responsiveness surrounding POW-MIA accountability and recovery. Supporting efforts to provide adequate resources for POW-MIA initiatives. Encouraging the VA to meet departments and chapters to support those POW-MIA. Okay, that's submission statement. We try to live up to that. At this time, I want to tell you some accomplishments of this POW-MIA committee this year. We have submitted five resolutions that had been previously submitted and we also wrote a brand new resolution regarding the POW-MIA issue. We also made two suggestions for changes to the ritual and so what we've heard so far is they have been well received. We think that at every DAV chapter meeting and department meeting, there should be at least some point in the meeting when the question is asked, are there any former POW that was in the room? And if there are, they should be recognized for the sacrifices they had to endure and the brutality and inhumanity they had to suffer. And so that's one suggestion we did. We also suggest that there should be a, at every meeting, there should be a vacant chair with a POW flag dragged over it so that we try to remember and everybody is asked to remember that the POWs that are not here with us. I would also like to, at this time, the one person on our committee I feel will be recognized, Justin Hart is our advisor. And Shane Learman, Justin's in the back and we thank him for his hard work. Now, our committee did a lot, we accomplished a lot this year and we couldn't do it unless we had the support from National and especially the National Committee. But I must tell Mr. Dixon to come on forward and return appreciation for your support to this committee and everything we have been able to accomplish. We present to you a brand new POW flag. Thank you, Commander, we appreciate your support and the DPAA support. This is the head thing we mentioned, the principal vector of the DPAA. I'm going to spare some to win, Rush. Back away from the mic. Close to the mic. There. Okay, we'll try that. The DPAA has or sold or loaded a wonderful relationship with the DPAA and the DPAA forces the Defense Department's POW-MIA Accounting Agency. They're the ones that are responsible for finding them, getting them, bringing them home. And we look constantly at the work they do and the successes they have. And third something, Windrush is the director, principal director of that organization. I don't know if I know this, but at this time I would ask our National Commander to come up with something here. We, like I said, we've had a wonderful relationship with the DPAA and do you know that last year during this seminar a year ago, at one point Fern spot the camera and said, I want to tell you something that nobody knows. She told us that we had a negotiator with North Korea and we got 28 boxes 25, I'm sorry, 25 boxes of remains from North Korea. We knew that before anybody in the country, even the media, they never, back up. But they contacted us about a month after that and I got a call from Colonel Smith of the DPAA and they had, once we got the remains of the U.N. flags that they came with and they put U.S. flags on every one of those 55 boxes and they won the DAP to get one of those flags and we're just now hanging up with National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. So, yes. We appreciate Fern and everything. It's really a distinct pleasure to do this. I had a lot of conversation before you left and I'll read this. It's preserving the legacy as it says, presented to Fern Sumpter Wimbush, Defense Field OWA Accounting Agency in recognition and appreciation for your continued effort, support and commitment to achieve the fullest possible accounting for United States personnel still held captive, missing or unaccounted for from all of our nation's war colleagues at home given this day, August 4th, 2019 of the Disabled American Veterans. I know you've got a busy schedule. You need to be in 10 places at once. Yeah, and I'm going to go to the next can right now. Leaders of a veteran organization to get one of my newly minted coins. You can hear her well. Project, is it better for me to talk like this or do I really need a mic? I need the mic. Welcome. Can I see a show of hands of this is your first time hearing? Okay, great. So now I know kind of where to start because I was going to skip over a lot of the basic knowledge but I'm going to have to go ahead and touch on it. So those of you who have heard this part before, please bear with me. I'll try to move through it quickly. But I also have a special treat today. So normally when I come, it's just me and my MA and we do our thing. Well, it dawned on me that, you know, we have so many talented people in DPA and it would be more interesting I think for me to bring someone who actually knows about the science of what we do. So today I brought with me Dr. Veronica Keys, who is both a doctor of archeology and a doctor of forensic anthropology. So I can only imagine what her parents, you know, thought when she said she was going to go off and study archeology and anthropology. They probably thought she would never have a job and they could feed her. But she is quite an accomplished doctor in the, not only DPA, but in her community. And she's going to also talk about, in addition to the science, she's going to talk about her experience on the ground in North Korea when she was part of the team that received the 55 boxes that I told you about last year. Alright. In 2015, then Secretary of Defense Chuck Hegel directed that the entire accounting effort be consolidated and so all of the organizations executing that mission were consolidated into a single defense agency headed by a senior executive. In 2017 we had our first real permanent director in Major General Retired Kelly McKay who took over the organization and I had the distinct pleasure of stepping down because I was serving as the director for a while and for those of you who know me well know that I was praying for a new guy to come and take over so that I could go back to doing what I do as the principal deputy director and that's all of the support. So I take care of the personnel, the budget, the information technology, plans of policy, outreach and communications, plans of partnership all the things that it takes to go, that go into deploying teams downrange. Out in Hawaii, we also have our deputy director for operations. It is a one-star flag officer. Currently we have an Admiral Price who is in Hawaii and the back team is getting ready to leave. His tour is ending. Our DDOs generally only serve about two years and then they move on and so we'll be bringing on our new deputy director for operations next year. And we have as most paramilitary organizations, you can't do your job unless you have a good senior NCO to help you. So serving as our senior listed advisor is Master Sergeant Tubba who's doing just an outstanding job. We do have a sergeant major inbound who's checking in as we speak and so I hope we got introducing him this picture anyway. We're talking about him next year this time. So here's our mission and again I'm going to talk fast and move through because I want to get through the video and I want to get Dr. Keese up here so she can give you the real interesting stuff. This is our mission and the bottom line is we will provide the fullest possible accounting to the families of our lost and missing service members or DOD designated personnel because we do have some civilians still missing. As it starts, this is the video that's going to give you details about how we conduct our mission and then I'll come back when the video is over. Last chapters, the course of works with final members. America's involvement in Vietnam cannot come before we achieve the fullest possible accounting of those missing in action. If I keep searching, never leave with all America behind. The mission of the Defense POW MIA County Agency or DPAA is to provide the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel to their families and their nation. Strategically located in Arlington, Virginia with major facilities at Joint Base Pearl Harbor, Hickam, Hawaii and off at Air Force Base, Nebraska the more than 600 person newly established Defense Agency is jointly manned by soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines and Department of Defense civilians with specialized skills. Researching, recovering, identifying and ultimately returning an individual to their family begins with analysis and investigation. The DPAA experts begin to search by studying all known information regarding the circumstances of each loss. Historians and analysts gather information from U.S. veterans, foreign witnesses archival records and other sources. They then create a case file for each unaccounted for America. This file may include historical records, official correspondence, maps, photographs, daily activity logs and medical and personnel records of the missing person. These files are continually updated until an identification is made. Once the research has been done here we get the commands approval we send out the small teams people who could be 10 person team conducting interviews at a villagers house, at a district office for a combination of their going to the site first and then conducting interviews on site. Once all available information is analyzed a decision can be made to dissenter individuals buried as unknown or conduct field investigations. During a typical investigation mission personnel interview potential witnesses, conduct on-site reconnaissance and survey terrain for safety and logistical concerns. Teams also try to generate new leads that may result in future recoveries. The main goal of the investigation is to obtain enough information to correlate or connect a particular site with one or more missing Americans. If enough on-site evidence is found the site will be recommended for recovery and excavation. Recovery sites range in size from a few square meters such as in individual burials to areas larger than football fields for aircraft crashes. DPAA may hire as many as 100 local workers to help with the excavation process. This job has so many benefits for me personally it's an opportunity to serve the country but also our fighting forces that kind of contribute to that as well. Professionally it's just an incredible challenge to get to work in all the countries where we work to travel to meet amazing sites to work with the local villagers and local officials and just have the opportunity to give somebody some answers after decades of waiting to know what happened to the loved one and maybe just wrestling with the grief that that lack of information and lack of answers brings we have the chance to resolve that for them and that's just an incredible opportunity. In Southeast Asia there is on the Korean Peninsula 16,000 foot mountain tops in the Himalayas and underwater sites off the coast of Pampu, Louisiana and we still continue to search the battlefields of World War II throughout Europe. After a successful recovery all evidence has been transported to the DPAA laboratories. Once they've arrived in the lab the painstaking process of identification begins. This is the final step of the mission leading to the return of an individual. In many of the cases an important step in the identification process is DNA analysis which is accomplished by cutting a bone sample that is sent to the armed forces DNA identification laboratory. One of the challenges DPAA faces today is the lack of reference samples from family members of those still unaccounted for. Any person who is a relative of an unaccounted for American is encouraged to contact their service casualty office to ensure there is a DNA reference sample on file for that service member. DPAA makes an identification when all available evidence remains. Artifacts and historical documents point to the same person. The ID process can take anywhere from a few months to several years to complete. Any unresolved cases are kept open with the hope that new evidence will be found or new technologies will be developed to make a future identification possible. Once an American has been identified there remains a return to their family through the respective service casualty office. They return home with full military honors and given the respect they are unto their service and sacrifice for their country. Oh, as a family member of this agency to me is doing phenomenal work and in a very personal way because when somebody loses somebody like my father and you really don't know the story for 70 years and then you find an agency that knows about him and keeps his his memory alive keeps the mission alive to try to find him is very meaningful in a very personal way because it means you're not just doing this yourself alone you have a whole lot of people who are concerned about finding your dad and bringing him home. Jack says something about how we honor our dad particularly those who serve this nation I'm very grateful to all of the DPAA in the related agencies in the military in general and the person who is in our government and for our citizens because they think it's important enough mission to continue in the way we value life in very few nations very few nations I don't think this group does this I just wanted to yell to open me to everybody out there he's home he's home I couldn't believe it and when I would have touched his name you're home it's unbelievable I'm glad I live in the United States of America have this attitude being the man behind we're so fortunate we want you to know and I know from my own experience that if something's happened to you we will be looking for you P.O.W.M.I.A. Accounting Agency are united in their effort to recover and return as many of our missing personnel as possible one more patriot return one more family that now has answers one more step in fulfilling our nation's promise so I still have not lost my skill set as a military intelligence officer and I have way too many slides in my briefing that I have time so I'm going to flip through a number of these and just jump to the highlights because I really want you to hear from Dr. Keith the bottom line take away from this slide is 82,000 missing daunting we have over the past couple of years been able to increase our number of accountants to over 200 which is what Congress asked us to do but at the end of the day because many of our losses are either deep sea or high aircraft crashes we only expect to be able to identify or recover an account for about 38,000 here are all the locations that we plan to go to in FY19 which is this year there's a big question mark from the bottom right hand side of that slide for North Korea as many of you know we have not had an opportunity to look at the locations as we thought we would following the two summits held by the President and Chairman Kim unfortunately due to the time frame of having to establish logistics fund all of the teams and fund all of the logistics we can no longer do any North Korean operations in this FY because the FY ends at the end of September so what we are doing now is we have our plan on the shelf of the North Korean People's Army to get back in contact with us and hopefully agree to sit down so we can have a discussion stay tuned if you hear the conversation that's good if the conversation ceases and we haven't announced that we're going to conduct operations by April of next year then that means that we weren't able to come to an agreement and the North Koreans won't let us in so we continue the message to them and we're hopeful that they will come back soon here are our priorities I'm going to skip past this the bottom line is the Vietnam War remains our priority because of a number of issues like aging, witnesses dying, witnesses, acidic soil, etc I want to talk a little bit about Korean War accounting Dr. Teese is going to do the rest of the main details of what she experienced but the bottom line is the 55 boxes that came back we just identified our 8th individual in the next 2 to 3 weeks so we told the families this Thursday and Friday so I'm not telling you anything I'm not tipping like I did last year we are about to announce 25 more from now that sounds like a lot but what we've also determined is there are probably over 250 people represented in those 55 boxes 170 of which we believe are US and then the 80 are 9 US so watch this lane and we will continue to report with those accounting we have full authority to do the negotiations with the North both the Secretary of State Secretary Pompeo and the National Security Council and the White House have told us that everybody is committed to keeping this on a separate track from the DINU issue and we continue to do everything on our power to keep it separate but it seems like the messaging keeps trying to pull it together and associate one to the other but from our standpoint we continue in this humanitarian effort lastly the announcement that I made last year where I talked about a project that we were moving forward that I couldn't tell you the details because we had to tell the families well that's the 652 that we have established and got approval for to disenter 652 Korean War unknown out of the punch bowl it's a 7 phase project we just completed phase 1 and we're now in the system of 73 and we're now into phase 2 it's going to take us anywhere from 5 to 7 years to disenter all of those bodies for a lot of reasons because we can't tear up the memorial so we're working with the cemetery to get at least 8 disenterments a month during the fiscal year so that's moving along along nicely this is RJ McDaniels he was the first Korean War servicemen identified out of the K55 project the 55 boxes what was really interesting is first of all you saw his sons in the video tag that ID tag was in one of the boxes and so we kind of suspected that he might be there and then of course we looked for him in those 55 and he was definitely there another individual that was the second one identified was PFC Jones and I'd like to talk about him because our lead for the Korean War identification project Dr. Jimmy Jin told me that when they opened the boxes and they saw a particular son remains she said I knew exactly that it was PFC Jones she had to wait for the DNA to bear it out but the reason she knew was because PFC Jones was like 6'8 or something really, really, really tall and so the phone she said there was nobody else who could be but him so really interesting again Vietnam is our priority but we continue with World War II like Cali as well much of the World War II identifications are from disinterests we continue to work with US Russia Joint Commission to deal with the losses that we believe the Russians have information on in their archives as well as working with China again I'm going to be moving pretty fast this is a picture of Tech Sergeant Kibbe in the upper left hand corner he is in Hawaii picking up the remains of his grandfather really, really awesome and so that young man had an opportunity to come to Hawaii and frankly be his grandfather for the first time developments of note in the top right portion of the slide is a picture of Miss Marla Andrews she is the daughter of Tuskegee Airman Captain Lawrence Dixon the reason why this is significant is because Captain Dixon was the first of the 27 Tuskegee Airmen that are missing that we identified we identified him last year we did not do it on our own, we had a number of partners in the South to include the University of Austria the University of Innsbruck the National World War II Museum in New Orleans as well as a private researcher in Austria helped us recover that first of the 27 Tuskegee Airmen I'm going to leave Iza to him off because she is going to talk about it and then lastly if you have an opportunity Google the Tulsa American last B-24 PBS did a documentary on our mission, it's very very exciting and I'm going to leave you in suspense in the interest of time you're going to have to go watch the documentary to see what it's all about again I talked a little bit about partnerships we are growing our partnering effort immensely with a budget, what we would call a poultry budget of just $160 million you would think that it would likely cost a lot more than that but it does and so what we've done is we've invested in partners so we work with universities private organizations, private individuals to help us and what we found is not only do we increase our expertise but where we are unable to get more people meaning internal to our agency we're now able to outsource a lot of the research, investigation and excavation we do not outsource identification piece to external labs and that's largely because our lab is accredited we have a standard and frankly our director and I have to be very confident that when our medical examiner signs that piece of paper he is adhering to all the standards that we put in place and so we can trust that identification as being true this is just a map of where all of our partners are here's by country, so we're worldwide outreach I'm here the right hand side of the slide is a poster, there's a couple of boxes of these posters back there, I invite you to take them back to your organizations it's really good to hand out for the National POW NIA recognition day in September this poster was designed by a staff sergeant in DPAA I'm going to skip that I'll skip that so again I want to thank the DAV what I didn't mention up front is that the DAV sponsored two family meetings for us one of them was a family member update in San Jose and the other one was a government meeting hosted by the National League of Families we thank you so much for that gift we'd like to use our money to do operations and we'd get in the field and so whenever we have an organization that gifts us funds we give it to the families so thank you so much we're not going to do any shake hands but come on and dot the keys future plus that you don't use the tab I'm going to use this all right just tell the guy no if you have a present here it'd be the last hospital as they mentioned my name is Dr. Brown the keys and I want to be invited to talk to you this afternoon so basically what I'm going to talk about this afternoon is the identification process from the lab report side so as this one was mentioned I am a forensic anthropologist and forensic archaeologist at the DPA laboratory in Hawaii and so I participate in a lot of the steps of the identification process but my main role is in the Korean War Identification Project so she mentioned I went to North Korea as part of the team that recovered those 55 boxes of remains and I work a lot with the identification of those remains of Korean War service members that were disinterfered from Punchbowl and other sources so that's my main role but I also work in the field so I do recovery missions and I do other types of analysis in the lab so I would be happy to answer your questions as I'm talking because I like to talk about the things you're interested in so if there's anything you want to ask feel free to ask as I'm going along and I think we'll also have some time at the end for questions so I'm going to kind of just start at the beginning and go through the end of the identification talk a little bit about how evidence gets into the lab and the different methods that we use in the lab to do our analysis and then I have a little case study that we can kind of walk through to show the whole process so we receive evidence into the lab in several ways the three main ways that we get evidence are do field recoveries so these would be an activation of sites where we believe there was either a plane crash or burial or some location where we believe there are remains of a missing service member we also accept evidence that is turned over to us sometimes this can be from a local like while we're on a site doing a recovery we might interview a local who knows of some remains that someone has had in the family or in the turn those over to us and turn over identification so we'll accept evidence from people this can also be a government to government thing like the North Korean turnover the North Korean government turns over remains to us and we will accept an exception to the lab and we also do a lot of disintermins of remains that have been buried in various cemeteries that we're not able to be identified at the time and then as we do research we feel like we have a good idea of who this might be we'll listen to those remains bring them into the lab and then we do our analysis so we can identify them so I'll talk about each one of these a little bit more so the field recovery is a big part of our operation and we use well trained and experienced archaeologists to lead those recoveries because when we are doing an excavation of a site we can only do it one time on that site as we do this excavation so we use well trained archaeologists to manage those so that we know that we're doing it properly we document everything so that we have a record of what we've done so if anyone else can go and refer to those documents to see the results of that excavation and that training we take that to the field and we're able to look at the relationships between where evidence might be how a site was formed so the things that have happened in that location since that incident to help us pinpoint where we have the best chance of recovering evidence and then also between the evidence and that site so we excavate sites in a variety of contexts some of them are underwater some of them are on mountain slopes some of them are in just a lot of different contexts so we take that experience and so that we can do the best excavation and make sure that if there's any evidence there to be recovered we will get it and if we walk away from that site and we didn't find anything we also have high confidence that it's because it wasn't there or not because we missed it so this is a profile of an excavation we made at a site so the ground surface is up there where that orange level is and this is the bottom of the unit and this is what we call soil profile so part of what we are able to do is look at this profile and get an idea of what might have been going on at this site so there's some different stratigraphic layers of these different layers of sediment and then we can look for different features like where things might have been disturbed where we're finding bits of evidence that are related to the incident that we're interested in so pieces of plane wreckage or other things that we know would be the material that we're interested in and so all of that is part of our job as the recovery leader to then direct the team as to how we should be excavating some of the sites are also burial features so these sites aren't spread over a large area but we're trying to find one particular where someone may have been buried and there are distinct sometimes you can see in the soil that something has been disturbed the color is a little bit different so in this slide that area in the middle is a little more there's some lighter colored soil with some dark modeling that looks different than the soil around it and once we excavated that we did find that was a burial feature and the difference in that soil color we were able to determine if that's where it was but it's not always that obvious and sometimes it does require someone with training to be able to interpret those things as I mentioned these sites are in a lot of context so we use a lot of different tools depending on the situation that we're in so in the top left they're using an excavator and that is not a very fine-tuned type of tool so you would use something like that where you know that maybe near a river somewhere where there's a lot of soil being laid down annually and you know you've got a meter of soil before you're going to get to the level that you're interested in so when that crash occurred so instead of having to dig that whole top overburden by hand and you were bringing an excavator down close to the layer that we're looking for and then that is more efficient for our teams on the top right that's an underwater site I'm not an underwater archaeologist but we have teams that based on research they know that Plain has gone down in a certain area and they use certified divers to go and recover evidence and we've made several identifications from underwater Plain crash sites in the bottom left is a team using hand tools to excavate a solution when you recover a body how do you discern whether the gender of the patient we will get to that yes that's a good question and when I get there if I haven't answered it it's your satisfaction these hand tools shovels we have a lot of large rocks in the soil and everything on the bottom right that shows our screen so all of this soil then has to be screened because some of this evidence is very small and so it's all run through mashed screens so that we don't miss anything we also I mean it remains through turnovers this photo is the repatriation ceremony I take them for the 55 boxes that we refer to as the K55 North Korea so these remains are given to us in various situations and the biggest challenge with turnovers is that we don't have all of that information about where these remains came from we conduct that excavation ourselves so a lot of times we have some information on where the person or organization gave it to us says they came from but we don't really have extensive documentation about how it was recovered when it was recovered it makes it a lot more challenging to do analysis on these remains because some of it isn't reliable people misremember things people misremember where things came from and so that makes our job a lot harder when we get into the laboratory but we still have a lot of success identifying individuals from turnover remains and if you would like me to tell you my little anecdotes about going to North Korea and if you're interested in bringing that I can do that now I'll do that at the end but this was really an amazing honor there were four of us from the laboratory that went to North Korea it was about a year ago so we went on July 27th last year and we flew in on a C-17 to the airport in Wamsan North Korea we were there on the ground for about three hours and all of the remains had been laid out so we kind of like sent ahead boxes and packed the material everything was laid out and we did a review right there on the ground to make sure that what we were accepting was in fact human remains which they were and there was also some material evidence including Master Sergeant Daniel's ID tag so it was the only ID tag we had but that obviously corresponded to a missing soldier and there was also some other equipment helmets other materials that were consistent with the military US military gear so we knew that it was likely our guys and it was human and so we then took all of those remains back to South Korea to the Osan Air Base we had about three days on the ground there we documented everything we went to cases we were very happy to US flag and then we're pulling back on two C17s to pick them so I also had the privilege to export one of the C17s back for this ceremony and then everything came into the lab when we began our analysis so as Mr. Moon mentioned we've made eight identifications we've got another 25 so over the next few weeks and then we have several more in the work so going into the next fiscal year we will continue to make identifications from this assemblage so that was pretty pretty amazing things almost 55 all come from this angle so this is one of the issues with the loss of context that we have we were given some documentation on where these boxes came from but obviously we didn't participate in the recovery so we just had what we were told by the North Koreans but it is turning out that that is accurate so the people that we are identifying were lost in the area where these boxes reportedly came from and there were two major areas most of them were from and then there were 35 boxes and then the other 20 boxes were from the Uttan area so two of the major areas we also work with a lot of discernments so for the Korean War all of those unknowns are buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of Pacific or Punchbowl Cemetery and we now have gotten approval to visit the remaining 650 unknowns that are buried there and we also work on we also manage all those cases the pace has been about 8 every 2 weeks twice a month we get 8 discernments from the Punchbowl and then we do an assessment of those and then we just fill them all out for the appropriate testing and there are also cemeteries all over the world we have projects that work with remains of particular terms from World War II cemeteries to other places so those remains also come into our laboratory and then we have some historical documentation about when those were initially buried where they came from anything else that might help us with our identification so that Punchbowl that's the Pacific burial? yeah this photo is from one of our internment ceremonies and some of these cases do you guys use that ground concentration burial? we have used that in some sites so if we for a lot of the like Pittsburgh's a burial and we have to kind of pinpoint that location we can use ground penetrating radar to look for any disturbances below the ground that aren't visible by the naked eye and then we can kind of focus our efforts to get rid of those anomalies instead of just dating every day question one returns to the remains of Priya is there a possibility or is there a system they might be able to utilize some of these remains possibly were listed as last known lives with the cooperation of other people who were with them at the time and if some of them were the remains that might have been exhumed from prison camps so in this group none of those remains came from any PWA camps and these were all bad for the losses and so far that has actually been anxious no last known lives so once we get evidence into the laboratory we have a variety of testing methods that we use to determine those remains might be as was mentioned our laboratory is located in two places our main laboratory is on Kekom Air Force Base in Hawaii and then we also have a laboratory at office air force office air force base in Nebraska both of these locations are accredited so again we know that we have high confidence in the results that come off our laboratory we also have a lab at Wright Patterson they do a lot of our life support analysis of like plane wreckage and plane evidence from plane so the first line of evidence that we use is historical research so we have a team of historians and researchers that have compiled information on a lot of these incidents so if we know that we have recovered evidence from a particular location we can use that to narrow down how many people have been lost in that area and who could be a likely candidate for a match to that evidence so in this example this is a World War II site in Belgium with 73,000 individuals on account for it from World War II but in that area there were only so many P-47 crashes so we know that there are only so many people who are likely to be a match for these remains to be found at that site we often recover material evidence this could be personal effects it could be issue gear and we can use that substantial evidence to help build an identification so in this example here this was a wrist watch we were able to determine the make of that watch and there was a photograph of an individual wearing that watch and so that helps us when we're trying to build a case that it is that the remains are a particular individual we can link that to a person and also we can then return that to the family so the family would receive any evidence that we could tie to a particular individual when that identification is made in logical analysis so with any human remains we'll try to create a profile of those remains so that we can then compare that to any information we have on file for the service members so we try to establish sex, age, ancestry, the stature of an individual any trauma that might have taken place or anything else individuating that we can then use to determine which individual this might be a lot of the assemblages of remains that we receive have been commingled so that means remains from multiple individuals have been mixed together and so we also try to, we have to determine which remains are one person and we can use some of these characteristics to determine that so if we have two skeletal elements and one appears to be from a much older individual than another we can use that to distinguish them from each other if they want as much larger or smaller or they just don't look consistent then we can segregate those individuals out and then we use the records that we have on file and this historical data so we know where they came from, we know information about individuals and then we can compare those to see who is consistent with the information we get from the remains your question is about sex how do we tell the sex so the areas of the skeleton that are most useful to determine sex are scubble and your pelvis so there are features in the skull the nails tend to be more robust they have more robust muscle attachments so we can look at those features and determine whether or not it's likely that the individual is male and also there's a lot of morphology in the pelvis that is very distinctive between males and females so we can look at those areas if we don't have a skull or any pelvic bones men are generally just larger so we can look at we can measure the lengths of bones and then the probability that if something measures over a certain threshold it's more likely to be male so depending on what remains we have we have methods that are more or less accurate and if we don't have anything that is reliable then we would just say in a term that we also have a team of forensic dentists who if we receive dental remains can create a postmortem chart of those remains that we can then also prepare dental records that we have on bios for individuals they also take radiographs of any dental remains and as anthropologists we can also use some of those radiographs to determine the age of people so your teeth develop at a pretty predictable rate and most of these guys unfortunately are still quite young so we can use their dental development to come up with an age range and then if we happen to have any age mortem x-rays on file we can compare those and that can be just as unique as a fingerprint so if we have an x-ray on file for service members we can match it to their remains then that's a positive idea we also have developed a method in the laboratory to look at radiographs of your clavicles and upper vertebrae a lot of service members have induction radiographs so these were taken when they were conducted into the service and a lot of those are still on file so we have those and we digitize them all and we can take x-rays of the skeletal remains and then compare those to those x-rays and that's another that would be considered a positive idea so if we're able to compare those radiographs and there's enough features that match so this on the bottom is an example from one of our reports where an analyst will describe every place that they see something in common with an anti-mortar x-ray and then that report would go in an identification packet to ID someone and then as Ms. Bergen-Sumpterman which mentioned we are now developing an isotope testing laboratory within DPA I am not an isotope specialist so I'm going to give you the 101 version of this but basically as we consume water and food our bones record these different isotopes and we can then measure that and figure out what type of diet someone is eating generally speaking and also sometimes some geographic information so the water that you drink from a different area will have different ratios of oxygen isotopes and we can then use that to kind of exclude people from a set of routines so for example in the K55 boxes we have approximately 80 individuals that we believe are not US service members many of them we believe are probably rock forces that we are fighting with our units but using isotope analysis we can kind of distinguish between a more eastern style diet where someone was eating more rice and vegetables versus a western diet where it leads more heavily toward corn and meat consumption and so we were able to use this we kind of did a pilot study with the K55 to separate those groups out and then we prioritized DNA testing on the samples in the more likely US so if we are using it as a tool to kind of manage our resources the DNA lab can only do so many tests so this way we can kind of prioritize the ones that we believe are more likely to be our guys so two questions one is do we know approximately how many sets of remains in the K55 total 250 so we're based on DNA and isotope testing and then based on that these 80 that we think are rock what are we doing with the Korean government to be able to help and deal with their missing? So we have an account of our organization in South Korea called MACRI and we work very closely with them in these sorts of situations so we have sampled all of the remains for DNA testing and if we believe that they are likely to be one of their missing service members then we will share that data with them and then they can compare it against their own database of family reference samples for their service members so and we have done repatriations with them so if we have our case soldiers they will be repatriated to South Korea I think last September we repatriated 64 individuals by the way there are three or four vacant seats up here now there's people in the hallway we have three or four seats in the room so the isotope analysis is not discriminating enough to use for a positive ID but it does help us kind of separate out in groups and that means other analysis we can do it faster and use our resources better DNA testing which I was just mentioning we have a good partnership with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner Systems DNA Identification Lab which is located at Dover and they do all of our DNA testing so we will cut the samples and then we send them to them they also maintain the database of all the family reference samples so all current active duty service members have their own DNA file but for past accounting this wasn't the same so we don't have self DNA references for any of these individuals so what the DNA Lab has done is pursue family reference samples for all of the missing service members so they begin with mitochondrial DNA testing I won't get too technical because we get really confusing again, I'm not DNA analyst but mitochondrial DNA is passed down eternally so I share the same mitochondrial DNA as my mother and my son also shares my mitochondrial DNA exactly but that means it's also not unique to you so everyone in your maternal line will have the same mitochondrial DNA that is the first line of testing because usually with past remains the DNA can be degraded and you have a lot more copies of mitochondria in your cells than you do in nuclear DNA so you only have one copy of nuclear DNA and so they're able to get that to sequence more successfully and then we compare that to those family reference samples and then we can narrow down the pool of who it might be some of these sequences are really common we have one sequence for the Korean War assemblage that has like 400 guys the same mitochondrial DNA so it gets around 400 guys but we still have to figure out which one of those 400 guys it is so that is when we use nuclear testing but again since we don't have a self reference it's still kind of a statistical game so I have a sister the likelihood that me and my sister share a good portion of our nuclear DNA is higher than me sharing with a person that I'm not related to so we can run those tests on the sample we get from the remains and the sample we get from another family member and come up with the likelihood how likely is it that these two people are related so in some cases those statistics are on the billions I think we just had one from the K55 that the people at Aftal that's the DNA lab said they had never seen it was like 4 non million which is like 10 to the 20th something so it can get really there's only 8 or 9 billion people on the earth so we were pretty sure it was the guy but we have to use these kind of build these things on each other in order to get down to the place where we can say it's only this long and then we use all these different lines of evidence together to make the identification so after we've done all these different types of testing all of these lines of evidence need to point to the same person so once we have overwhelming evidence that these remains are associated to this one person and we can reasonably exclude every other one else then we make that right and then a whole pack of reports is put together showing all these different types of testing and why we are confident it is that person so now I'm just going to do a little case study this one is a Korean War case and just to kind of show you from beginning to end how this works this is an actual case so there's nothing in the person has been identified but I think there's any identified information in here so just to briefly talk about different types of identification I mentioned positive identification that means we can say this is one particular person we also have situations where we can't make an individual ID we can make a group ID so for example a plane crash we know there were four people missing from that plane crash so we might recover remains and we aren't able to determine who it is but we know it's one of these four people we can make a group identification of the four missing people from that incident I am actually not aware of any case we have ever made a certain substantial ID there could also be a situation where based on certain substantial evidence we can identify the individual but we can't call it a positive ID because we don't have the right kind of evidence to say that and then we also have situations where we get additional portions of an individual who has already been identified so in that 250 individuals from that K55 we believe there's probably about 20 individuals represented that we've already IDed so in that case depending on the wishes of the next of kin so when they get notified there's a form that they fill out saying yes I would like to be notified if you find additional remains of my family member we know I do not wish to be notified and then we act according to their wishes if we find additional portions but we do the analysis we don't know beforehand if it's someone with already IDed so once we have identified that it is someone that person has already been accounted for then we just check our documentation and see what the family wanted to do identification the timeline can really vary depending on quality of the evidence we have and the different types of testing we can do if we have enough evidence that we're able to identify a person we do so immediately we don't wait to see if we might get more remains we ID what we have as soon as we can because we want families to know if we don't have enough data we don't have enough evidence to say that we can't see who it is then we pursue other lines of testing so if we have DNA results but we don't have a DNA reference then we will go to service technology offices and ask them to look for someone you know we think it might be this guy but we don't have a DNA reference see if there's anyone in their family that can don't so we will keep working to see if we can find more evidence and then we just constantly revisit those cases every so often and see if anything has changed and we've come up with a new line of testing and we've gotten in more evidence and then until we get back to what we made in 1990 so that's kind of our process so in this example the number of individuals that are so long accounted for to create more is about 7,650 we're probably down to 7,640 now so that's a large pool of people and this is how we get down to one person so we have a lot of historical data in this particular case this was a field recovery so for a period of time from about 1996 to 2005 we were sending teams into North Korea to do field recovery so in this situation in this case we knew that there was a period of time where these companies were engaged in the recovery and we had 63 individuals still missing from that incident so at this site based on the location of the site when we were excavating we knew the kind of pool of people that went missing in that area so that brings down to that number of 63 as our team was doing the recovery because we carefully document everything in every step of the process when we got down to the remains we could see the orientation of the remains in the grab so how they were like buried at the time of the incident there were two individuals the site is in a field in an agricultural field so this is a drawing of the positioning of those remains in the field and as you can see there appears to be the legs of the second individual above the individual on the bottom so we could tell that there were two people the remains on the top had probably been disturbed from that agricultural activity because they were closer to the surface but the the individual on the bottom was based down and his arms were kind of placed haphazardly and so the positioning of the bodies indicated they were not buried by friendly forces so we would not have our own people would not have buried them this way so just based on the arrangement of the remains we have 63 people missing 42 of those individuals were found buried by UN forces probably not the sport one guys because they wouldn't have been buried like this so there's 21 people missing in that area who could have been found and buried by the North Korean and Chinese forces so from this point on we're talking about the set of remains on the bottom the more complete set of remains so we were able to establish a biological profile for that individual and it was a male we were able to determine the persons of African descent and that they were between 17 and 19 years old and my bones we determined they were about 68 and a half inches tall usually we have a range maybe 5 inches on either side just so that when we look down we don't see anybody these guys were still growing a lot of time so of those 21 people there were only 6 people who fit that profile so now we're down to a much smaller group of people dentists did an analysis of the dental remains they observed a large cavity on that right upper molar and a large cavity on the lower first molar this individual's upper third molars had not erupted so they would not have been visible in his mouth but the lower molars were erupted so by comparing the most important dental charts to the charts of those 6 individuals there was only one guy who's dentition matched what we saw in the remains so he had charted an upper right first and a lower right first molar cavity upper third molars were not visible so weren't marked in the lowers so that was one guy and then we also used a letter from his personnel file from his mother saying that he had a large gap between his front teeth which we observed in the remains it's called diastema it's a technical term so we had recorded this in our analysis and then when we checked the records of that one individual it was also noted by his mother that that was present so we were able to make that ID of that person without using DNA in this case because we just had enough evidence that it could only be this one person so just to kind of summarize we in the laboratory we're live very heavily on all of our other directorates and we need to get a lot of support from them so this is definitely an effort that is across our agency from logistics to research all comes together to support the work that we do in the laboratory and we try to use all evidence that is available to us so that we can make the identification in the past year, 2018 fiscal year we had 207 IDs which I think was a record for us and I think this year we're on a pace to at least meet that goal so I'm happy to answer any questions Matt How many sets of remains do you have to have to identify your system? I don't know what the holding on the lab is for you know because we're always working cases and taking new cases the Korean War identification project has a pretty large establishment for me that's the one I can speak to we had a turnover similar to the K55 in the early 90s where we received 208 boxes and we've made over 300 IDs out of those boxes but we still are working in those cases like I mentioned so we can get to an ID so we have that assemblage and then we now are working on some terms but there's a good amount of case work that's always coming Will you give the numbers for Vietnam that also includes the ones that were in Cambodia that included into that? Yes So yeah, no matter where they were lost anyone from that conflict just simply made a lot of tunnels Do you have maps of those tunnels that you can investigate in Vietnam? No Historian research personally no Are there other countries that have departments like yours that are working that you get information from? The country with the level of operations that closely approaches ours would be South Korea and their agency is modeled on our agency we work very closely with them I know that we have we exchange information with other countries but I don't think there's any other country that operates So we have been in contact with several other countries and set forces to Korea and I don't know about our engagement with them but we have three more samples but we'll have situations where we have a set of remains that doesn't appear to be a person to Asian descent but doesn't seem to match any of our vats so we have reached out to them so that we can exclude them we think this might be an Australian or a Canadian or a British soldier we need some information from you so that we can exclude them but they're not active but they're not actively pursuing like we are I don't think so but I think that's starting to be something that comes from This is a question What work did you do? Do you guys have anything to do with O2? All of our one cases we don't actively pursue our mandate is 1 or 2 but if we were to encounter one Do you get good cooperation from the Vietnamese government the Cambodian government Laotian China I think we have pretty good cooperation with Vietnam Cambodia we go into Cambodia and we go into China we have a well established relationship with Vietnam and Laos and I think we're still working on So I know you've probably heard about the sanctions that Cambodia put on the US last year 18 months ago they have since lifted those sanctions and now our teams are able to go back to Cambodia so we're doing that with China what we're really interested in in China right now is the archives we need to get into their archives to get their records so we can look but we have had the ability to send teams we just haven't been able to do it recently so hopefully in FY20 we'll be able to do some some work in China with regards to our cooperation to get to their question in addition to Australia we also work closely with Japan Vietnamese that know the history about how Japan goes after their loss and their missing once they find their remains they cremate them so we've been able to get in and have them agree to allow us to take a look at any remains that they believe are not of Asian descent so our lab works directly with their lab as well to ensure that they don't cremate any of our military other than that and of course the Russians we're working with them getting into their archives we are not in the embassy now because we were kicked out because we kicked out there but what we did do was we set up a contract vehicle and so we hired three Russian researchers that we give information to for them to go and find details about losses in their archives so that mission is still going and we also have a major that's responsible for going into Russia every once in a while and check on those researchers to make sure that they're doing what we've asked them to do if we're in South East Asia we have to hire Russian countries in the past to actually go and send the teams in because that's still the case yeah so much of South East Asia countries are still communists and largely for reasons of safety which I can respect they pretty much dictate to us not only the contractor that we can use but also the type of military aircraft so we no longer use US carriers because of the sensitivity of appearing like an invasion and so especially in Vietnam we coordinate very closely right before the beginning of the next fiscal year so that we can let them know how many teams we're going to send in and they will figure out that's the largest expense the late hours for both transporters of our teams but also for Medevac but they will go ahead and help us contract through the US contracting office in Singapore so that's how we do that yeah they're coming to see you you're searching for remains in Vietnam, Laos, Korea France, Germany and you find remains of another soldier from other countries family or not, what do you do with those units do you get into that country so we don't do field analysis so if we were to uncover remains if there was something obvious that we suspected it wasn't one of ours and maybe depending on how certainly were there wasn't a US soldier we might notify local officials but generally and in a lot of countries there's a review before the remains come back to the US where local officials and our personnel determine what's going to stay and what's going to come back but if we got remains back to the lab and then determined that it was someone else a soldier we would definitely counterfeit that time and then depending on their program their level of interest would be reached to repatriate those units from countries that aren't necessarily friendly to the United States how well have we done in delinking this from any type of political process so this is a non-political just a humanitarian effort how well have we done in that and how well is that working? Yeah so I'm biased so I will say we did very well as an example last year we repatriated a lost serviceman from Burma which was pretty awesome the first in a very very long time that it was the first that we actually recovered an ID we had some others turned over but I just use that as an example as to how the director and the DDO our deputy director for operations are engaging at the government level for the countries that we want to go into to have talks to talk about this humanitarian and we keep stressing humanitarian mission to recover our missing service members and the fortunate thing is the countries that we deal with understand that right because they also are looking for their missing service members and their families also are demanding that their government do a better job so we try to stay as far away from arms races and you know D-Nuke initiatives because again we are humanitarian and although we tend to look very military often times when we go into many of the nations that we're not as you call it friendly with our soldiers don't wear uniforms now we know what our soldiers you know soldier sailors and the marine looks like so you can tell that they're military but for the most part you can't tell at a distance that there are military personnel on the ground because we try to keep that as far away from our mission as possible in fact I didn't get to mention but I'm leaving tonight to go to three sites in Europe so I'm really excited about that because I've only been to the southeast Asia sites Vietnam Laos Vietnam Laos and Cambodia but I'm going to Poland D-K Germany in a span of seven days so I hope my back holds up yeah I got some problems I'm going to carry my suit put it in the overhead for me make sure I get up on time make sure I drink a lot of water carry my coins but yeah I'm really excited about having an opportunity so next year when I come back maybe I'll bring some photos and I'll talk more about my experiences in Europe which I think is going to be pretty awesome because one of those sites is actually a site that's being done by one of the universities that we partner with so I'm extremely excited to go out here I just kind of asked what were the North Korean but what was the North Korean experience it was a pretty surreal experience they were extremely professional I mean it was a very high-profile effect and we didn't know how cooperative they were going to be going in everything was handled very professionally they were very courteous they had two North Korean anthropologists who were there with the KPA to like answer questions when we had finished our review they insisted on helping us transfer the boxes back to the plane and serve us coffee I mean it was not what I was expecting but I think on both sides we all wanted a good face and we wanted this to happen and it was good for everybody so it was very pleasant I was very happy when those wheels got off the ground it was a good experience as far as it could be I don't think anybody was more happy than I was because you never want a repatriate or recovery to turn into a rescue so that was my biggest concern I remember someone asking in our pre-greed what was the plan or something went wrong if you hear the plane start rumbling that didn't happen until the start get your rotor straight if you're authorized to do a dig let's say in Vietnam are the charges made to the United States for the cost and restoration of where those digs are done so it depends if we disturb a farmer's field rice paddies said we have to pay to restore but by comparison to what we're getting back in this field it's not a lot of money I guess I had to go but it's not a lot of money and we do that around the world it's just like when we during wartime but we destroy areas we go back and either help them rebuild and or we pay money restoration can't be a good question I just want to ask something about DNA I know it's relatively new it's not developing it's new but the percentage of DNA how is it used versus other types of identification older World War II career 1 how does that type of DNA play in that as far as percentage is it a high percentage what percentage of our cases we use DNA I don't actually know that and a lot of that is because some of us other like the historical data is not as reliable so we need verification of DNA so often we'll have a good idea of what it should be so this is a good point because I can use the case of the case of Craig first life which by the way was me that knew it was him so we did and here's his remains and they were fairly complete so we looked at him he was really tall and from some characteristics of his teeth we thought it was an African American and we measured his steamer and we had a number so then I'm going to go back to my hotel room I'm going to figure out and tomorrow morning I'm going to show up and tell you who this is so I just made you guys stature I knew the box was supposed to be and it came up with three eyes there's only three eyes with this tall African American descent in that area and based on the unit I was like it's Jones, it's him, this is him but we couldn't say that it was him without some other testing so in that particular case we used that DNA to confirm what we already suspected based on the location and the characteristics of the remains that led us to unnamed but because again that recovery information wasn't reliable, it wasn't done it turned out to be reliable, it was accurate but we didn't have any way to put any faith in that because it was just told to us but we didn't know if those boxes were recovered from where they thought they were told they were so in that case it was the guy from that area matched that profile and we used that DNA to confirm what we were seeing from other lines of it so we used it a lot but we also don't always get results because the DNA is degraded a lot of these cases that come out of the disinterference they've been treated like for now the head powder and that upgrades the DNA and the remains so if we don't get the DNA we have to get creative and figure out some other ways to get to that level and feel confident that we know I just said something the reference samples of what they need in the labs the new techniques like she just mentioned the formaldehyde North Korea has been known to store their remains and only give them back to us when the price is right and they get the most money out of us to get them and this new next generation sequencing from that formaldehyde problem they're now able to get the DNA out of us but they need the they need the reference samples if you have family members somewhere in the family they don't just need them the terminal sample can be terminal and that's what they need we don't have anything to compare to and even if the remains give us DNA information we need something to compare to and I want to make sure that everybody has a personal invitation to come to our lab in Hawaii you've heard Dr. Keys tell you a little bit but you should experience her and other scientists in the environment where they work you'll be shocked and amazed we do tours of our lab all the time so you're not inconveniencing us you just have to reach out and ask for a tour and our lab will be more than happy to take you through and that's one lab the other lab is in Nebraska Wright Patterson so if you happen to be I'm sorry often often Nebraska so if you happen to be passing through please stop fighting I'm sorry is the term paid for? yes you're getting dressed you're getting dressed you're getting dressed you're getting dressed thank you