By Laurence Jolidon
Copyright @ Ink-Slinger Press (Posted 9 Sept. 2000)

In late January 1956, some 867 flag-draped caskets - America's "unknowns" from the Korean War - were shipped from Japan aboard the USS Manchester to Hawaii and interred in a group burial at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

The ceremonies, little noted in the press, were kept deliberately low-key to avoid what an Army directive called "unfavorable publicity" about an "extremely sensitive" subject.

For the past 44 years, those ceremonies have achieved just what the government intended. Few questions have been raised about the sizable number of caskets entombed in Honolulu, even while the families of more than 8,100 men who didn't return from Korea searched desperately for any scrap of information about their loved ones' fate. Since they were buried, beneath a stately, white edifice set in the crater of an extinct volcano (thus the nickname given by veterans, "the Punchbowl"), science has made extraordinary advances in using human DNA to establish identities; but those families have learned little, while the government has preferred to focus instead on obtaining thousands of remains that lie buried, most of them still inaccessible, in North Korea.

But their quiet burial and long anonymity - on U.S. soil, to be sure, but in a distant place of honor that some veterans and families of Korean War MIAs still don't know exists - have also shielded a sad and inconvenient truth:

A great deal has always been known about America's Korean War "unknowns."

At least 239 of the caskets buried in Hawaii in 1956 contain remains that were among nearly 2,000 sets that Communist forces turned over in 1954 complete with names, military service numbers and burial information from North Korea that exactly matched U.S. records. (SEE LIST)

In three of the 239 cases, personal effects - a wallet, a wristwatch and a ring - even accompanied the tagged remains, which were received in "Operation Glory," a mutual but partial exchange of war dead at the 38th Parallel in September-October 1954.

In Operation Glory, 15 months after a ceasefire and armistice-signing, the United Nations side delivered more than 14,000 bodies of North Korean and Chinese soldiers from graves in South Korea while accepting some 4,100 United Nations dead - 1,885 identified as Americans - exhumed from battlefield and prison camp graves in North Korea.

(The exchange was devised after it became clear that the plan outlined in the armistice agreement - calling for graves registration teams from each side to enter the other's territory to retrieve their own dead - couldn't be carried out because neither side trusted the other enough to allow this.)

The figure of 239 "name-associated" Korean War cases is not from any specific official document - although such a document may well exist. A Freedom of Information Act request for documents that disclose the names related to cases buried at the Punchbowl is pending with the Pentagon.

The names are those that match when official public data on individuals still listed as unaccounted for from Korea are compared with declassified military personnel and graves registration records, including shipping manifests of Operation Glory.

They include soldiers and Marines, blacks, Caucasians, Native Americans, privates, non-commissioned officers and 15 officers, including Capt. Emil Kapaun, a highly-decorated Army chaplain from Kansas so revered by veterans who were prisoners of war with him that some mounted a campaign to have him declared a saint.

Eugene Kapaun, the chaplain's brother, said he wished the government had informed the families of the receipt of the "name-associated" remains and all the other information they had when the exchange took place, in 1954. "They never mentioned anything like that," he said

The majority of name-associated remains - more than 150 - were tagged "Pyoktong," indicating the Communists had exhumed them from graves at POW Camp 5, one of the largest of the dozens of camps that held thousands of UN prisoners and near the town of Pyoktong on the Yalu River, the boundary between North Korea and China.

U.S. authorities have maintained over the years that forensic specialists at the U.S. Army mortuary in Kokura, Japan, where Korean War casualties were processed until it was closed in March 1956, applied all procedures then available in efforts to make conclusive identification, but were stymied in hundreds of cases.

By then, the Army's graves registration units that performed the last tests on the Korean War unknowns had processed tens of thousands of war dead, from the U.S., South Korea and a dozen other countries with troops in the war, while under-strength and battling very challenging conditions.

When Operation Glory began in September 1954, they faced great pressure to complete the massive task. The Army Quartermaster General's orders were to finish all work - on the nearly 4,200 cases from Operation Glory plus hundreds of UN remains evacuated during the war that were still unidentified - within 18 months.

The schedule was met. But hundreds of cases were left unidentified. Officials say they were simply too difficult, and that no corners were cut, nor cases overlooked.

The anthropologists who ran the identification program at the Kokura mortuary "were really, really quite good," says Thomas D. Holland, a forensic anthropologist and chief scientist at the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii (CILHI), which inherited the data from the Kokura mortuary and where all work on recovered U.S. military remains is now conducted.

The main problem that prevented final identification in 1954, he says, echoing what other officials have maintained, was the absence of adequate medical data, particularly dental records. Korean War-era military dental records "weren't very detailed," he says.

Military archives and correspondence shared by MIA relatives appear to bear out that point. U.S. military officials wrote letters in the mid-1950s to some families of men missing from Korea asking them to forward private dental records to assist in forensic work on recovered remains.

How much this effort accomplished is unclear. Some family members who received the requests say they were skeptical from the outset of government intentions, and doubted how useful pre-induction civilian records would be since dental inspection and work are routinely performed in the first weeks of military service

Burial of hundreds of "unknowns" from the Army's Kokura mortuary ended efforts to identify them. They were disturbed only once. In May 1958, four were removed as nominees for the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery. After one was chosen, the others were re-buried.

And the issue of identifying Korean War remains went into storage along with boxes of classified information about the 8,100 men still missing.

In the intervening years, while no further work was done on the 866 left buried in Hawaii, U.S. forensic experts at CILHI have tried to identify other remains more recently exhumed in North Korea. In fact, negotiating with North Korea for remains still in that country's custody has taken precedence over virtually every other aspect of the Korean War POW/MIA issue.

The first postwar cases received by the CILHI laboratory were turned over beginning in 1990 by the North Koreans in return for millions of dollars that U.S. officials strained to define as "expenses" for North Korea's trouble. The money was in addition to the increased diplomatic standing the Pyongyang government believed it was achieving by dealing with members of the U.S. Congress and other official emissaries.

Washington's main goal was to add North Korea to the list of countries (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) that allow U.S. joint recovery teams to do their own excavations to recover remains.

Since 1996, under agreements laboriously renegotiated and renewed annually, some of CILHI's 13 joint recovery teams have traveled to North Korea several times a year. They have been allowed to dig in a single location north of Pyongyang while under armed guard by North Korean troops.

The ratio of success over the past decade has been very low: only five of the 208 excavated unilaterally by North Korea (which a CILHI analysis described as a "mess" of commingled and damaged bones that were shorter and older than the average U.S. soldier in Korea) were finally identified, and only a handful of the 60-70 exhumed in the past five years by U.S. teams.

Compounding the problem of poor wartime records, CILHI officials say, was a 1973 fire at a military records repository in St. Louis that officials say decimated Korean War personnel files. Dental X-rays, charts and diagrams for Korean War veterans are "virtually absent" because of the St. Louis fire, according to one federal report.

"About 90-plus percent of the original Korea (personnel) records were burned," says Holland. "What we're dealing with now are transcribed copies, which have even less detail than the original records."

But in the 1990s, the technique of using DNA to determine human identity came into prominence, holding out great promise for the next chapter in the saga of Korean War remains.

The new technology requires only a microscopic amount of DNA from a bone and a small blood sample from a relative to establish identity. When it can be applied, it is virtually foolproof, and a handful of Korean War cases - two so far this year - have been resolved thanks to DNA.

But it's far from a magic bullet. The major problems:

And inadequate dental records remain a stumbling block.

"If we get a skeleton," says Holland, "and take DNA, we can't just match it to everybody who's missing and see who it matches." The candidates must be narrowed down to five or ten individuals, and that requires dental and other records. Thus, DNA is only sometimes an option for newly excavated remains brought back from North Korea.

For those 866 cases buried at the Punchbowl in Hawaii, the outlook is even bleaker.

Until 1999, there was no plan to employ DNA on the Punchbowl remains at all. Two events changed that: in 1997, DNA tests on the Vietnam War remains buried in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington were determined to be Air Force Lt. Michael Blassie, and returned to his family; and in July 1998, the Pentagon received a formal request from a Korean War family member seeking to have the hundreds of Korean War "unknowns" group exhumed and tested using DNA.

The request was filed by Robert Dumas, the brother of Army Cpl. Roger A. Dumas, a Korean War POW who was never repatriated. His motivation wasn't personal. He doesn't think his brother is one of the "unknowns" buried in Hawaii (and Roger Dumas was not on the Operation Glory manifests.)

"I believe my brother Roger's still a prisoner in North Korea or China", says Dumas. "But it's not right for the Pentagon to keep silent about these men in the Punchbowl."

"They've known for a long time who those men are. They should finally do the right thing and finish the job and send them home to their families. After all, it's been nearly 50 years."

The plan CILHI devised to deal with the Punchbowl remains calls for incremental steps. "The idea," says Holland, "was that we weren't going to dig up 866 men and put them on a shelf in the laboratory." The plan was to "start slowly," he said, by ranking the cases in order based on the likelihood of identification, and disinterring the top two.