Laid to rest: DPAA brings record number of service members home

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Rachelle Blake
  • 55th Wing Public Affairs

At roughly one-third the size of the pentagon, the largest building on base, was originally the Glen L. Martin assembly plant built in the 1940s. Among their productions were B-29 bombers including the Enola Gay and Bockscar.

The former assembly plant, aside from its sheer size, cleverly disguises the many unique units it houses with its monotone paint job and scarce windows. But tucked away at the end of a hall is a growing team whose sole purpose is to return fallen service members to their families.

“It is an amazing turn of events that this is the building where the plane that dropped the bomb that ended WWII was built, and we are now using it to identify the guys that died that first day of WWII,” said Dr. Carrie Brown, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency forensic anthropologist and USS Oklahoma project lead. “It is a historical coincidence.”

In fiscal year 2017 alone, DPAA’s accredited laboratory, housed out of here and Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, made 201 identifications. This marks a milestone for the organization since its inception in 2015.

Furthermore, they show no signs of slowing down.

The larger Pacific location is where the unit’s one identification authority sits and signs death certificates, but the workload is shared between the two. Currently, Offutt’s three biggest cases are the USS Oklahoma, Battle of Buna Gona and Operation Tidal Wave.

“We are proposing five to six identifications a month,” said Dr. Franklin Damann, DPAA laboratory director and forensic anthropologist. “That is our goal and we are well on our way to meeting the five year plan we set for the USS Oklahoma.”

Of the 62 caskets disinterred from the Hawaii Punch Bowl Cemetery’s USS Oklahoma plots, 99 have been identified. This was no easy feat, as the bundles within the caskets were comingled and the staff needed to overcome this huge obstacle was limited. 

“When I arrived in September of 2015 we had one anthropologist,” Damann said. “Our total staff is now pushing 30 and I hope to have more by the end of the calendar year.”

Among the new hires are additional support staff who will mirror the Air Force’s push to relieve Airmen of additional duties and let them focus on the mission.

Also on the horizon are technological advances with how the lab stores data. In early March they hope to unveil a new laboratory informational management system.

“We are going from everything being paper based to digitally based,” Damann said. “Right now I have to sort through actual paper files and records and what one person describes one way, another analyst may describe slightly differently. Within our new database there our data entry will be standardized will only be one or two ways you can describe something, and then it’s easy to identify patterns in the observations.”

With more than 82,000 unaccounted for from WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam and the Cold War, all these new changes are set to streamline the identification process and send the lab well on the way to their end goal – returning every POW/MIA possible, to their family.