Photo By Staff Sgt. Emily Simonson | Oregon Army National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Nate Brushe, a recovery noncommissioned...... read more read more
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QUẢNG TRỊ, Vietnam - “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” The final line of the U.S. Army’s Warrior Ethos is a promise that all service members will find their way back to American soil.
Oregon National Guard Sgts. 1st Class Nathan Brushe and Brian Miller, with the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Emergency Response Force Package (CERFP), spent more than 45 days on an archaeological site in Vietnam working to fulfill that promise. From March to April, 2025, Brushe and Miller worked with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) recovery team to bring home a missing service member from the Vietnam War.
DPAA’s mission is to provide the fullest possible accounting for missing personnel to their families and the nation. There are currently 1,572 U.S. personnel still unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War.
Recovery mission sites are determined by historical records, findings from prior DPAA investigative teams, and interviews from possible eyewitness accounts. Based on the information DPAA gathers, recovery teams are sent out to excavate for missing personnel. These recovery teams are augmented by service members of all branches, fulfilling roles including linguists, medics, photographers, explosive ordnance disposal technicians, and recovery noncommissioned officers.
This mission was the first time the National Guard has supported DPAA. As Vietnam is partnered with the Oregon National Guard through the State Partnership Program, the Oregon National Guard has a special interest in aiding missions occurring in their partner country. So, Miller and Brushe joined the recovery efforts and got their hands dirty.
“The DPAA experience has been great,” Brushe said. “They’ve obviously been doing this a long time and they know what works and what doesn't. They point us in the right direction and we just go.”
Every day, the recovery team and local Vietnamese workers haul bucket after bucket of excavated material from the dig site to be wet-screened. Wet-screening is the method of utilizing a high-pressure water system to rinse away soil and identify anything that might lead to an identification.
“We’re looking for anything that isn’t dirt that will give us a clue,” Miller said. “So if it looks different…we just put it in the bucket.”
Anything that “isn’t dirt” is set aside for the life support investigator and forensic archaeologists to examine. They are looking for material that could be correlated with the missing personnel: pieces of uniform, safety gear, aircraft parts with legible serial numbers, and - if they are lucky - human remains.
One of DPAA’s forensic archaeologists, Rob Ingraham, has completed more than 30 DPAA recovery missions.
“There’s something about being able to provide answers and work closely with host nation personnel … in these kinds of environments at this sort of scale and pace that's both challenging and rewarding,” Ingraham said.
Anything recovered from the site still has a long way to go before the service member can be identified. The collected material is formally released by the host nation to the United States in a repatriation ceremony, and sent to the DPAA lab in Hawaii - the largest skeletal identification laboratory in the world - to be tested. The findings are reviewed by the Scientific Analysis Directorate of DPAA, and, hopefully, receive a positive identification.
Although results are never guaranteed, Miller and Brushe’s contribution to the mission is invaluable and their work continues to fulfill our nation’s promise.
| Date Taken: | 05.05.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 05.05.2025 14:12 |
| Story ID: | 497040 |
| Location: | VN |
| Web Views: | 152 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Oregon National Guard Augments DPAA for First Time in National Guard History, by SSG Emily Simonson, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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