Photo By Daniel Martinez | Military service members carry a casket off a C-17 Globemaster III with unidentified...... read more read more
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On a sunny day on the Offutt flightline the remains of unidentified service members in flag draped caskets are repatriated in an honorable carry ceremony where military pallbearers carry them off a C-17 Globemaster III, marking one step in the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency process.
Offutt’s DPAA facility, one of three core DPAA locations, coordinated the ceremony to pay tribute to these unidentified service members.
“The [honorable carry] mission is of utmost importance,” said Senior Airman Selina Flynn, 343rd Reconnaissance Squadron assistant wing datalink manager and noncommissioned officer in charge of the honorable carry team. “Returning our fellow service members home is a duty, honor, and a calling placed on all service members. My experience has been very rewarding.”
Flynn’s role is just one piece of a much larger puzzle for unknown service members who died while rendering their service.
Following the ceremony, each casket is carried to an awaiting vehicle, which then transports them to DPAA’s laboratory where the arduous identification process begins. The broader mission of the DPAA, with its headquarters based in Washington, D.C., is comprised of roughly 700 federal civilians, service members, and contractors and involves a wide range of coordinated efforts to ensure the dignified return of lost service members.
“The DPAA is tasked with the search, recovery and identification of missing service members from past conflicts,” said Dr. Carrie Brown, DPAA laboratory manager. “So, our job as an agency is to go out into the world and work alongside many partner organizations to bring home those who have fallen fighting for our nation. The laboratory is where all the scientific analysis takes place. We’re combining different aspects, different lines of evidence to try and match up a set of unknown remains with the name of folks who are missing.”
The DPAA on Offutt has a staff of approximately 70 people who specialize in a variety of different roles with the goal of identifying remains. Those roles include logistics, information technology, DNA sampling technicians, odontologists, anthropologists, life support investigators, evidence specialists, historians, and a data team.
The staff primarily works on cases from Europe, many of which are disinterments from 14 American Battle Monument Commission cemeteries in the European region.
“The bulk of our work right now is from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam,” Brown said. “The number unaccounted for from those conflicts is over 80,000. Through our disinterment program, which is a program where we disinter unknown remains from overseas American cemeteries, we are doing a lot of World War II and Korean conflict identifications.”
Excavations are also conducted around the world where whole bones, bone fragments, teeth, and military relics from the different conflict eras are recovered. When remains arrive at the laboratory for analysis they are accessioned, photographed, and a preliminary list of evidence is created.
Much of the work is visibly noticeable just past the entrance of their building where various skeletal remains are laid out on tables in a large, well lit bay area behind glass. According to Brown, up to 1,000 people are represented with approximately 40,000 individual bones. She added that most cases are completed within two to three years.
“We’re looking at all those little parts. We’re looking for whether we have human remains, do we have material evidence, a dog tag, a wallet, or something like that. Where did the remains come from? Do we need DNA?” Brown said. “We’re kind of overlapping all of those in the management team and deciding how to proceed with the analyses and then they get assigned out to our specialists.”
Since 2015, more than 750 unknowns have been identified from the Offutt team. So far this year the team accomplished 220 identifications surpassing their previous record of 217 in 2019.
DNA sampling, or family reference samples, are vital in the identification process where it’s compared with the DNA profile extracted from unknown remains. Military casualty offices encourage family members of missing service members to provide DNA samples.
“DNA is one of our more heavily used lines of evidence,” she said. “Remains are sampled at the DPAA laboratory and then they are sent to the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System DNA Identification Laboratory at AFMES AFDIL (Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory) at Dover Air Force Base then for sequencing.”
Brown said that once enough information is available to make a scientifically legal identification, they’ll move forward in the process.
“It’s not a question of how much in terms of quantity of skeletal remains or teeth, it’s how much evidence do we have to say that that person matches those set of remains to the exclusion of all other reasonable possibilities,” she said.
When the team is confident in their findings and a name is provided to a set of remains, the medical examiner will write a report and provide an official death certificate. The announcement is then provided to the corresponding service casualty office. The family is notified and briefed on the identification of the member. They will then decide what to do with the remains where they will also receive full military honors.
For National POW/MIA Recognition Day, the significance of the work DPAA accomplishes is not lost on Brown and what it means to the families of missing loved ones.
“It signals, for me, to anyone currently serving, who will serve in the future, that the United States of America will come and find you, no matter how hard or how long,” Brown said. “We are committed to the mission of never leaving behind a fallen comrade.”
| Date Taken: | 09.19.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 09.19.2025 15:49 |
| Story ID: | 548778 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 16 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, The long road home: Putting a name to the fallen, by Daniel Martinez, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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