The Department of Defense will meet with families of missing service members this weekend in San Diego.
Nearly 300 people are expected at the San Diego Marriott Mission Valley Saturday, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., to hear an update about their lost loved ones from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
The agency is charged with finding the remains of members of the U.S. military lost in World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War. Closure is still important, even among families of World War II veterans, said Kelly McKeague, director.
“We find many second and third generation families know as much about their loved one, their great-grandfather, their great-uncle," McKeague said. "It’s as important to them, as it was to their great-grandmother.”
This is the fourth time the agency has held one of their regional meetings in San Diego. Families receive individual updates, like the case of a woman whose husband who was last seen standing guard at a post in Vietnam, McKeague said.
“He may have had malaria as some of his comrades in arms were," McKeague said. "He may have wondered off from the post. That's all we know and have been able to piece together.”
Families are sometimes asked to give DNA samples. DNA has been key to their recent successes like the recovery of the remains of Marines at Tarawa 70 years after the battle in the Pacific.
“Time is our biggest enemy. As witnesses die. As soil conditions erode the bones, it becomes very challenging endeavor,” McKeague said.
They recovered recovered 183 bodies in 2017, which is a high since the new agency was created in 2015 out of three separate government offices which dealt with recovered remains. In the past, there have been complaints of bureaucratic slowdowns and backlogs. The agency has become more efficient in the past three years, McKeague said.
In recent conflicts, the U.S. military has become more diligent in recovering lost remains. During 17 years in Afghanistan, no member of the U.S. military was lost on the battlefield, he said.
The task is still large. Factoring out those presumed lost at sea, the agency estimates potentially 34,000 American service members are still out there, waiting to be found.
