Episode 31. POW/MIA: US Efforts to Find the Missing and Recover the Fallen with General Kelly McKeague and Ambassador Charles Ray

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy: [00:00:10] Welcome to a conversation in this series, The General and the Ambassador. I am Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, the host of the series. In our discussion today, we will focus on the work and commitment of the Department of Defense to account for missing personnel from past conflicts around the globe. Today, our guests are Major General Kelly McKeague and Ambassador Charles Ray. General McKeague is the director of the Defense POW Mia Accounting Agency called DPAA. He served 34 years in the US Air Force. In his last two assignments in the Air Force, he served as deputy director of the DPAA and then was commander of the Joint POW Mia Accounting Command at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-hickam in Hawaii. Ambassador Charles Ray served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense for POW Mia personnel Affairs from 2006 to 2009. He was assigned to the Department of Defense while still a diplomat after serving as ambassador to Cambodia Before becoming a diplomat, Ambassador Ray served 20 years in the United States Army, including two tours in Vietnam during the war. In its mission, the DPAA works closely with our embassies overseas to get information about the missing, to access sites, to conduct searches and to recover and repatriate any remains. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming to talk about this important effort by our government. It is an issue I take to heart as my father, a former King's Point graduate, did the same work years ago in retirement to help account for missing members of our merchant marine who were lost at sea during World War II and to get them veteran status. I wanted to start with the following. The DPAA is trying to trace missing Department of Defense personnel, both civilian and military, from World War Two through Operation Iraqi Freedom. General McKeague, How many missing are there? How many are unaccounted for from the different conflicts to include the Cold War?

Gen. McKeague: [00:02:07] I think most people would be surprised that the number is over 82,000. Wow. 72,000 of those come from World War Two. 7700 from the Korean War. Vietnam. We still have 1589 missing. And then for the Cold War, it's 126. While the majority of these are Department of Defense personnel, we also have about 908 civilians. Four from CIA, one from State. He was a USAID worker that crashed in Vietnam and we're still looking for him. I would also note that in the last year we also found and accounted for three CIA personnel from Laos, which was a big deal.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:02:51] We'll get into how you go about finding accounting, bringing remains back. Well, one of the things I wanted to also touch upon for our audience is the fact that the map of the world has changed since some of these conflicts began. The map of Europe changed some parts of Europe where some of our missing are reportedly located are in independent countries, whereas before they were part of the Soviet Union. Which countries across the globe does DPAA work with today to account for the missing?

Gen. McKeague: [00:03:24] So we have relationships with 46 different countries that span the globe. Today alone, we have 221 individuals deployed in seven countries Germany, the Netherlands, Laos, Vietnam, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Just today alone.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:03:43] That is a global enterprise. I understand that in early years we were looking for a narrower set of missing personnel, I believe. Charlie, during your time there was a shift of emphasis from certain conflicts to a broader set of conflicts, if I understand correctly.

Amb. Ray: [00:04:01] Well, it was actually just before I became deputy assistant secretary in 2006 when the mission first started on sort of a mass national level, It was primarily focused on Vietnam. And this was in part due to the efforts of the families of those who were unaccounted for in Vietnam, who pressured the government to give some kind of accounting. Once that became public knowledge, there are still a lot of surviving families from World War Two, and the Korean conflict also wanted to have some kind of closure. And in some of the cases, it was more of a bureaucratic oversight that they hadn't gotten closure than any deliberate effort. When I assumed the job and the predecessor to the DPAA was called DPMO or the Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office, which was a semi-independent office, not quite the status of an agency that was responsible for coordinating policy, for outreach to family members and for basically sort of keeping the statistics, if you will. When I assumed the job in July of 2006, we had assumed responsibility in addition to Vietnam for the Korean War. World War Two. For the Cold War, or for those people missing during Cold War missions, and also for conflicts up to that point in time, which included the first Gulf War and the attack on Libya, where we lost a pilot on the first day of the conflict. I believe we had a pilot on one of the flights that went down. They thought first in the ocean. But later, an interesting sidelight, that case was resolved. The remains were found and the individual was identified on my last day on the job in 2009. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:05:54] Oh, my goodness. Well, this global enterprise, as I'm calling it, the DPAA has you mentioned you have 221 people scattered across the globe. Can you talk a little bit, both of you, about how this process takes place? Because it involves having people in place, getting permissions, looking, gathering information, excavations. It's quite a huge operation.

Gen. McKeague: [00:06:17] It is. So we have 720 military and civilian personnel from all disciplines. We have historians, we have anthropologists, odontologists, forensic dentists. And it's a very linear process in that it begins with the research and historical background that will hopefully allow a location to be narrowed from which then an excavation team could be sent. And these excavation teams are led by an anthropologist or archaeologists. They will operate in terrestrial settings on the sides of mountains as well as underwater. And then, assuming they find remains, the remains come back to the largest human skeletal forensic laboratory system in the world. Our scientists use cutting edge forensic analysis at labs in Honolulu and Omaha, Nebraska.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:07:07] Was this similar to the process when you were there?

Amb. Ray: [00:07:10] In essence, the process is still pretty much the same cases researched exhaustively to try and narrow down as finely as possible potential location so that teams can go in. And in some places this is really problematic. In Vietnam, for example, which is a very geologically active country, a set of remains on the ground over a period of 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 years can have moved as much as half a kilometer or more because of the shifting of the earth and because a lot of the missing were air crashes. You have small, literally fragments of remains. So you're talking about finding a needle in a haystack. You're talking about finding a particular straw in a haystack in many cases. The other process, I would assume, still the same. We negotiate with the government to get into the area, usually with government assistance. And Vietnam, for example, the Vietnamese have a very active organization that not only assists, but General McKeague and I were recently at a forum where we discussed this with our Vietnamese counterparts who were there. They actually sometimes go out and unilaterally handle cases for us.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:08:25] Oh, really? That's quite a level of cooperation.

Gen. McKeague: [00:08:28] We've developed that capability over time. So this past December, we just commemorated the 30th anniversary of sustained operations and cooperation with the Vietnamese. Over time, as Ambassador Ray mentioned, we have developed unilateral capability. Now there are four teams. Next year there will be eight teams. And these Vietnamese led teams are doing some incredible work. You might have heard about a case in Halong Bay. This island could only be reached by a two hour boat trip. It took 2.5 hours to climb to the top where a naval aviator was located. And this was all done by the Vietnamese. And they found Lieutenant Lanham this past year, and he was just buried in Union, Tennessee. His widow is still alive. But that was all accomplished, as Ambassador Ray said, by a unilateral Vietnamese team.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:09:21] Were all countries across the globe as cooperative as Vietnam?

Amb. Ray: [00:09:24] I'll let General McKeague talk about the current situation, but as it is today, the Vietnamese have been in Asia definitely the most cooperative and in many senses I would say probably the most cooperative anywhere on the globe for us at the time. Many of the Western European countries, the Netherlands, for example, are cooperative. But you have the problem there. A lot of the sites of the missing are now under shopping malls or under the autobahn. And so you have an issue of being able to get access. And I think some of the Pacific Island countries were also relatively cooperative. We never had really much problems with the governments there. You had issues. The Russians, for example, during my time, you had the resurgence of Russian nationalism. And so our joint committee, which had been working fairly effectively, was put in mothballs. And we spent countless hours negotiating with the Russians to reinvigorate that.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:10:23] And we still have that commission. Is that correct?

Gen. McKeague: [00:10:25] We do. It's been in place for 26 years. It is the only military to military engagement that the Department of Defence allows today. Ambassador Huntsman tells a great story. He says, you know, other than you, POW MIA, and NASA, he says, I don't have much to talk about with the Russians.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:10:42] At least on this critical issue of finding our missing. They are cooperating.

Gen. McKeague: [00:10:47] I would add to Ambassador Ray's point that in terms of cooperation, most countries admire the United States for this work. They look at it as a humanitarian endeavor, and most countries are more than welcome to assist. Now, they do have their unique permitting requirements. Some have sensitivities when it comes to any archaeological activity in their in their space. And some have issues with any kind of remains, transfers that come out of the country. I see. But again, these are all able to be worked. There is one outlier. I think that's why Ambassador Ray chuckled is North Korea. So we operated with the North Koreans for ten years and that ended in 2005. And we've yet to be able to get back and negotiate an arrangement with the North Koreans, as had been done for ten years. You'll recall that President Trump was able to secure a commitment from Chairman Kim. And so today we remain open that at some point the North Korean government will realize and want to fulfill that commitment made by their chairman.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:11:56] And I understand in that summit, the chairman agreed for the return of certain remains how many have been returned. And it's a very long process to identify them, correct?

Gen. McKeague: [00:12:08] It is so last August 1st, to be exact, Vice President Pence repatriated. He was the officiating dignitary that brought home.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:12:18] It was the vice president.

VP Pence: [00:12:19] "And we are gathered here at this honorable Kerry ceremony. To receive 55 flag draped cases, which we trust include the remains of American heroes who fell in the Korean War. Some have called the Korean War the forgotten war. But today we prove these heroes were never forgotten. Today, our boys are coming home." 

Gen. McKeague: [00:12:50] And so those 55 boxes are not 55 individual skeletons. They're co-mingled, they're degraded. And to date, we've identified six of those individuals. And the reason we were able to do those six fairly quickly because of the degraded remains was because we had either dental remains in the boxes or we had clavicles, their collarbones. Your collarbone is as unique as a fingerprint. And if we have it and we can compare it against an x ray, that's a line of evidence that we utilize to identify an individual.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:13:23] And to help identify the individuals. You have information from the families, DNA samples. But some family members are removed by several generations. How does that work? To help identify remains 

Gen. McKeague: [00:13:35] DNA has come a long ways. The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory at Dover, Delaware, is the preeminent forensic DNA laboratory in the world. They have patented techniques and technologies that are yielding DNA for very degraded, formaldehyde soaked remains. They're also able to go back for generations. And if we can have a family reference sample from four generations removed, they can still utilize that to make an identification.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:14:05] That's extraordinary.

Amb. Ray: [00:14:06] If I can add to that, during my tenure, we were able to identify a set of remains found in France that dated to World War One through matching the DNA from the remains to the DNA of a female cousin who hadn't been born when the person went missing. The mitochondrial DNA is fairly stable. And if you have DNA from a female relative, you can pretty well narrow down the remains to a I won't say an individual, but the odds are that if the mitochondrial DNA matches, there is a familial tie.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:14:46] Well, in terms of obtaining just information about the missing, there may not be any remains. Can you talk a little bit of how this process takes place in a country, how you go with what information you've been able to gather through, the historians and others, how you work through the embassies to get access or go into archives or whatever, and let alone bringing something back so that you can bring closure to a family.

Amb. Ray: [00:15:12] If I could, going back to what General McKeague said about peculiarities of individual countries and considering our current state of relations with China vis a vis trade, during my time, we actually concluded, and I think the negotiations took almost ten years, an agreement whereby the Chinese allowed us access to the People's Liberation Army Archives, and it was the first time that a foreigner from any country had been allowed into the archives. There was an interesting video that they used for a while as a promo video of me visiting the PLA archives and being welcomed by the director where they allowed us access to documents from the World War II period and a few during the Korean War that helped to identify some World War Two and Korean War era losses that occurred in areas where the Chinese were operating.

Gen. McKeague: [00:16:08] That collaboration still bearing fruit. We just had an investigation team in Hunan Province in China really complete a field investigation because of that archival collaboration. They looked at two World War two crash sites in Hunan Province last month alone.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:16:25] And the teams stayed there a while. As they continue to gather information.

Gen. McKeague: [00:16:31] Most investigation teams are in-country anywhere from 30 to 45 days, and most excavation teams are in country 45 to 60 days.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:16:40] Have you ever had an issue where you've gathered information, you're ready to bring it home and all of a sudden you can't take it out or you have to have extra diplomatic negotiations to bring it home?

Amb. Ray: [00:16:51] A World War Two air crash in the Himalayas had been spotted after an avalanche had opened up an area and this plane had been missing since World War Two. One of those that worked in the China-Burma-India Theater and flying supplies. We negotiated with the Indians to get permission to go into this area to do the excavation. The Indian government, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and one other ministry all agreed. And we were getting the team from Hawaii prepared to go in to start the initial excavation when suddenly we were informed that the state in which the site was located hadn't been coordinated with. And they had a Very strict, very specific regimen on the movement of human remains. And until they were satisfied and until all of their boxes had been checked, no team would set foot on the ground. And I think that was eventually sorted out. But it was sorted out after my departure because we had to then go back to square one with the negotiations starting all over with the level below the national government. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:18:03] You can't do it all at the national level. You have to coordinate with local authorities and maybe private sector companies. 

Amb. Ray: [00:18:09] Depends on the country you're in. I mean, some countries in Vietnam, for example, you have to be sensitive to local governments and local people. But once the Vietnamese government in Hanoi makes a decision, that is the decision. In India, it's different. Delhi makes the decision, but Mumbai vetoes it. 

Gen. McKeague: [00:18:29] And we've seen that in China, where the federal government in Beijing will say yes and we'll run into difficulties at the provincial level. But it's no different in the United States. I mean, we still have that state sovereignty issue. We run into these issues in France and Italy, where the mayor will be the fulcrum, the center of gravity versus what you may get from the capital.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:18:53] I see.

Gen. McKeague: [00:18:53] And so we work closely. Again, the embassy, the country team is the one that helps us sort of navigate this minefield of which box to check, which permit to get, and more importantly, which official and which department needs to be satisfied. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:19:10] I wanted to ask you, Charlie, about your time in Vietnam, since you went back after you were a soldier there and you were the consul general in Ho Chi Minh City during your time. As I understand it, people would arrive at the consulate with quote unquote, bags of bones, claim they were Americans and want to sell them. Is that correct?

Amb. Ray: [00:19:28] Yeah. And it was not just in Vietnam. I was also the consul in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand in the 1980s, and I was ambassador to Cambodia in 2002. And in all three of those locations in Vietnam, you probably had more than in the other two. Every few months you would have someone show up and sometimes it would be a matchbox with a few bone fragments in it. And other times it might be a shoe box claiming that these were the remains of Americans that they'd found in wanting to be paid for them, to use them as validation to apply for a visa. There were all kinds of reasons. You sometimes had Americans show up with bones. I remember in particular on a holiday, I had been alerted that an American member of Congress, of the House of Representatives would be arriving at my location on the holiday, wanted to see me on an issue having to do with the Vietnam War. Very hush hush. It was no press coverage. I was to basically keep it from most of my staff. In fact, the only members of my staff who were made aware was my deputy principal officer, My public affairs officer, the senior INS official, because we use his space for the meeting. It was the biggest space we had. The Congress person showed up and having been told there was a press embargo, I was a bit shocked to see a reporter from the local paper paper present, and this member of Congress then presented me with three boxes bigger than a breadbox, but smaller than a coffin.

Amb. Ray: [00:21:05] So these were the remains of three US soldiers missing in Vietnam and wanted immediate identification and settlement of the remains. And I tried to explain you can't do immediate identification. It's impossible. Then I get that. Well, but you use DNA. And I said, Well, tell me where the remains were found. Couldn't do that. That's hush hush. Well, if you can't tell me where they were found, you just ensure that it will be a long, long time. You know, you have to have some idea of where they are to even know which family members to approach for possible DNA. This went back and forth. At some point in the conversation, the member of Congress informed me that these were pretty complete remains. I mean, these are full skeletons, so that should be easy and was very upset when I said if these are full remains, there is about a 90% chance they are not missing from the war because we have very, very few full skeletons from the Vietnam War air crash. You don't have full skeletons, but even a lot of the ground losses, just the shifting of the earth, made it hard to do a complete skeleton, which didn't endear me to this member of Congress who immediately came back to Washington and trashed me with the State Department for being unpatriotic.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:22:24] And you survived?

Amb. Ray: [00:22:26] Oh, I survived. Especially when a year later, the anthropologists from Hawaii identified the three boxes and four skeletons as being elderly Vietnamese.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:22:37] They were local people.

Amb. Ray: [00:22:38] Some graves had been robbed and sold to this congresspersons constituents who then made the contact. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:22:46] Well, continuing on Vietnam, I believe, General, you mentioned that we have roughly 1700 that remain missing or unaccounted for. But within that group, there's a small subset of individuals who were last seen alive at a certain point during the war. How do you sift and distill rumors about sightings? And I gather there have been a number of these over the years.

Gen. McKeague: [00:23:11] So, first of all, we have no credible evidence that any American is being held or was held against their will either since the War ended or even to this day. Over time, as Ambassador Ray pointed out, there were over 2000 live sightings. These mainly came from refugees who at one point said, I remember seeing an American. We resolved most of those. The subset you're referring to is what's known as the last known alive. These are individuals who were last seen in close proximity to enemy forces and who never came home in 1973. Those are our highest priority. There are 296 of them, and we work closely with both the governments of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and dedicate an investigation and research effort toward resolving those cases. To date, we have that number, that original 296 whittled down to 45 individuals that are still left to be resolved.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:24:11] That's a lot of progress. 

Gen. McKeague: [00:24:12] It is. And in many cases, of those 296 we either found remains or determined that the individual was killed in action. 

Amb. Ray: [00:24:21] The rumor mill in regards to this issue operates in hyperdrive. Sometimes the well.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:24:27] People hope forever.

Amb. Ray: [00:24:28] It's not even just hope. In fact, I found it easier to deal with family members who had thought maybe their relative was still alive, but who were willing to listen. What I was most frustrated by were the what I call the professional rumor mongers who had picked up this issue for some reason and who constantly flogged it. I see. And who take advantage of the fact that if you speak loudly enough and what you say is audacious enough, you'll get a few people to listen. One of the examples was an individual who talked about an underground prison. Near a famous tourist site in Vietnam, where about 15 or 20 Americans were being held as late as about 2000. And I encountered him at a meeting of what might have been a family member meeting, or it might have been a veterans group meeting. But he got up and he basically shouted this out. And there were a few heads nodding, but most people were looking at him in shock. And then I responded to him. I just had not that long before been consul general in Ho Chi Minh City, which is located not too far from the area he was describing, which has a famous religious site there, the Cao Dai Temple that I visited on at least 4 or 5 occasions. And I had walked over the very spot and he described the spot very vividly. I mean, you could find it with your eyes closed. And I remarked that in a country as small as Vietnam, 15 people in an underground cell, if it was properly ventilated, especially, it would have to be if they'd been there that long, it would be pretty hard to conceal when you have probably a thousand tourists a day trampling over that area going to visit the temple. Later someone came up and thanked me for shutting this character up. I mean, I was greeted my first week on the job by a YouTube video that was posted online that accused me of being a war criminal who was complicit with the government's program to keep from the American people how we had betrayed them by leaving prisoners.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:26:41] That was disinformation in the early years when my father worked on the issue of missing members of the US Merchant Marine many years ago, he told me the hardest yet the most rewarding part of his work was talking to the families. At times, the team he worked with could give them closure at others, they could not. Gen McKeague, Can you tell us how the DPA today stays in touch with families and keeps them informed?

Gen. McKeague: [00:27:05] Know exactly what your father was talking about. This is a very visceral issue for families. Not only are they dealing with the grief associated with the loss of their loved one, but what exacerbates that grief is the uncertainty attached to it. And, you know, as he pointed out, it's a double edged sword. Time does not heal for these families. It is generational from the standpoint that memories and stories have been passed down. You'll talk to a great grand niece today, and it's as if you're talking to her great grandmother about her loved one. So for us, we exist to serve them. I mean, this is a fulfillment of a promise made by the nation to the service member or American who we sent off to combat never returned. But it's also a fulfillment of a promise made to the families. And so we actively cultivate relationships with them. We host seven regional updates where we provide them a one on one case analysis of their loved ones. We host annual meetings here in D.C. for both the Vietnam War families as well as the Korean War and Cold War families. And then we also have a very active family Web site that allows them to post pictures, whereas also to find out.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:28:19] On the website. It's really good.

Gen. McKeague: [00:28:20] It is. And I would add that Ambassador Ray talked about them earlier. The National League of Families is the preeminent, most influential organization of families out there. They were on the forefront of this effort, as Ambassador Ray talked about earlier back in the early 80s. They were petitioning both the White House as well as the Congress that this issue needed to be resolved. And this year they will celebrate their 50th anniversary. But, you know, they came at it from both a policy standpoint, which was interesting, that it wasn't just playing on the emotions, but they used it as a tool of diplomacy and tool of engagement. We actually cooperation with Vietnam on this issue predated normalization by ten years. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:29:12] And most people don't know that at all.

Gen. McKeague: [00:29:14] People don't know that.

Amb. Ray: [00:29:15] We had an American team on the ground in Hanoi working this issue with the Vietnamese government before we had a liaison office in Hanoi. And in fact, this team welcomed our liaison office people to Hanoi when they were sent there to begin the process of opening diplomatic relations.

Gen. McKeague: [00:29:34] But for the Vietnamese, I think they realized that this was an issue important to America. And cooperating with America may have led to normalization .

Amb. McCarthy: [00:29:44] Was probably part of the process.

Gen. McKeague: [00:29:46] It was it was. 

Amb. Ray: [00:29:47] Definitely part of the process. And it wasn't just a one sided thing either. What a lot of people don't know is in addition to helping us to resolve our cases of unaccounted personnel, the flip side of that is that at the same time, we also agreed to help the Vietnamese with prosthetics and with assistance to people who had been injured by unexploded ordnance. You see, we actually had two way cooperation going between the US and Vietnam again before we even had the beginnings of diplomatic relationships. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:30:21] Well, to wrap up, I wanted to ask if you can share any examples of working with families to bring closure.

Amb. Ray: [00:30:28] I think probably my most memorable encounter with a family member. I go back to my time in Vietnam in 1968 69. The organization that I was assigned to was responsible for cross border reconnaissance operations into Cambodia and Laos, and I worked in the Cambodia program. One of the last teams dispatched into Cambodia before my tour ended and I came back to the US, was attacked and some members were killed. We got the bodies back, but the team leader got separated from the team and was last seen fading into the bush and had been declared missing. It just so happened that I knew this team leader personally in a very colorful reputation and at a family meeting probably the year before my tour ended, I met his sister, who was an infant at the time he went missing because I made it a point. I went to every family event that we had wherever in the country. I spent a lot of time on airplanes during my tenure there to be able to sit and explain to her that I knew her brother and I knew the circumstances and that the stories that she had heard, that he was somehow still alive but couldn't make his way back to the US were completely unfounded.

Amb. Ray: [00:31:50] First of all, if this individual with the personality he had was still alive, we would have known about it because there would have been a trail of Viet Cong bodies and he would have made his way home, but also because of the way. The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong viewed our organization. If they got their hands on one of our people, survival was not a possibility. And to see, as General McKeague said, not so much a sense of closure because they still didn't know for sure, but at least a sense of sort of I know more now. This is somewhat comforting. I don't have to go through life with this myth hanging over me. That moment sitting across the table from this young woman who was in her late 20s at the time and who would have been an infant still in diapers at the time of the incident is one that sort of sticks with me.

Gen. McKeague: [00:32:44] There may be 82,000 missing Americans, but those are 82,000 unique stories. And so whenever you run into a family member, whether we found and identified them or they're still hoping and waiting, it touches you in many, many ways. One that I would share with you is we had a NGO, by the way, we have 40 of these private organizations that we work with. It's an authority Congress gave us in 2015. And these are universities, NGOs that allow us to expand our capacity and capability. So that's something we're very excited about. But this one particular NGO had been working in Kiribati on Tarawa. They happened to find a long lost cemetery that nobody had found in decades. They determined that it was this cemetery 27. They ended up bringing back and finding excavating 34 Marines buried in a trench, fully preserved skeletons. The soil conditions in Kiribati were such that they were fully preserved skeletons. One of the 34 was a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, Lieutenant Alexander Bonnyman. We bring those back to Hawaii. They're brought back on four Marine C-130s, 34 flag draped caskets. Our scientists had determined Lieutenant Bonnemains. Identification based upon his unique dental work. And because it was so. Unique, they knew it was him. Well, we hadn't identified any of the 34, but we knew which one was presumed to be Alexander Bonnyman.

Gen. McKeague: [00:34:19] Wouldn't you know that Ironically, his daughter Alex was two years old when her dad went missing? She happened to live on Maui. She came to Honolulu. She's part of this ceremony of watching these 34 flag draped caskets come off the plane, lined up in a hangar. And we ended up telling her, after all was said and done, This one is where your dad is. So Touching for us from the standpoint that she had a lei and she went up and she put the lay on and had some time with her dad. That story is indicative of so many others. This past year, we just identified the first of 27 Tuskegee Airmen, really? Captain Lawrence Dixon found in Italy. His daughter Marla, was two and a half when her dad went missing. We ended up finding Captain Dixon's ring that had inscribed his anniversary date, his mom's initials, and Marla was wearing it the day her dad was buried around her neck. He was a musician. We also found his harmonica. But whether it's Alex Bonnyman or Marla Andrews, every story is unique. Every story just touches your heart. And it makes you recognize that why this country does this so vigorously, I think defines us as a country. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:35:44] I think it does. I think it's unique. I think it's extraordinary. We are unrelenting in the pursuit of answers.

Gen. McKeague: [00:35:50] And it's a whole of government approach. We work hand in glove with the US ambassadors, with the country teams all across the globe, and we recognize that this hand and glove effort is what is that fulfillment of the promise made. This past March, we just had the very first repatriation in Myanmar, and for Ambassador Marciel, this was a big deal for him. You know, there's not much happening with Myanmar government, but for him having this very visible, tangible cooperation and which, as you can imagine, both the Myanmar military and government officials were very proud to both have participated in the recovery effort, but more importantly, to honor these Americans coming home in the repatriation.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:36:37] Well, gentlemen, I want to thank you very much for the hard work that you continue to do, General, that you continue to do, Ambassador, on this very important issue. Families are the most important thing of public service. Sometimes we focus on the individuals who are serving, but their families are an extremely important part. And in seeking to find answers as to what happened to their family members is part of what our country does. Thank you so much. Thank you. If you like this podcast, please give us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. This program is a special project on the partnership between our senior military leaders and our senior diplomats of the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. Past episodes with our outstanding guests can be found on all major podcast hosting sites as well as on our website: GeneralandAmbassadorPodcast.Org.