DNA lab unlocks secrets of soldiers' identity

New technology helping to identify thousands of remains

HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii—The bones -- some merely fragments, others aligned into full skeletons -- are laid out neatly on tables in the Central Identification Laboratory, tucked away in a corner of this vast tropical military base.

It is here, in the largest forensic laboratory in the world, that a team of anthropologists are using cutting-edge science to identify thousands of military personnel whose remains have been retrieved from distant battlefields or exhumed from the graves of unknown soldiers.

"The technology has come so far," says Johnie E. Webb Jr., deputy director of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. "We are identifying remains today because of DNA that we have had in the lab since the mid 1980s."

But the large number of unidentified bones laid out in the glass-enclosed room one recent morning -- and the thousands more in storage -- also attest to the enormity of the task and the scientific challenges that persist.

Most of the bones were turned over by the governments of North Korea and Vietnam decades after the wars, with little or no information about where they were excavated. Others have been recovered on far-flung battlefields by more than a dozen teams of active-duty military personnel dedicated to locating the remains of soldiers missing in action.

On one table lies the remnants of a mass grave of US soldiers from the Korean War. On another are bones of a World War II pilot who died on a jungle training mission on the nearby Hawaiian island of Oahu.

The lab also has 1,000 boxes of unidentified remains and unresolved cases -- roughly 40 percent from the Korean War, 40 percent from the Vietnam War, and 20 percent from World War II.

Some boxes might contain four or five individuals, while one individual's remains might be in four or five boxes.

For example, among the remains are almost certainly those of several hundred non-American Asians who likely died fighting US forces.

Other remains were turned over by Vietnam with only the province where they were found. Of the 208 boxes North Korea turned over between 1990 and 1994, many contain the remains of multiple individuals.

Untangling these remains -- let alone analyzing new ones brought in from the field -- "makes it anthropologically challenging," says Dr. Thomas H. Sprague, a senior forensic anthropologist at the lab. "First you have to decide is it human or not. Then, how many people do you have?"

Identifying remains with DNA is commonly accomplished by matching an individual's genetic sequence to a sample provided by a surviving family member, if one exists. (In one rare instance a missing pilot was identified by matching his DNA to the saliva on a postage stamp he used to mail a letter home to his girlfriend.)

Dental identifications, on the other hand, are made by matching tell-tale signs on the teeth such as fillings or other repairs to the suspected individual's military dental record.

"The reason we still do [dental identification] is it is much quicker," adds Webb. "Doing DNA analysis is an expensive process, especially when you are trying to get [strands] from remains that have been out in the elements 50 or 60 years, some of them exposed to fire and airplane crashes."

Indeed, the success of efforts since the 1990s to extract DNA from some remains has been mixed, particularly for the thousands of unknown soldiers from the Korean War.

For example, after 10 unknown soldiers from Korea were exhumed from a military cemetery in Hawaii the lab discovered that, before they were originally buried, they were covered with a powdery preservative that destroyed the genetic code. Thus, the laboratory was only able to identify six out of 10 individuals who were exhumed -- and all of those through dental records, not DNA.

In all, the lab has been able to identify only 92 soldiers out of the estimated 7,800 missing from the Korean War -- even though it has DNA samples from 60 percent of families who are waiting for word of a relative missing in action.

There are other impediments to using DNA, such as the highly acidic soil in parts of Vietnam that speeds the decay of human remains -- one reason why MIA recoveries in Vietnam have been treated with greater urgency over the years than older World War II cases.

But the recovery command hopes that as the ability to extract DNA from bones advances further so will their ability to identify many more soldiers.

In the meantime, the recovery command is expanding its outreach efforts to families of the missing to help build a much more extensive DNA database.

Until DNA identifications become easier, though, the lab will continue to rely on dental records.

"The bones are more difficult," says Sprague. "The dental ID is still the gold standard."

Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.