QUẢNG TRỊ, Vietnam - “I will never leave a fallen comrade.”
That 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, 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 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. Recovery teams excavate for missing personnel based on the information DPAA gathers. Service members of all military branches are on the recovery teams, filling roles such as linguists, medics, photographers, explosive ordnance disposal technicians and recovery noncommissioned officers.
This mission was the first time the National Guard had supported DPAA. Because Vietnam is partnered with the Oregon National Guard through the Department of Defense National Guard Bureau State Partnership Program, the Oregon National Guard has a special interest in aiding missions occurring in its partner country.
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.”
Each day, the recovery team and local Vietnamese workers hauled bucket after bucket of excavated material from the dig site to be wet-screened. Wet-screening uses 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 connected with the missing personnel, such as 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 host nation formally releases the collected material to the United States in a repatriation ceremony. The material is then sent for testing to the DPAA lab in Hawaii, the largest skeletal identification laboratory in the world. The findings are reviewed by the Scientific Analysis Directorate of DPAA and, hopefully, receive an 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.