Government Accountability Office review of the prisoner of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) community and the restructuring of these agencies as proposed by the Department of Defense : hearing before the Subcommittee on Military Personnel of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, One Hundred Thirteenth Congress, second session, hearing held July 14, 2014.

Last year the Subcommittee on Military Personnel held a hearing that highlighted the dysfunction and the challenges that plagued the POW/MIA accounting community within the Department of Defense. As a result, Secretary Hagel asked Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Lumpkin to lead the effort to resolve the many issues that confront this community. The Secretary proposed to establish a single defense agency to consolidate and coordinate the vast activities that fall under the purview of the POW/MIA accounting community. While the consolidation and the establishment of a defense agency is a positive first step, it is important for us to understand what the final agency will be comprised of; how will the transformation and the consolidation of activities, personnel, and resources be accomplished, and what the timeline for these actions will be; and what is really a fair timetable for the Department to accomplish the proposal, and for the Congress and the American people to be able to hold the agency accountable for the increased transparency with respect to the reporting and identification of POW and the MIA.

Winner of the 2020 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing Nearly 1,600 Americans are still unaccounted for and presumed dead from the Vietnam War. These are the stories of those who mourn and continue to search for them. For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans—and more than 300,000 Vietnamese—involved in the conflict are still unaccounted for. In What Remains, Sarah E. Wagner tells the stories of America’s missing service members and the families and communities that continue to search for them. From the scientists who work to identify the dead using bits of bone unearthed in Vietnamese jungles to the relatives who press government officials to find the remains of their loved ones, Wagner introduces us to the men and women who seek to bring the missing back home. Through their experiences she examines the ongoing toll of America’s most fraught war. Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace—a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones’ sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.