About 72,000 unidentified veterans are from World War II, followed by 7,667 from the Korean War, 1,589 from Vietnam, 126 from Cold War and six from recent wars. Of those, more than 41,000 are presumed “lost at sea,” according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
In Ohio, more than 3,500 military personnel are missing, most of them from WWII. Ohio has 3,176 soldiers missing from WWII, 420 from Korea and 75 from Vietnam, including three from the area: Richard Stephenson (Hamilton), David Woods (Franklin) and John Conger II (Lebanon), according to the agency.
MORE: Identified Middletown sailor killed in Pearl Harbor ‘coming home’
Earlier this week, the agency announced the remains of Navy Fireman 3rd Class Willard Irvin Lawson, 25, of Middletown, were identified after they were buried in a mass grave.
Lawson’s niece, Linda Gordon, 72, of Milton, Ky., said she’s thankful he’s finally “coming home.”
Lawson was assigned to the battleship USS Oklahoma when it was attacked by Japanese aircraft on Dec. 7, 1941, as it was docked at Ford Island in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Lawson was one of 429 crewmen — 415 sailors and 14 Marines — killed in the attack.
He will be buried April 27 in the Indiana Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Madison, Indiana, seven miles from where his niece lives, she said.
From December 1941 to June 1944, Navy personnel recovered the remains of the deceased crew, which were subsequently interred in the Halawa and Nu’uanu cemeteries.
In September 1947, tasked with recovering and identifying fallen U.S. personnel in the Pacific Theater, members of the American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) disinterred the remains of U.S. casualties from the two cemeteries and transferred them to the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks.
The laboratory staff confirmed the identifications of 35 men from the USS Oklahoma at that time.
The AGRS subsequently buried the unidentified remains in 46 plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP), known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu. In October 1949, a military board classified those who could not be identified as non-recoverable, including Lawson.
In April 2015, the Deputy Secretary of Defense issued a policy memorandum directing the disinterment of unknowns associated with the USS Oklahoma, according to the DPAA.
On June 15, 2015, DPAA personnel began exhuming the remains for analysis. DPAA scientists used dental and anthropological analysis to identify Lawson’s remains. Scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System assisted in using mitochondrial DNA analysis.
“When we are working on a loss, we work in the blind, which is to say we don’t have any information about that person in order to avoid biasing our analyses,” said Dr. Carrie Brown, who leads the DPAA USS Oklahoma project. “But once a loss has been identified, we are able to access that information, including photographs of the service member.
“If you look around our workspaces, you will see many photographs hanging at our desks; these represent cases we have personally worked on. It reminds us that our work is important because it brings answers to those who are longing to know what happened to the person they cared about.”
The remains of 200 previously unknown crewmen from the USS Oklahoma have now been returned to their families for proper burial and their families have those long-awaited answers.
Once remains are recovered, the goal is to identify 80 percent of the soldiers, Duus said. Some of the remains are nearly impossible to identify through DNA because they never had any children, they were an only child or they were adopted, she said.
When remains are returned to families, Duus said it’s “overwhelming to see the relief” in the relatives.
“Gives them closure,” she said.
Lawson’s niece certainly agreed: “This is a long time coming. I was happy that they found him. We never knew where he was buried. We were told they buried the boys in mass graves in three different places.”
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