A new book by gw professor wegner what remains bringing americas missing home from the war. Here is the book. Delighted to have you with us. Congratulations and welcome to the washington history seminar. We are also very fortunate to have Chris Mcdermitt from the Department Today with us as a common tenter. Welcome to you as well, chris. I am delighted to be cochairing this seminar, as always. The National History center. Today, eric will introduce our speaker and moderate the discussion. As many of you regular viewers know, the washington history seminar is a collaborative decadelong effort of our two organizations. InterNational History center of the association. Prior to the pandemic, we met on a weekly basis. Now we are very pleased to come to you via zoom and facebook. Behind the scenes there are two individuals that helped produce this event. Rachel with the National History center. Even in this zoom only era, staging this event is laborintensive. Let me ask for your support. We think our two institutional supporters for a center of history and the public interest. Both of them support the event financially. We are also grateful to a number of individual donors that make these meetings possible and whose rank we invite and urge you to join. Details about how to do so are now available in the chat room or simply go to our institutional websites. Todays session is being recorded and will soon appear on our respective organizations websites. For the q a part of the webinar, eric will remind you again, please use the raise hand function and the zoom room functionality if youd like to ask a question. Once you asked a question you will be entered into a queue. When the moderator calls on you, please unmute your screen. You can also submit questions to rachel weekly at rwheatle rwheatley historians. Org. With that, thank you and to our speakers, turning it over to eric. Thank you, christian. It is my privilege to introduce our speaker this afternoon. Professor wegner is a professor of anthropology at washington university. She received a ba from dartmouth and her phd from harvard. Her research focuses on societies, memory, National Identity and Forensic Science. She is the author of Dna Technology in the search. A study of the forensic and commemorative practices developed in response to genocide published by the university of california in 2008. She is the coauthor in the aftermath of genocide published in 2014 by Cambridge University press. Today, she will be speaking on her new book bringing america missing home from the vietnam war published by Harvard University press. Sarah. Thank you so much. First of all, my thanks to christian, chris and Chris Mcdermitt for being here as well as christian mentioned, the people behind the scenes, both peter and rachel for getting the logistics for allowing us to be together. I will say i am getting used to zoom but i sorely miss the opportunity to be together and be in a room and feel energy. Whatever the case may be. Very grateful that we have so many attendees. I look forward to the session. I would like to begin with some basic remarks about the book. I think it may be helpful if i share my screen. I have a presentation prepared. Doing the research and success. At this moment, i will share my screen. I hope that we can all see one another. You can see me. November 2018, i went to the tomb, the tomb of the unknown soldiers at Arlington National cemetery. Just a journey across the memorial bridge. A structure built purposely to connect the monument to the cemetery. Down facing the plaza with its roundtheclock tasting before the lock. With me was my stepson. Then a 10yearold boy who watched as he clicked his heels and shifted his rifle with shoulder to the next. My young companion was skeptical. Twentyone steps. We recounted those together. Our eyes following the shiny black shoes as they glide across the strip. For the unknowns in the major conflict of the past century. World war i, world war ii, the korean war and although now empty, the other vietnam war. I have gone to the tomb many times over the past several years. A site in and of itself. Considering the disciplining of the civility and domestic alike. U. S. Military ritual. The socalled civil and military performed each hour on the hour. The changing of the guard ceremony. Overshadowed by it is by the pageantry. The great war, the monument objects have conceded. At the tomb these days for the messages that invite reflections about what it means to die and to die a horribly painful death. Fighting on behalf of the nation [inaudible] from a different era. If you could hear the gargling longs, her violent incurable, my friends, you would not tell this to children. Against the backdrop of this, also serving a different role for me. Representing a touch for this. A project that ive worked on for well over a decade now. An archival study of the u. S. Military. Efforts to account for the Service Members missing in action. For the wars of the last century. Including and especially the vietnam war. Memorializing contemporary military. That is it must not be recognized to individually repair. The vast enterprise of mia counseling that the u. S. Has developed over the past several decades. The confidence that it may well decimate, but it can no longer steal away and identity. The disruption in 1998 from the remains of the vietnam war, identified primarily by dna testing. Un secretary of defense made a remarkable pronouncement saying that may be Forensic Science has reached a point where there will be no other unknowns. That claim, for the United States military and for the u. S. As a nation, unknowns may be a thing of the past. Testing and other forensic testing. More importantly, speaking through its consequences. Specifically related to missing in action from the vietnam war. The archival work, i fail to understand the complex relationships United States has with its unrecovered and unidentified in Southeast Asia. What it means five decades after the wars end, america remains in missing in action. What it means when they dont come home. When our actions may never be resolved. A real effort discussion. The first story pertains to the process. It is explicitly national politics. In the book i argue that for the United States, the vietnam war solidified and extended a tradition of individuated recovery and repatriation and identification. This is a tradition that stretches back to the civil war. Bringing them home trumps sparing them. Documenting the chronicles in her book. Individuated burial practices to the creation of a comprehensive system of National Cemetery to accountability. The conflict between north and south transformed the nation sentiment. The evolution and practice across the conflict of the century she writes , we still live in a world and take for granted to account for lives that were taken in service. More recently, that tradition of caring for the missing and unidentified benefited from transformative property. The form of ritual. The war in Southeast Asia to an enterprise has spent decades on hundreds of millions of dollars and returned thousands of war vets. The enterprise has in turn fostered an idea. An effort of Exceptional Care. I want to emphasize, and im not champion this effort, anthropologist to understand where it comes from, how it operates and what it produces. Accounting at its core is about recovering and identified. Reattaching a name to it otherwise nameless vet. Or even a handful and then sending those remains to a number of homes. In this enterprise, the named individuals come home has become expected. A final act of the nations proper care for missing in action or killed in action. With that i argue a particular effort. To put it in its terms, the Exceptional Care is to the story that the state tells itself its military past and present, the families of the missing in the american public, even unparalleled efforts no expense, no resource to bring them home. Working to accrue the law. A quick look at the numbers. A long an estimated 3 Million People shown between 1954 and 1975. Most of them by the ministries. 58,000 counted as killed in action or in noncombat deaths. The peace accord in 1973, the United States 146 americans as unaccounted for from the war. Equal parts from those missing in action or killed in action. Of those, 5085 u. S. Service members are currently still missing. Estimated at 300,000. Those numbers do not fall distinctly upfront from this peril. This example was described as the exclusionary practice of. To rehabilitate that notion. Back in 1980s was political winds began to shift with reagan rebranding the war and the Forensic Science of counting offered the states the means of by recovering and identifying. The price of this system of exception the u. S. Military spends 140 million per year on this mia accounting effort which is not taking into account million of dollars to some [inaudible] approximately 10 teams of military civilian personnel, hundreds of personnel, parsed out over the years, to Southeast Asia to excavate sites and rerecovery mainle. In the current pandemic that it not possible but this is a cal tee momentum. Two additional labs and the armed forces dna Identification Laboratory working at full throttle the United States does in fact to he repatriate and but for me, more than the exceptional costs and resources, is that this effort of promised indeed obelieved the fullest possible accounting for every possible case. On one level it provides the state a ready narrative to push past the vietnams embittering divisiveness and instead of the unparalleled evidents to bring them all home. Allows the state to shift the focus. Foreign skin science has reached a point where there will be no other unknowns in any war. Sciences practice of bone interest a being, human being, must give rise to a new sacred thing, and a new language of remembrance proffer certainitude through the tools of send underwater archaeology and the like. But on another level the effort of Exceptional Care exposes the fragmented and unstable nature of memory itself. [inaudible] memory belongs to more than the nation in the abstract. This brings me to a second thread of the book. The nation state and forms bureaucratic and Science Research moved across the arc of account from recovery and repatriation to commemoration is increasingly struck by how under return thursday remains to family and only about the state. Nor often than not homecomings are highly localized events, certainly they have the capacity to commune people, strangers and kith and kin like in the act of remembering an individuals life lost on behalf of the station but rather than commemorate it as static or flattened of the fallen hero, particular history. Sometimes the returns are fraught. Sometimes they force to the surface painful memories, ripping off the scabs that have for decades have covered over the profound cut of ambiguous states and unanswered sorrow. Families will tell you the homecoming rarely if ever bring closure. Itsanathema of their experien. The symbolic weight of homecoming is bound up with the nation that which were solely defined by. A piece of bone or teeth, which of collection of remains lie inside the homecoming as an oft of local reformation. This dense, often fraught homecoming ill end with a story of Lance Corporal he was once a ongoing man from a community in northern wisconsin to be killed in vietnam. Took partner rove mission that locationed his remains, single tooth that would constitute his official recovery and foreclosure. When i followed the trajectory of his homecoming through the eyes of his surviving family and local vets in the community. His homecoming was publicly sell operated and also a painful remainder of the time allen was declared mia, her family was embroiled in a battle to keep their property from being seized by the u. S. Government and that issue of imminent domain, land was supposed to become part of a national park, a lake shore along lake superior. This is so in short the family lost both a son, a brother, and their property, their home, their place of business, in a few short years. The father had struck back, deading a small portion of the island that had owned, heededded a tiny little strip to the township and he and with wife want teed be were buried there and wanted merlin to join them. A short passage describes the long awaited reunion. It is quirky treaty on space, place and memory paces, george writes [inaudible] places that are stable, unmoving, inning damageable, and almost untouchable and changing deeprooted places that might be points points points points of reverence my birth play this cried my family, the tree i may heave seen but he tells us, such places dont exist. Because just as time wears away at them, memories also betray us. Quote, space melts like sand running through ones fingers, the writer only recourse to wait and, quote, leave some sorrow somewhere, furrow, trace, mark, few signs of these fragile places. The possibilities or keeping sites alive in our memories as points of reference and departure and also spaces of communion and commemoration. The allen familycraft their own possibility the day they brought merle home to york island. Once the military rights had been rendered the at the family and a collect groupll brotheredded to outer island, world war ii knopfy vessel that helped ferry troops, armor, and supplies to beaches of europe in 1944. It was an ideal boat for the occasion, both from a historical significance and logistical reasons. It was two and a half miles from the little dog to the southern tub of york island where shallow waters prohibited larger vessels from landing. The former Amphibious Assault craft could drop it ramp on to the island beach, allowing the passengers, little children to more seniors and to disembark easily. A special escort, junior junior was someone would fight with merle and would survived the Helicopter Crash that killed merle. Junior was entrust offed with carrying merle, the wooden box, to the burial site. The group mate its way from the boat, on to the island walking through brush to a small clearing several yards from the wateres edge, i visited two years after the funeral to get a chance where he finally rested. It is a serene place, bored my mix of northland woods, birch, as spend and pine, carpet of island grass and the wild flowers. Ill skip to one last. At first the island wasnt quite as a recipient as planned. The deep narrow plot had filled with water overnight. The sky was cloudless that night has rained heavily in the preceding days leaving the ground saturate. Casey and sawn, sean, together has to press their way on to the urn vault to sub merge it. At last the vault see i settled in place and the attendees took a small handful of sand to sprinkle over the water, baathing merle in the grain of the beach he so loved. His family left and he mountainside of Central Vietnam to the examination table in hawaii, to a clearing on york island,mer Len Ray Allen has traveled a long way to come home from war. When i asked that allen siblings about whether it mattered to him to them that so little of their brothers physical remains was recovered and and repatriated the uniformly told me no. At case and y explained i was thrilled if even one bone chip came home. I knew it was my brother. Finally knew his fate. And he was coming home. I will end there. Stop sharing the screen. Okay. So, at this point i would welcome the opportunity to talk to all of you and chris, if we have questions and from you, or questions from the audience. Terrific. So, lets have chris share his thoughts. You can respond to them if you like, then well open it up to our larging viewing audience. Christopher mcdermott whod with a ma frusta Johns College and a ph. D in science and Technology Study program at virginia tech. He serve as the chief data officer at the defense prisoner of war missing in action Accounting Agency. Prior to the establishment of that agency in january of 2015 he was the Senior Historian for the joint pow mia account in command at the National Archives and the office of the defense pow missing personnel office. Joined the u. S. Army central. Laboratory in hawaii in 2001. He helped lead the transformation of Case Research and analysis for world war ii field and Laboratory Analyses in addition to his Case Research, he has conducted field Investigation Missions across europe, and the pacific. Chris, the screen is yours. Thank you very much, eric. Sarah, very much enjoyed having an opportunity to kind of deeply go into your volume and to think about the perspective that youre able to bring as a stenographer when the mission, both within the laboratory for the science in the field, and one thing that struck me as a great contribution from the book is its movement from the different among the different places that matters to the story and to the individuals involved. I think its really highlights the geography of the conflicts and the geography much more meaningful the place toils the people who live there and how much more meaningful to the people who lived with these people, the connection back to their home. And i think one of the things hat resonated for me is what we have been talking about is individual contributions but then at the same time that shared collective experience. And one of the things thats always struck me about the mission is that ability to recognize that individual who was subsumed by the state, and expend by the state, but the state still owes something, and who do they owe it to . Just back to the service . Do they owe it just back to the nation . Or do they owe something to the people who knew this person in a special way. What do they owe to that people who knew that person as family, to people who knew that person who shared the walking along that lake shore together. That becomes becomes so much moe meaningful and then at the same time you look at all of the contributions that go in and thats where i think i like the way you kind of sum that up with this sort of ethos of Exceptional Care concept and were trying to show the ethos can be something much, mump larger than psychiatried in but can recognize the contribution of that individual. And at the same time i think one things that really is problem problemized. The Police Continues and were continue to make folks. We can examine the unidentified and to identified. Id like to to the what the global mikes of the unknown soldier think mystery thats the. The one that represents them all, but then as we unpack that and also we look at there will no longer be anymore, what this transcendent mystery we risk reducing when we move the that direction. We talk bit with vietnam, korea, world war 2 we have memorials with names, the names mean something when we make an yankees, identification, we can have a social media homecoming but for the most recent conflicts where we have the mall volunteer force, mall percentage of the population is really directly affected, theres a much more mechanical operation of the identification process. Theres a much more hidden aspect of it and while we thank all the Service Members for their contribution, i dont see lots of places where the enemies are memorialized and where the story may union to echo generations further on. Id be interested to talk to you more from that framework. Chris, thats a fantastic comment, and it is in fact, its a question i repeatedly get and im not sure i have the satisfactory answer but i want to work through what are the thoughts and findings. So, one thing when i began this process, this entire research project, it was with the identification of the vietnam unknown soldier. Startled by the fact that this what seems to be this eternal you think of unknown soldiers and having that eternal flame, rome has one. That this is abiding, enduring and yet there was 1998, a total rupture of that icon and the remains are removed. And in fact this is along with the passage of Benedict Andersons imagine community where he tries to get to us understand what is this thing, National Identity, and National Belonging and he says he shows us the tomb of the unknown, perfect material cultural artifacts to help us understand how we imagine our connection to someone who sacrificed for the nation. Therefore we imagine we belong to his nation and then he weapons this line but and Michael Allen sees the written their beautifully about this, about who is this busy body, only this sacra sacra lidge of going and trying to pull out the remains and name them and thats in fact what happened. So then your question is, what is happened then . What do we lose . I remember when i started this project i thought, okay, it means when secretary cohen sends that it may mean we wont have anymore unknowns and its an off the cuff remark, that we were entering interest this uncharted territory, and i assumed as an anthropologist who is not very good at crafting a hypotheses because im social anthropologist, what this hypothesis. I assumed that molds of National Come enemy craigs are changing when you cant have aing a grove gate of the unknown or this sim pollic unknown, and symbolic unknown. I do in fact think some of that is true, the personal narrative. What was complicated for me is understand thing personalized narrative is never only about the state. I try to mention this in my opening, never only about the local family of the biography that precedes someones service in the military. Its this amal gam, a strange mix of it and that is styles that mix is contentious or fraught and pulls up some pretty terrible memory of a war and what families in particular have lost. So its harder for the nation to get to us imagine pause the particular histories and, yet, when i opened the book with allens homecoming and one thing that is extraordinary to me is that people came from all over just to witness this convoy of vehicles including the hear see was it left from the twin cities airport and head up north to lake superior, and that speaks volumes. Maybe this something but that personalized narrative, of the fallen hero come home, that helps the nation do the work of bringing us back into that whether its the air brushed history of the war or its inviting to us think but what obligations mean, contemporary members of this he society have to those who fight on our behalf. So again, i hate to say i dont have really easex quick answer but i think thats the crux of what is going on here, and i think well continue to see this change and well continue to see the tension between the local, the personalized, and particular history, the biography prior to military service, and to the aims of the state to rewrite or retell a story of a war that was incredibly contentious and very hard even for the veterans to this day grapple with their own experience. Longwind answer. Ill try to keep them shorter from here on in. No worry. No worry. Ties into the transformation of the symbology of the tune of them unknown, what is now the flag. The built of the flag that is such more more common and carried in marathons and parades, and therefore brings that message, not you are not forgotten and thats where i think one of the theme is find difficult is that the named individuals who were trying not to forget, something specific about that individual, but then those can also get washed into the symbology and i still fine it interesting to think but why america has this much more openly fraught relationship with it than sort of the commonwealth with the poppy and the tomb that can represent anyone, and then leave them where they fell, not why bring that remains home . That has been understanding the that tradition, the social contract between the state and the military, and current, past Service Members, families, the american public. It took me a while as an anthropologyist who trafficked in the cob tell free learn and understand that tradition went back to civil war. I changed its heightened and gained new force from the world war i, world war ii the korean war, returns during the battlethe expect attention of return, to the vietnam war. Its a necessary for me to dabble and lets be honest i am a e standings on the shoulder offed historians who have written very eloquently. And i would say Michael Allen as well from the vietnam war to help in the understand the political context that gave rise to i think the increased cultural demand and advances in terms of casino that dovetails to produce this ethos so this forensicber price and to provide enterprise and provide thats mythical notion that our science can triumph here. It can triumph in stepping back to the previous war and triumph with the promise there will be no other unknowns and thats something that is helping unpack or that is what i try to do in theth nothing grandfathery, to help up pack not magic but the work of the transformation that science offer and the new rituals that come out of that, that attempt to bridge chasms. To transition to the science part the conversation about how the certainty and the expertise around identification science also sort of evolves and changes, but the same time theres still the traditional hallmark, how the Family Members will say, i recognize every portion of that persons body because you must show me the remains thats how i will recognize them. But then also that sort of moves back and you had visual recognition, dog tag recognition, then you have the amberrology you start thinking, well then you get to a level of expertise where only senior people can recognize the fragmentary reexplains when you brick gene the picture its another level as well and theres a transition of the expertise and the sacred moving up in that chain, but then also always wants to return it back to, but i know this name goes with this. Yeah. And so much of what i try to write about in the early chapters around the scientific process, that, extraordinarily powerful tools are now there at our fingertips. Genetics it can do extraordinary things but doesnt it hinges upon that rudimentary element of trust. What i mean to say is, if families do not believe that it has been a scientifically sound process, that these experts have done their job well, and that there hasnt ban margin of error, that they can they receive this information and they can say, yes, i believe this. I believe this tiny fragment of my brother is my brother. Or is my father. That is something by the way that i found to be common with my earlier research. That sense of trust and the efficacy of the science they go hand in glove and you are not going to have families buy in, and in the case of this remains decimated by genocide it was necessary for families not just to trust but participate, partake the process because they had to give their dna samples and in the area years allege they were trying build up the system that could like a house of cards fall apart if you didnt have familiesed providing dna samples samples and then beg the results presented to them if felt like i was hearing a different version, of course different because of different context, different conflicts cod concerns around victims versus combatants and that sensibility of do we have trust, can we trust, and without trust, this enterprise may fail and every positive identification might all of a sudden look that problematic if an identification was salty or someone cast aspersions about its trustworthiness. So theres so much more than just the lab. Its the social world around the lab. It think its interesting when we look at the language around accounting, which is kind of has a financial history and when you think but the other parts where commerce kind of comes into it. What does it cost to find and recover and identify someone versus what is it worth . It means everything to family but does that mean we could spend everything to achieve it . And theres this interesting balance of dermatology and then problematics of thinking of these things in terms of the dollar values attached. Sorry. Theres a helicopter overhead so im not sure if you hear that. Apologies for the extra noise. That is one of i got to the lab, i did my research on what was then the central Identification Laboratory in 2011 and 201 and 2012 and then i came back. That was the motion where the myself as a whole was undergoing a fair amount of scrutiny about its efficiency. There was the oversight that congress had and was pursuing about how many identifications per year were possible, what were they doing at the time, how could that be increased and understandably theres always how too you make this system better more efficient. Was struck by this language of efficiency as one that even though point there was a consultant brought in and and chris im not telling you anything you dont know but in this oversight, this process of external consultants, trying to ascertain where their mission wasnt being accomplished, had the opportunity to speak with one and i remember her describing, using the language of customers, like customers are families and i thought, oh, thats such a mistake because this entire enterprise operates on a necessary notion of sanctity and that the missing are sacred, and that the families are not. What i mean is theyre the guardians of the memory and theyre the ones of the missing and theyre the ones who have been waiting and waiting and waiting for some news. So all of a sudden to hear them described as customers and this effort to make the mission more efficient and more responsive to the oversight i thought, dont go down that path. I know that many in the Defense Pow Mia Accounting Agency felt the same sort of frustration with that language because it wasnt true to how an overwhelming majority of people working for the Defense Department on this mission would ever accept that. At the same time there is another side to that where there was a scrutiny and oversight for ropes of not maybe a certainty of putting your finger on what was wrong but certainly something was wrong in terms of there wasnt a send that the sacred mattered in that broader sense, that specific sense. And that is really where i think the language always gets really problematic, the accounting name for our effort still causes problems when we go to other countries and say were an Accounting Agency and they say you want to look at the ledgers . No. We want to talk to villagers and go to a small place and dig up a crash site. Thats accounting issue in else. Outcome taught by the language with one thing i always found interesting is then you look at the situated knowledge of the laboratory but we do care very much about this, but at the same time how can we be more effective, get more cases accomplished. It cant always be, well, theres not part of bureaucracy that deals with that. We all have to figure out of a way to make that change happen. So i think certainly we should probably open it up to broader questions but i think theres a lot to continue to unpack in what it means to be responsive to the customer, what means to be responsive to the participant in the sacred and to the individual that sacrificed themselves. What is the appropriate level of participation we need to be able to show . If i could give one more juxtaposition between my work in bosnia and the u. S. Military. After id been working on the u. S. Military component guy back to bosnia fairly frequently and a spoke with a friend, pathologist, and i remember he was so surprised to hear that if families did not accept anesque and they have a channel to appeal, ultimately if that appeal was not successful, that the military would still take care of its own, still bury those remains, whereas in bosnia at that time, it all depend on the Family Members willingness to accept the validity of an identification. How is the case they families could be not overridden but their opinion didnt count. It was more about ultimately there was no way that an identify set of remains would ever languish on a mortuary shelf if the identification was sound. There was a need to render proper military rights and that juxtaposition has always struck me. Gets at the problem of the term closure, and in what way does it close anything. Administrative or is it meaningful . Mark im not sure. Do you have some questions . Yes. So, i will invite our audience to use the raised hand function, to email questions to rachel if youre on facebook or to use the q a function and well do our best to call on everyone. I would like to start off cochairer pogtive. A limited amount of time to share the contents of the book with us and there are many things in book that are absolutely fascinating that may or may not be familiar to either historians or to average americans. So, as an anthropologist, and as a stenographer if you could talk how you go about doing your research because you not only interviewed people but as you mentioned a few minutes ago you traveled to hawaii, you worked at the lab there, and just absolutely fascinating section in the book you travel to vietnam with one of these accounting teams, and you spent many weeks first hand participating in one of these reclaimation projects. So if could you could talk as a scholar how you did this and see various components allowed you to ultimately tell the story. So as a sociocultural anthropology gist and Ethnographic Research. Its the hope you can stand sustained amounts of time with your community or study or the practice you want to understand well or the place that you want to understand well. In this case, the project was complicated and took me over a decade because there soso many different sites and so many different well call them stakeholders, people involved in the process. Could never only be about the science, it could never only be about members members of the mi, veterans or current Service Members. Never could only be about the families. Somehow i needed to i try to get a feel for perspective, involvement, understanding on, all of these different fronts. And so i began i kind of thought but the project as one where i was tracing this arc of recovering and identification to commemoration, so i didnt start with commemoration. One could argue apologies i stared with the tomb of the up known is started at the flip end but that was more around this point of curiosity. I followed the expertise and i trailed the science first, and what i mean by follow the expertise, in fact there were two dna scientists scientists od actually come from the armed forces dna Identification Laboratory to boss knea. So i was tracing that from bowls nia and both of those individuals had a hand in the identification of the vietnam unknown soldier. So, i got in touch with one i was able to tour the armed fors dna Identification Laboratory in maryland and that was opened the door. So, it meant this Ethnographic Research where im shadowing scientists in a laboratory and there is the black lab, she has arrived. I just hope she doesnt bark. So then i would spend weeks trying to figure out what is forensic anthropological protocol with a set of remains. I never spent in depth time in the armed forces of dna a Identification Laboratory. So ive done a fair amount of work boss knea. The head of the scientific laboratory, saved youre going to understand the forensic scientific process of identification youve need to go on a mission, recovery mission. Without that access this project would have been so different. So, i i a candidate, rove mission to Central Vietnam. I was. [barking] sorry. Wait as 28day archaeological dig. We basecamped which meant the structures for a rudimentary camp is set up. We spent the 28 days each day hiking up to a Steep Mountain slope and seeking to find remains of a flight had been ascertained as the pinpointed Helicopter Crash site. Yes, that was working with the military. Incredibly fortunate. A Wonderful Group of teammates and the end of it we recovered remains and those remains led to the story of michael raye allen and that gave me the last portion of the Ethnographic Research to follow the remains back to this little town that had been the locus of loss and the face of the celebrated homecoming help scope widened a bit more because that little up to had suffered three losses, one man was killed, body came home right away, Merlin Raye Allen was killed and his remains return 46 years later and another person is still killed in action, body not recovered. So in that little town working with the veteran its got a better sense of what the war looked like decade later, both with resolution coming early on and then this protracted ambiguous loss of the person who will never come home. So, theth nothinggrapher, my task was to move across the spaces and to move through different ways of knowing, of thinking through, of understanding the process, from the most scientific to the most intimate localized version, and that which i describe in this little town of bayfield, wisconsin. Thank you. I have a second question on the ethnography side. You have multiple conversations and one gets a sense of the local meanings and the personal meanings of the war. What i didnt get a clear sense on is the extent to which it matters this was the vietnam war, other than it position in time. World war ii, the good war. Fought nazis. This war as you said easterly glory your talk was a contentious one. United States Government for all of the talk now about the sacred, lied to the american people, lied to politicians, lied to the men and women who served in vietnam and i wonder if in your discussions with the people that you talked to, if there was any kind of reflection, critical or not critical, about this particular war, what it meant to them in their historical memories, and or their thoughts about the government in relationship to the war or was thus something that was just subsumed in the intensely permanent that you talk about. No. No. I think there are moments where you see the anger and bitterness around the war, pierces the veil that this is a celebration of a soldier returned home. To hear some examples. When theres theres this third person from the little town in this community in northern wisconsin who has not returned, when the family put on a 50th remembrance ceremony, 50 days to the day of his death or disappearance, standing at the back of the room was vp vietnam vet who talked about how the u. S. Government writes blank checks with every person who enlists or serves and then he said and fairly strong tones, it had cashed those checks of these three men. It was very distinctly a critique of the government. More subtle ways. The person whom i quote in introducing that community is a woman named mary, and mary writes poignantly, she did not lose someone in the way that these other families she lost her husband in 2013, he died in her word not just of lung cancer but more likely from ptsd and she writes, she talks, as her hustles did and she shares a fair amount of her feelings about what that war stole from him or took from him, and yet at the same time his ininsis tense he wanted insistence he wanted his service acknowledged. To me the person, the figure that encapsulated that frustration, that anger, the says of betrayal is one of the two guys from from milwaukee, wisconsin, who built the that motorcycle, the famous motorcycle that is part of the Vietnam Veterans collection of artifacts left at the wall. He talked but really moving, talked about he was with a group of other bikers who had come to the capital, part of rolling thunder, coming for memorial day weekend, and she got separated from the other bikes and ended up kind of winding round d. C. And turf can be a really d. C. Can be a disorienting place and he was think about that feeling of lost, that heres his Nations Capital that you have the sense of not knowing where he was and that feeling of having return after the war and never been really welcome he home and that became their project. That bike is a message to the state, account for the missing and also recognizes who we are, recognize what we gave and, yeah, that i think theres shades of it. I also say its particular live my wisconsin crew, if i can call them that, these are people who dont wear their politics on their sleeve. When they came home, many of them told me that those who fought in the war told me we were told not take off doctor take off our uniforms and take the bus back home you should be in civilian clothing and how do people treat you when you got back. And he said theyre happy to have me back. It is a sense in that community that how shall i say their own community by point but the particularities of the local. Their own community welcomed them home, whether the nation at large welcomed them hopeful might be a Sticking Point but thats the advantage to spending time with the spaces outside the beltway to get a feel for how people lived their lives over 50 years and what thorns are still to their sides sides and which s have they come to accept and what terms. Thats longwinded answer. Its there but its subtle because frankly thats the subtlety which with my interlocutors displayed regularly. Thank you, christian, has a question. Thank you, eric. Sarah really a wonderful book and fascinating profession. Thank you. I realize youre an ethnographer but we are in an historical seminar so if you could for the audience but your book and the vietnam war efforts, recovery efforts, into a broader historical context, take us if you could just quickly kind of the historical article from the civil war through the most recent war experiences in terms of the effort to account, the effort to recover, and then secondly, connected with that, where do you see your most important intervention with this book, place a little bit in the historyo graphickic as well. As i say it took me a while to understand i needed to do better in contextualizing the vietnam war and that became clear through conversations and through conversations with historians. Early on i had read the book, this republic is suffering which allowed know see the notion of repatriation doesnt begin with world world war 1. Its the fact that a whole system was built around northern body needing to return, which is a foreign soil could be the south. That kind of blew my mind. I hadnt thought about it in those terms. And then rolling on. I wail say 134 of the best work on come mel race of war and commemoration for war and memory for me was to read jay winter, and thomas la cure. I was very luck you to have him come for a book workshop and help me shore up the historical account of the book. But i read i just finished teaching with my graduate students, in sites of memory and sites of mourning. A seminary book for anyone who works on kim memoration and war politics, and if i can jump ahead and say, he touches on some things that real estate nateed and i knew i i knew thats where my work would articulate. So come back to that in a moment. Let say in world war i you have the decimation of bodies unseen, unexperienced before so that ten Million People died, five million of them are unrecovered. Do not come back. This rep tour of a sense of where do they belong . What is interesting is for the American Family member of the world war i losses, they wanted when given the opportunity to decide do they want their remains to lie where they fell, their response, 70 , was, no, we want them home. And that is a tradition that continues and games force. So world war ii is 65 of families. Now theres been fantastic work that look ted unknown buried in military cemeteries doing soft diplomacy of rendering visible to europe what were the sacrifices the u. S. Made on behalf of the world, on behalf of europe to stop that war. So others have written but that but i focused on the number, just the majority of families wanted the remains to come back, so that repatriation is its strong and gaining force. But the korean war i read and learn this is something that is concurrent. A practice during the war, the military is involve not not waiting for after the treaties to be signed but rather during the war, as battles are raging, that remains are to be returned, and then the vietnam war, this is already in effect. I think it was helpful to learn from my colleagues the not just about the forensic scientific changes but also the tactical changes of the way vietnam was fought. The iconic helicopters, the helicopters were about insure generals. Merlin raye allen was part of the insure generals, they brought the battlefielddate dead from the war and back home. Took me a while to appreciate thats wasnt one off. Thats was building and there was a cultural sensibility and then tactical rational aspects howl the u. S. Fighting force and then you have the scientific advance of dna testing. That story didnt wasnt immediately attire me. Now if if can circle back to world war i. So much of jay winters writing and tom, they helped me understand the democratizing on the naming of the grunt, the naming of the lowest on the military hierarchy, that persons body needed tools be recovered to be marked. In jay winters work he spends time thinking about what memorials and monuments do. As these spaces of bereavement and of mourning that helped a community whose fabric has been tomorrow asunder, to begin to stitch it back together and appeal to one another. He talked about the mon immigrant is inscribing in a validation in the village, inscribing the name of those who died and also pointing to the families who will need help, who will need support and that i thought i knew i needed to study that ethnographically, and though its 50 years, 60 years late, that is what i was hoping to get at in seeing how families, communities, veterans came together around the returns or when there werent remains to be return. Thank you. We have some hands in the queue and questions in the Q Bernie Sanders a and questions from email. So first up will be james, your hand is up if you could unmute yourself. Thank you, i ask this question was a veteran who served in the u. S. Army many years ago in a place where there are bodies, french, german, americans, that have never been find was sensitized to this problem then and have been fascinated amateurishly, since then, and as you were speaking, i thought of an extraordinary documentary that i saw some, oh, six, five years ago, called taking chance. Its the documentary of a journey of the body of a soldier from i guess the air force base, dover to his home up to and the care and dignity with which the military arm i think marines accord that ceremony and making the journey of this body possible. And so im interested, i have a cousin who lost his life also in the Second World War, his death certificate hes bury evidence at arlington but his death certificate reads head not found. Which means that part of him remains in the in italy someplace. How do you set we thought but the sacredness of so much of this. How too you set the search for military men and women missing in action into this larger context of the way in which we honor all of those lost in war as a privilege of not only a greatly wealthy society but also of a nation fighting a war in vietnam that was much less costly in american lives than those other great wars. Can you imagine or treating all of the dead that were lost in the first and Second World War the way we treat individuals now coming home from afghanistan, through Dover Air Force base and the care with which we treat the missing in action in vietnam. Mr. Benner, thank you so much for your comment and you touch on a number of very important themes. Ill do my best. Im not sure i can respond to all of them. Let me start with where you began, which is this film with kevin bacon. I could be wrong. I remember speaking with the son of a air force pilot who lost their father when he was six and a half, and one of the things he described is the extraordinary surprise he felt when he learned that remains had been recovered and frankly he never imagined someone was still search force his fathers remains. Not. His family was not politically motivate when he got the call its totally out of the blue. So we spoke. We spoke on a couple of different occasions, and i know he asked me if i had ever seen the film, and the reason why he wanted to say, he wanted to discuss that he felt like this film captured so much of that attentiveness to ritual and that not performance in an insincere way but a performance of respect that especially the military escort has in bringing, literally bridging those remains back to a family. So, i want to acknowledge that film is a good portrait and resonated at least with one Family Member who i think is very attentive to the process as one which is incredibly costly and that he feels his family to be extremely fortunate for getting remains of his father returned. There is this so aside from the ritual care, i think the is a flip side to the ethnos and expectation. We have come to think of foreign Civic Science as all powerful Forensic Science that is all powerful, 24 hours and you have a result and its absolutely certain, and that the science will this is what he mean when i write it is a response to the sting of defeat but the problem witnessed this first hand is the problem is families now assume that thats what necessarily must happen and can happen and will happen, but if there nor remained recovered, or if those remains recovered and yet there isnt an i know you know countless examples of this certainly self examples where remains themselves maybe theyre not going yield maybe theres not enough to yield a dna sampleful maybe the remains are so degraded because of the conditions in which they were located or may have been buried, that there will be no definitive dna profile to match up, and so there is a sense that this science can do it all, and when it doesnt deliver, that is extremely frustrating, and so you reference world war ii losses. One thing im always a little bit surprised by, and chris you may want to weigh in here. I find it fascinating. Is its im surprised by the theres world world war i families that have essentially sued the state. That was a sense that it should jump the count. It should be resolved immediately. I think about what ive learned. I have the impression this is not something they brought it home and they put it away. They did have that same sensibility. We already live in a litigious society. You may have something to add. It definitely gets to that messiness of the actual work. On the one hand, there is a common narrative about that stoicism in that we will put it away and indoor. There is a constant worry point of the puzzle that hasnt been solved. What happens to that. And can i care and in a way about that that helps me worry and solve something. And certainly you see that from the perspective it in the individual case. And thats what matters. When you thought about a cue of queue of cases thats impossible to understand. How can one mean more than another. Arent all of them of equal weight. And when they are how do you constantly make progress. How do you show you care in the broadway. To show that you are helping to advance so many. When you talk about the families that want to push their own case where they think there is a clue or something that can read them there there is a world war ii on that one. Is that someone. Is that your loved ones. Is that where the ultimate clues will end up. We dont know for sure. And we know mistakes were made. There is also that challenge for world war ii. We have declared that. The science and technology that was available. And what youre really talking about if they make 1 of error that as a quarter of all of the unknowns that we have to try to sort through. With the zone of problem. And they still try to push ahead with what we can do and can prove. We understand that level of scrutiny. You can ask your question. We see that you are still muted. There we are. It sounds like a remarkable book. And it was ambushed one night. To control and won the silver star for the big bravery. About ten years before him. We met again in washington in the 1990s and we went to the vietnam wall. And my brother looked at the names and said zero my gosh. He was still alive when i put them on the chopper. I wonder if that is a common experience. The other question is. Later, Daniel Ellsberg wrote this. When i started teaching at columbia i was overwhelmed by what he was saying and doing. His wife erupted in anger. Is this common. Let me start with the wall. As you described this. With finding the name and the tragic realization. That they thought to be saved. Marys husband have a very similar experience. The experience of those i have none. In an airstrike that he himself had head. And the extraordinary guilt that he lived with. Mary took a while to really understand this. I think it was more the case that her husband have assumed he have died. In the sadness and that realization that these two men after a war have never learned one another state. And this is done with what i find confusing i will call it confounding. When people came home off and i heard from veterans that they werent coming home as a group. And not knowing how not having that feeling and the right course of action. And then as you described to learn that. As a name listed on here. The powerful memorial but one that was so jarring with the number of names. I say all of this to that your story doesnt surprise me. I think it was true. I dont know for how many people. But it was not one that people came home and reach out to. Years later when they found a way. Even now as retirees they have more time. More emotional space to kind of think through the memories and reconnect with people. Im not sure that i would not say that i have that. I will leave it there. I wonder if pam, with what the wall has meant to you. If you want to do that. Go ahead and raise your hand. From larry berman. Can you discuss the efforts. I have the good fortune in the last few years. And at the university of amsterdam. She has embarked on the multiyear and cited study again with the Archival Research into the vietnamese experience. And the efforts that have been ramped up. With its 300,000. And so we talk regularly. And the hope is that we will be able to Work Together a little bit on the American Experience has been really fascinating for her. Looking at the vietnamese government. We were slow to say that we will build up the Laboratory Capacity to seek to identify all 300,000. With the local resources but also partnerships. In the scholar and the seller has been a fantastic interlock are. They weighed in on the research at early points. And things that i think were necessary to augment for my understanding. It is a process that that is just recently underway in earnest. Certainly there had been recoveries and rites and rituals. The new era of identification. And they had partnered with another organization that was central to the work. It should be a fascinating story to watch. I personally right now just had the advantage from afar. We have a question from a historian at carnegie melon who is working on korean war pows. And has a number of questions. For a moment one in particular i read your article about k to await. Im not really sure about vietnam. Some of them want to make identification difficult in order to demonstrate their hatred of americans. Could you describe how it has intervened. That is a fascinating question. Lets just contextualize that. This is a set of remains returned in the early 1990s. There were 208 boxes essentially. In fact those extensive co mingling so that one set may contain multiple individuals. This has been an enormous puzzle for the forensic anthropologist and what they have to rely very heavily on the net genetics. It has been slow going. There has been a significant amount of progress there as well. The cases have gradually yielded maybe about a hundred 50. I dont know how much more they have come out of it. There are approximately 600 individuals presumed to be and more recently those who may remember trump and the singapore summit 55 boxes again. Those two are significantly co mingled. As identifications have moved to the center. They had yielded identifications but those two will be slow going. On the part of the north koreans. To sipe in the identification. I know there are cases where recoveries are done in the late 1990s 2000. It may have been not the most genuine sites. The remains may have been placed inside. And they could tell. They were recovered and bear but presumably in the place there. Is not straightforward. I think we would be premature to describe that. This is about the u. S. In the military and Southeast Asia dropping its personnel and the extraordinary bombing. This is not the straightforward that said i dont know enough to describe that to each and every case. Certainly, we have examples from these different collections and the different opportunities weve had to work with north korea to now we have gone to sites that appear to be prepared. Also at sites they have taken us to. And they were turned over and singapore. We found sites in the early 2000s. And there are some remains there. The u. S. Mission does not seem very straight forward to straightforward to the other cultures and societies. It seems very concerned about a drop in the bucket. To the large number of people that were killed in their country and being so concerned that you hold up all of the other political progress until you satisfy this one element is very hard to translate and understand. It is embedded in the larger geopolitical challenges. Is contingent about them providing all of this information. How do i get all of these things done. How do i solve the mysteries for the people who i cant possibly sell. I dont know how i can answer that question adequately. But i can try to work with you to come up with some solutions. When you make everything contingent upon that. Its very difficult to put out the other geopolitical interests. Its past 530 and i know we could go on for much longer. I want to thank sarah and chris in turn this over to christian to wrap us up. We hope to see you again. This wednesday december 2 when we will discuss columbia university. With the new book. A story of love, and power. Thanks to sarah, chris and eric for really terrific conversation thanks to all of you. Stay safe and be well. Created by americas Cable Television company. Hello. This pandemic has touched everyone around the globe. And for so many of us. 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