As the Pentagon seeks to recover 27,000 missing American war dead, it may turn away from Hawaii — where much of that government effort has been centered — and to private organizations to outsource some research, recovery and identifications.
Mark Noah, founder and president of Florida-based History Flight Inc., already has a proposal.
For about $4 million over two years, History Flight and the Bode Technology Group, which provides forensic DNA analysis, would undertake family reference sample work and recoveries and identifications of service members from the Pacific battle of Tarawa, Noah said.
Limited-scope historical and genealogy work and family DNA testing involving "unknowns" buried in cemeteries in Europe also would be performed, he said.
Noah’s nonprofit group has already been to Tarawa and done that — more than 30 times, he noted. But that work so far has been done through fundraising and donations and not government funding.
"History Flight recovered over 14,000 American bones from Tarawa — and that’s a fact," Noah said.
Those remains, Noah said, were turned over to the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, whose Central Identification Laboratory makes identifications of formerly missing war dead.
"In a two-year period, we could get at least 100 IDs from Tarawa from the existing number of remains that we’ve recovered already and what we can recover in the next two years," Noah said.
It’s a bold statement in a field that often comes with confused burial pictures and requires meticulous science to identify war dead, but the public-private partnership approach may portend the future for the recovery of more missing Americans.
According to the Defense Department, 1,149 Marines and Navy servicemen were killed in the Nov. 20-23, 1943, Battle of Tarawa. About 520 remain unaccounted for, the military said.
JPAC, as the command is known, identified 87 service members in fiscal 2014 from all conflicts — far short of an annual goal of 200 set by Congress.
More than 83,000 Americans remain missing from past wars, but the Defense Department contends about 27,000 are "recoverable."
As part of the Pentagon’s decision to reform what it acknowledged was a dysfunctional government MIA accounting effort, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in 2014 announced a series of steps, including developing proposals for expanding public-private partnerships in identifying the missing.
"The goal is to leverage the capabilities and efforts of organizations outside of government that responsibly work to account for our missing," the Pentagon said.
History Flight is among private organizations — the BentProp Project is another — whose passion for military history and desire to see MIAs repatriated has taken team members to jungles, atolls, mountaintops and other remote locations where Americans fell in battle.
Noah, a commercial airline pilot who said he has been to Tarawa 25 times, maintains History Flight and Bode Technology can make Tarawa identifications faster and cheaper, yet with the level of scientific professionalism that JPAC is known for.
JPAC was spending $100,000 a week when it went to Tarawa, Noah said.
Noah said his proposal is for History Flight and Bode to enter into a pilot project to do the recoveries and identifications.
"And so our proposal was basically to do the same (work on Tarawa) and work with JPAC and Bode Technology to get the job done" instead of what he calls the "asinine type of internecine squabbles" that elements within JPAC engaged in.
"There’s a lifetime’s worth of work to be done here (recovering and identifying MIAs), not just for a (nongovernmental organization) or the Pentagon, but for everybody," Noah said. "There’s so much to be done."
Lt. Col. Joe Sowers, a Pentagon spokesman, said in an email that "we did receive and considered" a sole-source contract proposal from History Flight to conduct recovery operations on Tarawa.
"We appreciate his proposal and have determined that if requirements are identified in the future, the department will pursue contract support of the requirements through full and open competition," Sowers said.
Sowers said the Pentagon does not currently have any paid public-private partnerships involving JPAC-related research, recoveries or identifications.
More than a year ago, the commanding general of JPAC told his staff that he wanted 75 to 100 identifications from Tarawa and to put together a proposal to work with History Flight, Noah said.
In early December, Noah met with Republican North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones and Alisa Stack, then in a key decision-making role with the Pentagon’s MIA accounting reorganization, to discuss the proposal, Noah said.
Where it stands now is not clear, he said.
Noah calls Virginia-based Bode Technology a "top-quality lab — as good as anything in the world."
Bode said on its website that its "extensive experience in DNA forensics" includes more than 80,000 forensic cases completed, processing more than 15,000 cases a year.
Bode said it has assisted in identifying criminals and victims of war, terrorism, crime and natural disasters, including dead from the World Trade Center, war in Bosnia and U.S. soldiers dating back to the Vietnam War.
The identification of American MIAs is currently done through JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory, which has been called "the gold standard of scientific rigor and excellence" for IDs.
Under the Pentagon reorganization, however, the lab has seen an exodus of key staff.
Noah said History Flight has "top-quality research and recovery capabilities, and it’s a perfect union (with Bode) to do this kind of work."
Noah said his field staff includes forensic anthropologists, historians and geophysicists — most with doctoral-level training.
Greg Fox, a former JPAC forensic archaeologist who was a recovery leader on a 2010 Tarawa mission and more recently was acting director of a JPAC satellite lab in Nebraska, said he hadn’t seen History Flight’s proposal, but he could comment on the challenge of making 100 IDs from Tarawa Atoll.
Incomplete recoveries on Betio Island at the end of the war left "numerous" skeletal elements of already-identified Americans in the ground along with indigenous burials and 6,000 Japanese and laborers, Fox said.
It may be possible to exclude some of the indigenous population or Japanese dead using an archaeological context, but "each individual bone and recovery context must be evaluated and/or tested to determine identity or origin," Fox said.
Sorting out Americans among already-resolved and unresolved cases "is a rigorous and resource-intensive endeavor of monumental scale," Fox said.
Noah, however, said "in historically relevant areas, we found American bones (with) American boots, wearing American helmets, wearing American webbing gear."
Some were wrapped in American ponchos, making it "so obvious" they were Americans, he said. American ID tags were also found with bodies.
Japanese also could be identified, with some wearing Japanese helmets.
One enemy combatant was still clutching a Japanese hand grenade in his bony fingers, Noah said.
"We found another Japanese individual whose trigger finger was on the trigger of his rifle, and it was clearly a Japanese rifle," he said.
Noah has believers in both the Pentagon and among families seeking the return of fallen kin from Tarawa.
Deno Zazzetti of Joliet, Ill., said his brother, Joseph, was an assistant driver in an amphibious landing vehicle tracked, or LVT, when he died on Tarawa.
The family received a telegram on Christmas Eve in 1943 telling them Joseph, 21, had been killed in action. The Marine’s body was never returned, and Deno Zazzetti believes he’s now buried as an "unknown" at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.
"I have really nothing good to say about JPAC. JPAC to me is a bunch of guys covering their butts and their jobs," said the 84-year-old Zazzetti. "I’ve been looking into this for 65 years. I get most of my information, truthfully, from History Flight."
