Dr. John Byrd is now director of scientific analysis for the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency Laboratory. The Hickam-based facility has just begun releasing the first identifications of 55 sets of American remains unearthed from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), where the service members fell more than six decades ago.
Byrd, 52, is originally from North Carolina and studied forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee. After first taking a teaching job, he came to the Hawaii laboratory 20 years ago, living here now with his wife and their college-age children.
At the start, the lab had little physical evidence of identity to use other than dental records, if they were available, he said. Technology has improved vastly, and aided with DNA samples from family members, the ID is far less elusive. The impediment has been political, with U.S.-North Korean relations hardening and access to field survey teams drying up.
However, after June’s Singapore summit between President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un, the remains were released as part of a goodwill gesture.
The families of the missing and killed in action, for so long given little reason to hope their loved ones would be found, were “ecstatic,” Byrd said. The recent identification of the first missing veterans, Pfc. William Hoover Jones and Master Sgt. Charles McDaniel, was marked with a ceremony.
That was a rare opportunity for the Honolulu team to encounter family members who are finally reunited with loved ones, he said.
“The laboratory staff doesn’t have a formal role to play in interfacing with families,” Byrd explained. “But when families have technical questions, then they usually will bring us in to speak to the families and explain things to them.
“An example would be if we identified some body and the families were having a hard time understanding the technology that was used to make the ID. We would be brought in to explain to them how you managed to figure out that this was their loved one.”
Question: Given the past history of repatriation from the Korean conflict, what do we know so far about the remains repatriated this time?
Answer: These remains are very much like the other remains repatriated from the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) in the past. The preservation is moderate to poor. The remains are commingled in most cases.
Since we have identified two individuals already, we know that some of the remains are U.S. service members, but cannot yet say that there are no foreign national remains in the mix. No animal remains were in the 55 boxes.
Q: What is the staffing and annual budget for the Honolulu operation?
A: We have approximately 100 lab personnel in Hawaii, another 20 in Omaha, Neb., and two persons in Dayton, Ohio. The overall lab budget, not including government salaries, is approximately $8 million per year.
Q: Can you describe the process of examination in a general way? What are the first tasks?
A:The tasks include accession into the lab evidence management system, preliminary examination and inventory, selection of samples for DNA and other testing, initial observations and measurements, cutting of samples and transfer to other labs, analysis of test results, segregation of individuals, report writing, and identification.
Q: How much has DNA technology improved to make identification easier?
A:DNA technology has made many leaps forward over the past 10 years. Major advancements include improved extraction protocols that greatly reduced the size of a sample needed for testing, the addition of nuclear DNA tests for degraded bone samples, the advent of Next Generation Sequencing for highly degraded samples, etc.
Our DNA testing is done at the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System lab at Dover, Del.
Q: What other tools are used to identify remains?
A:We make extensive use of dental records of our missing service members, along with induction chest radiographs to do direct comparisons of the remains with medical/dental records. Often time these methods can be used in lieu of DNA tests. In other cases, they are combined with DNA results to get an overall strong case for identification.
A new test modality we are incorporating is stable isotope analysis (SIA), which is useful for determining the geographic origins of a person.
Q: At what point does the agency contact family? Do you field inquiries from the public?
A:The agency fields many inquiries from the interested public but works through the respective Service Casualty Offices (each branch of service has their own office) to communicate information to families.
Q: When you first started at the agency, was your work mainly with the Vietnam War remains?
A: When I came 20 years ago, most of our effort was Vietnam and we were doing about the same amount of field work in Vietnam, and Laos and Cambodia, that we do today, but we were having a lot more success in the field. …Vietnam ID access to the field was fairly routine and easy. …
For whatever reason, the political reality at the time, I guess … we occasionally went back then in North Korea. From 1996 to 2005 we were doing field work, and we did have a restricted, limited access into North Korea. What I mean is that they would let us go to certain places. It was very controlled but we were doing excavations every year during those years and we were recovering a lot of remains successfully. We stopped in 2005 when they developed their first atomic bomb.
Q: Right. So since then, basically not much — no field work?
A: Nothing. And so now we’re looking at the possibility of resuming field operations.
Q: Any word on how soon that is?
A: No. The soonest we would work there would be spring, because of the weather. But we have to negotiate that access. …
Q: Are you at all optimistic about that?
A: I’m optimistic. I personally believe more likely than not we’ll start doing field operations again next year.
Q:How many missing soldiers or service members are yet unaccounted for from Korea?
A: Approximately 7,600.
Q: Does that include the disinterred remains from Punchbowl in the lab now?
A: Each one of those is an unaccounted-for American from Korea from us. So I’m confident that there are a lot of those (7,600) unaccounted-for individuals right here in Hawaii right now. …
Since 1999, we’ve been disinterring at Punchbowl but for many years, we were doing only one or two and now we have a plan that we just put in place this summer to disinter all of them within the next few years. …That’s on the order of about almost 700.
Q: How are your funding prospects now?
A:We have enjoyed good support from Congress as long as we’re successful. … I think it’s because as we have improved our performance level, they appreciated that, and they have responded with a little bit more generous funding. … The improvement in performance … is a combination of better technology and process improvement.
It’s also because of sort of strategic decisions we’ve made about how we’re going to do our mission. So for example, five years ago we were doing very few disinterments. … Now we’re doing literally hundreds of disinterments every year of these unknowns, because we have the 700-plus from the Korean War there to do — but we also have about 7,000 or so from World War II. …
The agency developed a much more comprehensive program to look at the unknowns in addition to all of our normal field operations. …
Q: How certain is the ID, based on DNA?
A: So, when we identify someone, we would tell you the certainty is 100 percent. We have two medical examiners, one’s office is right here. … H e won’t sign it unless he is completely sure in his mind that this is the right person. …
If you get say the Y chromosome results (from the paternal side) and the mitochondrial (mother’s-side) cells, you have two independent things. … And you combine them as a combined statistic. We sometimes see them (results with a probability) at a billion to 1. Because when you add them you look at them simultaneously. There’s no way that a random person could just happen to match that. Impossible.
