Recovering American war dead is serious, sacred business; leave hyperbole out of it President Trump is making it sound like the recent return of U.S. war dead from North Korea is unprecedented; that's just not true.

Gregg Zoroya | USA TODAY

Two realities are most striking about America's timeless exercise locating and returning U.S. war dead from past conflicts.

The first is how this sometimes-painstaking process carried out in remote jungles and mountains where violence unfolded decades ago is the toil-and-sweat manifestation of an age-old military axiom — leave no one behind.

The payoff for dedication to that idea comes in small doses; as when 55 caskets arrived in Hawaii this month containing (it is hoped) remains of U.S. troops killed in the Korean War; or, as I witnessed a few months before 9/11, the recovery of a World War II air crew killed in a B-17 crash in New Guinea.

The other reality that hits home when you witness a recovery is an abiding truism of war — that the last full measure is almost always borne by young people. The airmen who died in the bomber that crashed into a jungle ridge were nearly all just a few years out of high school. As the world keeps turning, they remain forever frozen in youth.

Recovering what these men left behind

A delicate neck chain found at the crash site, along with rosary beads, flight jackets, a 1939 class ring, what looked to be a bottle of hair tonic and a gold bracelet engraved with the pilot's name, were belongings of eight crew members, almost all in their early to mid-20s who were a week from going home when their plane crashed in 1942.

The dog tag I saw glistening in the mud of a rain-slick mountain ridge belonged to the 22-year-old bombardier, Sgt. Robert Burns, a big-band music fan who played the trombone and married a girl named Mildred he met at Moose Lodge dance in Belleville, Ill., shortly before heading off to war. She lived to be 95 and died never knowing what happened to the young man who vanished somewhere in the South Pacific.

Mildred is not the only one who has waited so long. There are still more than 72,000 U.S. troops unaccounted for from World War II, nearly 7,700 from the Korean War and about 1,600 from the Vietnam War. "It leaves an enduring pain and void (for families)," Kelly McKeague, director of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, told reporters at a White House briefing this week. His military recovery teams that fan out across the globe searching for these lost Americans, not surprisingly, see their work as something bordering on sacred.

"They sacrificed their lives for their country," Army Sgt. Leon Hudson, a mortuary affairs specialist, told me as he sifted buckets of dirt through a metal screen at the bomber crash site, inspecting for bits of bone or teeth. "If we go out and recover them and bring them back home, that's the best feeling in the world."

Their work often goes unnoticed by the public. Last year, they repatriated 183 missing U.S. troops.

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It's a mission not to be trifled with, exaggerated or used to political advantage. The Trump administration has come dangerously close to doing just that with the recent news that North Korea agreed to release the 55 containers holding U.S. remains.

During interviews and appearances after his June 12 summit in Singapore with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un, which President Trump works hard to characterize as an unprecedented success, Trump suggested that negotiating repatriation of those war dead was a rare response to a public outcry.

The Washington Post fact-checked his claim that "thousand and thousands" of people approached him personally during 2016 campaign rallies begging for return of their lost loved ones from that war. The newspaper found the claims implausible.

"We're getting our — the remains back of our great heroes," Trump said in June, a few weeks after Singapore. "This is something — we never got anything back, anybody back."

That's just not true. The arrival of those boxes in Hawaii — possibly containing remains of Marines killed during the famous battle of Chosin Resevoir in 1950 — is a wonderful achievement.

Not the first remains to return from North Korea

But as recovery agency spokesman Chuck Prichard told me, "as much as we appreciate the light that this incident has shown on our mission, this is not the first (from North Korea)."

In the recent past, the U.S. military had repatriated 341 U.S. service members killed in North Korea. Between 1996-2005, 229 bodies were located by U.S. military teams working inside North Korea at battlefield or former POW-camp sites under an access agreement with Pyongyang. Six American war dead turned over by North Korea in 2007 were the last repatriations before the most recent return.

Military forensic specialists will work with dental records and DNA to determine how many missing American war dead are actually contained in those 55 boxes. It's a process that can takes years, Prichard said.

Bringing these warriors home is difficult and serious business. It doesn't need hyperbole. It doesn't need embellishment. It just needs to get done.

Gregg Zoroya is a USA TODAY editorial writer and author of The Chosen Few: A Company of Paratroopers and Its Heroic Struggle to Survive in the Mountains of Afghanistan. Follow him on Twitter: @greggzoroya