TWO hundred and eight boxes were handed over by the North Koreans, but American scientists quickly realised that the remains inside them belonged to many more lost servicemen. The consignment of bones, acquired in the early 1990s, was augmented by 33 American expeditions, spread over a decade. Although those were tightly escorted, recalls Johnie Webb, who went on some of them, the North Koreans were “very receptive”. Too receptive, perhaps: some of the specimens the Americans dug up had been freshly reburied for them to find. The visitors brought hard currency; their hosts wanted them to succeed.

The North Korean haul—altogether containing the remnants of over 600 individuals—has its own section in the Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s new laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbour-Hickam, on the outskirts of Honolulu. The scenes inside the lab and beyond its windows are grimly contrasting. Outside stand monkey-pod trees and the mountains of Oahu; inside are rows of tables on which rest skeletons, individual skulls or hip bones, and grisly scraps. The Korean project exemplifies some of the challenges of the agency’s mission to account for all missing American servicemen from the second world war onwards—a task that encompasses the edges of forensic science and the delicacies of diplomacy. It is logistically challenging and emotionally wrenching, expensive but priceless, quixotic but quietly heroic.

To illustrate the environment’s effect on a corpse, John Byrd, the lab director, points to the skeletons of two marines known to have died on the same day in the Battle of Tarawa (now in Kiribati) in 1943. One, which was buried in a coffin, is recognisably human; the other, which was left in the sand, has disintegrated. In South-East Asia there are monsoons, humidity, lots of wild animals: “horrible for preservation,” says Mr Byrd. Many of the missing from the Vietnam war were shot-down pilots, says Brigadier-General Mark Spindler, the agency’s deputy director, so “you’re looking for teeth, you’re looking for slivers of bone.” Jumbles of fragments are brought in from battlefield sites or mass graves, such as a pile retrieved from Cabanatuan, a camp that was a terminus of a POW death march in the Philippines.

“The first question”, Mr Byrd says, “is, is it even human?” Then his colleagues must determine how many individuals are represented and whether they were American. Recent advances in the science of bone DNA make that easier; its insights are combined with biographies, dental records and rib-cage data from tuberculosis tests, plus circumstantial clues such as aircraft serial-numbers. The sleuthing can take years—and that is just the lab work.

Before they can be identified, the remains must be recovered. Some come from American military cemeteries, in Hawaii itself, Manila and elsewhere, in which around 8,000 unknowns are thought to lie. But others are unearthed by teams dispatched to dig in jungles and beaches around the Pacific or to sift through European mud, highly skilled units whose quarry is not live enemies but long-dead compatriots, and whose role is more humanitarian than military. They include photographers, forensic archaeologists and anthropologists, aircraft experts and (depending on the terrain) divers and mountaineers.

Strange meetings

Fifty missions went out last year. Given its reach, the agency inevitably faces political hurdles as well as practical ones. The North Korean visits, for example, stopped in 2005 because of security worries. Still, while authoritarian regimes may impose restrictions, says General Spindler, usefully their officials “work all the access”. In democracies the constraints are subtler: there is “a greater awareness that you’re on personal property” and more room for private objections. Moreover, “Archaeology is a damaging science.” On a recent trip to the Solomon Islands, in pursuit of ten marines interred close to where they fell in 1942, a team dismantled a local’s kitchen, rebuilding it after the dig.

The risks are not just to property. There are tropical diseases, landmines—unexploded-ordnance officers are deployed too—and accidents. Seven Americans were killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam in 2001. “There is nothing easy about this,” says General Spindler. Nor is the quest cheap. The custom-built facility in Hawaii, named after Daniel Inouye, the senator who lobbied for it, cost $85m; previously the relics were housed in an old barracks at risk of flooding. There is another lab in Omaha, an HQ in Washington, DC and permanent detachments in Germany, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. A total of 700 people work for the agency; its annual budget is around $115m.

Searching in the waters of Vietnam According to various audits and reports of a few years ago, not all those funds have always been well spent. The bureaucracy was found to be ramshackle; there was talk of “military tourism” and luxury hotel stays in Rome. A Senate subcommittee weighed in. The structure has since been consolidated and—says General Spindler—inefficiencies addressed. Yet the implied cost of each ID continues to be eyebrow-raising. Last year’s total was 164, a bump on previous tallies but short of a congressional target of 200. The overall caseload is around 83,000, including 73,000 from the second world war. Even discounting more than 40,000 lost at sea, at today’s pace it would take a couple of centuries to clear the backlog. (It would help if the rules were changed, so that physical evidence was not always required for an accounting.) While the dividends may seem intangible, though, they are real. “You cannot associate a dollar value with this national imperative,” says General Spindler. Overseas missions “publicly demonstrate our values” of loyalty and honour; sometimes the agency can repatriate other countries’ casualties (South Korea is said to be keen to take them, the North less so). The effort assures current servicemen that, should the worst befall them, they won’t be forgotten. Then there are the families. Sometimes the missing’s links to the living are tenuous, and the agency has to enlist genealogists to find relatives who can supply DNA samples for comparison. But often, observes Wil Hylton—author of “Vanished”, a book about the long search for a bomber crew lost over Palau in 1944—the unanswered questions inflict “hereditary damage”. Children “grow up not knowing whether their father is dead or alive”; wives are haunted by a hybrid hope and fear that their husbands survived and “might walk back through the door”. It is “a wound that never heals”, Mr Hylton says. Unless the agency provides a salve. Mr Byrd recalls a woman who, before entering the family viewing room at the heart of the building in Hawaii, fixed her hair to encounter what was left of the father she never met. “It’s still very real, raw pain,” he says, “like it happened a week ago.” The protocol after an ID is the same as after a new fatality: a visit from an officer, a formal service at Arlington National Cemetery or in the no-longer missing’s home state.

Deanna Klenda’s brother, Major Dean Klenda of Marion, Kansas, was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965. His parachute failed to open, Ms Klenda says, and his family knew he had died, but she longed to bury him, “even a knuckle”. They “never thought they would ever find anything of him”; but after a Vietnamese villager chanced on a jawbone, and after years of prompting by Ms Klenda and excavations by researchers, his remains were finally flown back to Kansas from Hawaii last year. “When they put that little piece of dental work in my hand,” Ms Klenda says, “that was the biggest hug I’d gotten in 51 years.” There was a fly-over in his honour at the funeral, and “I cried my heart out because he was finally home.”