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Sarah E. Wagner - What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War

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What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War: summary, description and annotation

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Nearly 1,600 Americans are still unaccounted for and presumed dead from the Vietnam War. These are the stories of those who mourn and continue to search for them.For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americansand more than 300,000 Vietnameseinvolved in the conflict are still unaccounted for. In What Remains, Sarah E. Wagner tells the stories of Americas missing service members and the families and communities that continue to search for them. From the scientists who work to identify the dead using bits of bone unearthed in Vietnamese jungles to the relatives who press government officials to find the remains of their loved ones, Wagner introduces us to the men and women who seek to bring the missing back home. Through their experiences she examines the ongoing toll of Americas most fraught war.Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest tracea tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.

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WHAT REMAINS Bringing Americas Missing Home from the Vietnam War SARAH E - photo 1

WHAT REMAINS

Bringing Americas Missing Home from the Vietnam War SARAH E WAGNER - photo 2

Bringing Americas Missing

Home from the Vietnam War

SARAH E WAGNER Cambridge Massachusetts London England 2019 Copyright - photo 3

SARAH E. WAGNER

Cambridge Massachusetts London England 2019 Copyright 2019 by the - photo 4

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2019

Copyright 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Cover design: Annamarie McMahon Why

Cover image: kevinjeon00 Getty Images

978-0-674-98834-7 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-24361-3 (EPUB)

978-0-674-24362-0 (MOBI)

978-0-674-24360-6 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Wagner, Sarah E., author.

Title: What remains : bringing Americas missing home from the Vietnam War/ Sarah E. Wagner.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019014450

Subjects: LCSH: Vietnam War, 19611975Missing in actionUnited States. | Missing in actionVietnamIdentification. | Vietnam War, 19611975 Repatriation of war deadUnited States. | Vietnam War, 19611975Search and rescue operationsUnited States. | GriefUnited States.

Classification: LCC DS559.8.M5 W34 2019 | DDC 959.704 / 38dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014450

TO THOSE WHO CAME HOME RIGHT AWAY TO THOSE WHO CAME HOME YEARS LATER TO THOSE - photo 5

TO THOSE WHO CAME HOME RIGHT AWAY

TO THOSE WHO CAME HOME YEARS LATER

+ TO THOSE WHO MAY NEVER COME HOME

Contents ABMCAmerican Battle Monuments CommissionAFDILArmed Forces DNA - photo 6
Contents
ABMCAmerican Battle Monuments CommissionAFDILArmed Forces DNA Identification LaboratoryAFRSSIRArmed Forces Repository of Specimen Samples for the Identification of RemainsARVNArmy of the Republic of VietnamASCLD / LABAmerican Society of Crime Laboratory Directors / Laboratory Accreditation BoardASGROArmed Services Graves Registration OfficeAWOLabsent without leaveBNRbody not recoveredBTBbelieved to beCILCentral Identification LaboratoryCILHICentral Identification Laboratory HawaiiDMZdemilitarized zoneDNAdeoxyribonucleic acidDODDepartment of DefenseDPAADefense POW / MIA Accounting AgencyDPMODefense Prisoner of War / Missing Personnel OfficeEODexplosive ordnance disposalGAOGovernment Accountability OfficeIEDimprovised explosive deviceJCRCJoint Casualty Resolution CenterJFAJoint Field ActivityJPACJoint POW / MIA Accounting CommandJPRCJoint Personnel Recovery CenterJTF-FAJoint Task Force-Full AccountingKIAkilled in actionLPDRLao Peoples Democratic RepublicLSELLife Sciences Equipment LaboratoryMACVMilitary Assistance Command, VietnamMIAmissing in actionmtDNAmitochondrial DNANGSnext generation sequencingNPRNational Public RadioPACTPersonnel Accounting Consolidation Task ForcePOWprisoner of warPSYOPpsychological operationsPTSDposttraumatic stress disorderREFNOreference numberSEASoutheast AsiaSOPstandard operating procedureSRVSocialist Republic of VietnamSTRshort tandem repeatUSPACOMUnited States Pacific CommandUXOunexploded ordnanceVFWThe Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United StatesVNOVietnamese Office for Seeking Missing Persons (VNOSMP)WWIWorld War IWWIIWorld War IIY-STRSTR on the Y-chromosome

After forty-six years, Lance Corporal Merlin Raye Allen came home. To fanfare and flags, he returned to the little town on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin where, as a child, he had spent his summer vacations and later, when his family moved north, he finished out his high school years. He loved the lake and its sandy beaches; he made good friends and felt at home on the water.

But, in 1965, he also felt a duty to serve his country. A few months after his graduation from Bayfield High School, Allen enlisted in the Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam.

For almost half a century, Merlin Allen was one of Bayfield, Wisconsins missing in action from the war in Southeast Asia, and on June 28, 2013, the town readied itself for his homecoming. Too small to have its own funeral parlor, Bayfield would wait an extra day to host the memorial service for him in its local high school. In the meantime, Allens remains would be shepherded to the Bratley Funeral Home in nearby Washburn, just a few miles south on Route 13, the two-lane highway that traces the lakes southern shoreline and the promontory leading to the one of regions prized landscapes, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

It was a beautiful day, the kind when all of the glory of the Canadian Shield is on display, and the sweet scent of the woods, cut with wild flowers and the cool breeze from the lake, fills the air. A perfect day to greet a fallen hero.

Well before he arrived in Washburn, Allen had already returned to the fold of the military and the care of the nation. He flew from the United States militarys forensic facility in Hawaii, where his remains had been identified, to the Minneapolis / St. Paul airport, where his family and an honor guard waited planeside for the arrival of the urna compact wooden chestnested inside a flag-draped coffin. Soon afterward, members of the Minnesota and Wisconsin Patriot Guard Riders, many of them Vietnam War veterans, with their signature leather vests and rumbling Harleys, joined the official escort. As the column of vehicles moved northward, squad cars from towns and counties along the way led the procession. When they hit the Wisconsin border, state troopers took over.

In Washburn, people of all ages lined the main street in anticipation. Local television crews set up to capture the convoys arrival. Flags were given out for children to wave at the cars passing by.

It was a return more symbolic than material. Little of Lance Corporal (LCpl) Merl Allen remainedjust a single tooth unearthed from a mountainside in the jungles of central Vietnam one year before as part of the US militarys efforts to account for its missing service members from the war in Southeast Asia. If the crowd that had assembled to welcome him home knew what a small fraction of LCpl Allen had returned, they didnt let on. Or it didnt matter. What mattered was that after so many years of uncertainty, his family, friends, schoolmates, fellow veterans, and the Bayfield community could finally reclaim him. They could welcome him back and give him the marked resting place that he deserved. And so when the motorcade rolled down Highway 13 and into Washburn, past the local diners, the grocery store, the auto shop, and the memorial park, they stood at attention, many waving flags and wiping away tears. It was, as one vet told me, the only homecoming of its kind that people in northern Wisconsin could remember.

Bayfield is both singular and common in its story of a lost son returned. With a population of 487, its a sleepy town despite the influx of tourism and lakeshore development. But on this occasion, as it received that tiny fragment of a once vibrant human life, Bayfield became something larger. The remains of LCpl Allen did more than just put Bayfield on the map for a few days. It created a powerful, if ephemeral, community of mournerskith and kin and strangers alike. Around that single tooth, a temporary assembly memorialized a lost life and recalled a war long past. The gathered mourners imagined, if only for an instant, their connection to the young man, a US Marine, and to the nation that sent him off to die and that decades later labored to find his body and to bring him home.

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