"Editorial by Chip Beck
The Real Washington
I read with delight the recent stories in the Washington D.C. press about the Clara Barton "discoveries." A lost box of treasures recalled the forgotten achievements of an American icon. The stories how revealed the woman who healed those wounded in battle, and later founded the American Red Cross, spent the post war period to successfully track down missing servicemen from the Civil War.
The finding of old records, artifacts, and memorabilia intrigued me from two professional vantage points.
First, the find interested me as an amateur archeologist and historian.
In 1980, while helping rennovate a turn of the century D.C. building called the Dresden, I came across some lost treasures myself, in a basement trash pile. They consisted of a rebel battle flag carried in a cavalry skirmish near Winchester, a Civil War sword carried by the losing Union colonel in that contact, and most importantly, photographs and documents. Most of the records related to a family whose patriarch had risen from private to major in the Confederate Army, then turned into a prominent businessman based in the Union capital up through the turn of the century.
It was clear from the photographs, and some records I was able to acquire from the national archives, that the old rebel's son grew into a U.S. Army Captain, who was killed in action in France in 1918.
Also in the trash pile was a complete 1881 yearbook from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. It was apparently owned by a graduate who went on to command the Academy during WWI.
It proves you never know what you can dig up in Washington, if you hunt in the right places.
The second, and main point of interest, owing to my last military assignment as a POW investigator (1995-1996) was Barton's work in locating soldiers who had been Missing in Action during the Civil War. The most prominent statistic in the article was that young Clara, and what little staff she might have had, managed to identify and locate 22,000 "live" men who were missing from the war.
Today's Defense MIA Office (DMO) should take note of that achievement. Particularly when they have not managed to locate a single live person missing from any of the major wars of the past 50 years. Nor have they even been able to identify, or even recognize, any POW or MIA who was alive after the wars.
So, the score is "Clara Barton - 22,000; DMO -Zero, zip, zilch."
True, Clara did not have to deal with the Communists, but neither did she have such modern miracles of investigation as DNA testing, CILHI, JTFFA, DPMO, DIA, CIA, State, NSA, NRO, U-2's, computers, electronic mail, telephones, FED-Ex, airplanes, automobiles, copy machines, electric typewriters (maybe not even a manual), next-day USPS delivery, faxes, or a $13 million budget and a luxury office in Crystal City.
Barton had to do her work with limited resources, -- technological, financial, and administrative. She didn't have today's problems, but she had the problems of her own times, which were equally daunting.
Yet she located 22,000 "live" people, spread over a portion of geography that was certainly larger in land mass than either Vietnam or Korea. And she did it in a relatively short period of time.
How'd she do that?
DMO has all the resources that can be thrown at today's version of the same problem. All it can do is build wiring diagrams and discover excuses. It hasn't located a single live person. Why can't they compete with a field nurse who turned MIA hunter?
The difference is easy to understand, from reading the articles. Clara Barton cared about her work. She took it seriously. She produced results, not excuses. She had been in the field of battle and understood what honor meant. She catered to concerned families, not duplicitous policy makers. She set a goal, then did not deviate from it.
What a difference real committment can make in finding missing men from a war, alive after that war.
By comparison, today's batch of MIA hunters should not be embarrassed. They should only be ashamed."