Finding a POW's remains abroad is only the beginning
By CAROL ROBIDOUX - Union Leader Staff
About a year ago, a special military unit was created with one single mission: full accounting of all American POW/MIAs dating back from the Gulf War to World War II.
In an average week, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, based at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, recovers two American servicemen classified as missing from a foreign war.
It's the identification process that can take years.
With a specially trained coalition of 440 military personnel and civilians representing all branches of the armed services, JPAC teams work every day to piece together the physical evidence and DNA traces of servicemen.
It's not just to close records that have been open, in some cases, for more than 50 years.
It's really for the families who have been lost, along with their loved ones, in endless limbo.
That was the case for one of New Hampshire's eight listed POW/MIAs - Air Force Airman First Class Phillip Joseph Stickney of Manchester, who was 28 when his cargo plane was shot down May 31, 1966, during a special bombing mission aimed at destroying a bridge in Thanh Hoa, North Vietnam.
He left behind a wife, three sons and a daughter.
Stickney's remains were finally identified in February of this year, even though they were recovered and returned to U.S. soil in January 1998.
Stickney was buried in June in an Arkansas veterans cemetery, near where his family now lives, including his widow, Hudson native Patricia Stickney.
For the thousands of others still unaccounted for, JPAC continues its daily missions around the globe. Currently there are active recovery missions in Laos, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam, said JPAC information officer, 1st Lt. Ken M. Hall Jr.
His unit is actually the newest incarnation of two former military identification command posts.
Their work is tedious, but rewarding. Since 1973, some 1,200 servicemen have been recovered through the efforts of military recovery missions.
Although the bulk of the process requires combing through archived military records, there is also much physical work to be done by a staff of forensic anthropologists who sift through fragments of clues, from data plates and ID tags, to wedding rings, pilot's wings, and scraps of deteriorating photographs pulled from weathered wallets.
One thing families of POW/MIAs might not realize is that, due to advances in technology using DNA testing, help is needed from surviving family members.
JPAC is interested in hearing from family members from the maternal bloodline of any American classified as missing from any past war. Contact information is available on the Web at http://www.jpac.pacom.mil