Military Update: Command is dedicated to finding those lost in service
BY TOM PHILPOTT
HONOLULU -- James Coyle is the intelligence research director for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. He's spent most of his professional life investigating the whereabouts of hundreds of Americans lost in service to the nation.
His commitment to that quest hasn't flagged in 18 years, he said. But Coyle, 57, defines his motivation more narrowly than would many JPAC colleagues.
"I don't really do it for the families," he said. "I do it for the memory of the people who gave their lives in service to their country. Those people deserve to have what happened to them found out and reported."
As a historian, linguist and intelligence analyst, Coyle - over two decades - has made dozens of trips, conducted hundreds of interviews and sifted through mountains of documents to find lost U.S. service members. Perhaps given his immersion in the human cost of war, he has strong views on topics such as the Iraq war, which he shared when asked.
"We're in Iraq because we failed to learn from Vietnam," Coyle said. "You don't bring democracy with bayonets."
But most of my interview with Coyle - and with Air Force 1st Lt. Ken Hall, former Marine and spokesman for JPAC - dealt with the evolution of this unique command. JPAC leads a $100 million-a-year effort to gain the fullest possible accounting of Americans missing from past wars. Most of that is spent by JPAC directly, with 75 cents of every budget dollar going to investigative and recovery missions.
In the past year, JPAC teams visited Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North and South Korea, Burma, Tibet, New Guinea, Palau, Albania, France and Washington. The investigative teams seek leads and information. When enough evidence is found, recovery teams return to excavate sites.
The 440-member JPAC was formed in October 2003 by combining the world's most sophisticated forensics facility - the Army's Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, or CILHI - and Joint Task Force Full Accounting. JTFFA got its start in 1992, a better-financed version of the Joint Casualty Resolution Center, or JCRS, begun after the Vietnam War.
CILHI, since its own founding 30 years ago, has had a global mandate to identify U.S. remains from all past wars. But most remains came from Southeast Asia because the JCRS mandate was to find the missing from Vietnam. By 1992, pressure from the families of lost Vietnam veterans help shape support for a full accounting of all the missing from all past wars. Creation of JPAC, Coyle said, reinforced that national priority.
"This probably is never going to end, certainly not in my lifetime," he said of the searches to find remains. Numbers tell the tale: Although 1,849 remain missing from the Vietnam War, that number is small compared with the 78,000 never recovered after World War II and the 8,100 missing in Korea. During the Cold War, 120 U.S. service members disappeared, and one pilot is missing from the Persian Gulf War.
Coyle was an Army foreign-language officer in Vietnam (1969-70). He said the United States was committed to recovering Americans' remains after that war, in part, because of scientific advances in identifying remains - and, in part, because America lost the war, a fact that a lot of veterans from his generation refused to accept.
"After World War II, we had control of the battlefield. We had the Graves Registration Service," Coyle said. Yet, by 1955, with almost 80,000 Americans still missing, the organized search for casualties ended.
But with Vietnam, expectations changed. The view of many Americans was "Damn it all, they owe us an explanation!"
Hired in 1986 as a casualty resolution specialist with JCRC, predecessor to JRAC, Coyle intended to expose any cover-up of Americans still held captive. Instead, he came to think that the "real cover-up" was how little Americans knew of extensive efforts to find the missing. JPAC contends that of 1,956 firsthand reports of live sightings since 1975, most are traced to "accounted for" Americans. Many were fabricated. Only 14 are unresolved.
In 1988, Vietnam finally did allow U.S. search teams. Coyle, with his near-native fluency in Vietnamese and a couple of master's degrees in Vietnamese history and culture, led one of those first two teams.
Today, he thinks that most of the missing from Vietnam probably won't be found. The soil there is highly acidic, which accelerates decomposition of bone.
"The real problem facing us ... is time," Coyle said. "Time is reducing the number of eyewitnesses (and) destroying, little by little, the physical evidence, including aircraft wreckage, uniform pieces (and) remains."
But through extraordinary efforts, remains are being found.
"As long as people want us to keep looking," Coyle said, "we'll keep looking."
© 2004, Daily Press