Kin of MIAs get "update"
By Amy Herdy
Denver Post Staff Writer
Westminster - Hoping to help identify her uncle's remains one day, Susan Anderson opened her mouth Saturday.
Anderson, 47, a Qwest technician from Denver, is counting on the DNA taken from three swabs of the inside of her cheeks to be a match to some remains the Army has of soldiers killed in the Korean War. Her mother's brother, Sgt. Andrew Joseph McKinley, an Army medic who served in that war, was declared missing in action in 1950.
"He had two little boys," Anderson said. "I hope it will give us more information on my Uncle Joe."
The testing was done as part of a Department of Defense "Family Update," or POW/MIA accounting, at the Westin Hotel in Westminster on Saturday to some 150 Denver-area relatives of missing soldiers and airmen.
The department gives updates nearly every month in a different city around the United States, spokesman Larry Greer said. The POW/MIA office maintains 88,000 cases from World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the Cold War, Greer said.
Two cases involve the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the current Iraq conflict, Greer said.
Could any of these soldiers still be alive?
"We don't rule it out," Greer said. "We have one team that investigates only live-sighting reports, but they're very old (sightings), 10 to 15 years old."
Greer said that with an annual budget of $103 million, the POW/MIA office employs anthropologists, linguists and scientists in teams to find, identify and recover the remains of American soldiers overseas.
"We treat these sites as crime scenes," Dr. Tom Holland, a Defense Department scientist, told the crowd.
The updates can be hard on family members. At one point Saturday, Holland described searching for bodies that had been flung down sheer cliffs in Laos during the Vietnam War, prompting groans from the audience.
In painstaking detail, Holland also told how the memories of a handful of Marines prompted the recovery of the remains of a prisoner of war.
In South Vietnam, he said, the young Marine died of malnutrition and was buried by his fellow Marines. Decades later, a recovery team brought one of the survivors of the POW camp, who indicated an area roughly the size of a football field where the man could be buried.
The team excavated the jungle, Holland said, and dug trenches until they found soil that indicated remains. Matching his teeth against dental records confirmed the identity.
Twelve years ago, DNA was not used in any of these cases, Holland said. Today, it is used in 75 percent to 80 percent of them.
For family members of the missing, resolving the cases can bring desperately needed closure.
"My father used to play hide- and-seek with me a lot," said Sally Wilton-Gould, 58, a King Soopers floral department manager from Denver who was 8 when her father disappeared in North Korea. "I thought when they came to tell me he was missing that he was hiding in the back of their car. So, I never believed he was dead or missing."
Her father, Air Force Capt. Gene Gould, was flying a plane that was shot down over North Korea in 1952, Wilton-Gould said. Military officials, afraid to give the Communists any information, told the family they should not talk about him.
"So, we were silenced in a way that was very difficult," she said. "I closed off."
Wilton-Gould said it has only been in the past few years that she has addressed the emotional issues triggered by her father's disappearance. Learning about their father also was important to her brother Richard, who was 3 when their dad disappeared.
"It's like an underground river of sadness," Richard Gould, 54, said of his unresolved feelings. He works for an insurance agency in Denver.
Growing up with a father who was missing in action, he said, affected how he feels about all wars. "In Iraq, they feel about their families the way we feel about ours," Gould said.
"We're not that different. The people who are affected are the innocents."
Staff writer Amy Herdy can be reached at 303-820-1752 or aherdy@denverpost.com