Fresno Bee, The (CA)
MISSING
Searches for Valley war heroes who never returned home require patience, technology, detective work and hope.
Denny Boyles - The Fresno Bee
Houys and havatk. Hope and faith.
For the family of Air Force Capt. Ara Mooradian, those Armenian words symbolize the decades-long search for answers about what happened to the 27-year-old whose plane was shot down over North Korea more than 55 years ago.
It's a quest shared by the families of nearly 85,000 Americans still listed as missing from World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm.
The list of names for those missing in World War II does not provide hometowns. Lists for Korea and Vietnam show that at least 36 families in the Central Valley have a relative still missing in Korea. Seven families are still searching for loved ones lost in Vietnam.
Their searches require patience, cutting-edge DNA technology, old-fashioned detective work and hope and faith that their government will not stop looking for those who went to war and never came home.
In many cases, parents have passed the search on to children and grandchildren, so that even after they die, the quest for answers can continue.
Roxy Iknoian and her siblings inherited the search for their brother Ara. Iknoian was a 20-year-old nursing student in 1951 when Air Force officers came to say that Ara was missing in action in Korea.
Mooradian, of Fresno, was a veteran of World War II who had been called back to serve in Korea as a B-29 bombardier. His plane, with 13 men on board, was attacked by both warplanes and anti-aircraft guns on Oct. 23, 1951, during a bombing mission over North Korea.
As the burning plane limped out to sea, the crew bailed out. One man was found alive by search-and-rescue crews. Searchers found the body of another airman.
Five others were captured and held as prisoners of war until 1953.
But Mooradian and the rest of the crew were never found. More than 230 search missions were launched by the military during the war, and countless searches have been conducted in the area since.
Looking for answers
Hunting for clues about missing soldiers and airmen like Mooradian is a job shared by five federal agencies scattered from Washington, D.C., to Hawaii with more than 600 workers and budgets totaling $105 million a year. Their common goal is to provide answers to the families of the missing men.
"We still have a lot of work to do," said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Pentagon's MIA office. "We have teams on the ground, teams doing research and teams working to identify the remains we've already located."
Those teams have searched in Vietnam and Korea as well as many World War II battlegrounds.
Greer said the government has had success both at finding remains and identifying them. Every year, searches turn up new remains, and every month at least one or two sets of remains are identified.
Earlier this year, the remains of Marine Corps Cpl. Jim Moshier, a Bakersfield native listed as MIA since Vietnam, were returned to his family. Greer said successes like that keep the searchers motivated.
"I can say that we'll keep looking as long we have information," Greer said. "We'll keep at this as long as we're able."
More than 220 sets of recovered remains have not yet been identified.
For the families of those still missing, the search has become less about finding a loved one alive and more about knowing how they died.
Today, on Veterans Day, which would have been Ara Mooradian's 83rd birthday, his sister still hopes that she will live long enough to learn more about her brother's fate.
"Ara has memorials, but none of his remains are there," Iknoian said. "We put a picture of him in between my parents at [Fresno's] Ararat Cemetery. He also has a memorial plot on a little hill at Arlington National Cemetery. They've told us that if they ever find him, they'll move his memorial down to flat ground for the burial."
The Air Force declared him as presumed dead in 1954, but his family said doubts remain.
"I believe he survived the crash," Iknoian said. "We know that some of his crew were rescued."
That day in 1951, an Air Force officer told Nishan Mooradian and his daughter that the crew had parachuted out of the plane before it crashed. A search was under way for the missing airmen, the officer said. There was still hope.
Nishan Mooradian took the news stoically, Roxy Iknoian said, then told her that he wanted to hold off telling his wife that her son was missing.
Iknoian believes her father hoped that within a day or two, some sign of Ara would be found, and his wife wouldn't have to face the doubt and despair that the word missing carried so strongly.
"My dad was quiet at first, then he said, 'Let's not tell Mom for a while,' " Iknoian said. "So we didn't. Then, a few days later, Ara's girlfriend got a letter back stamped 'Missing.' That's when it became real for all of us."
A helpless feeling
Today, Roxy Iknoian is a 76-year-old grandmother. Her parents are both gone, as are three of her six siblings. Also gone are the hopes she once had of seeing her brother alive.
"My parents, before they died, accepted that Ara was gone, but I think deep down they still thought he was going to be found," Iknoian said. "They had houys and havatk, hope and faith, that he would be found. We all kept hoping, first that he could still be alive, and then that we would find some proof that he wasn't."
Now, Iknoian said, she just hopes that if the answers about her brother's fate don't come in her lifetime, they will still come some day.
"You feel so helpless, not knowing," Iknoian said. "I'm not going to live forever, so I'm passing the search on to my children."
That search has involved giving DNA samples to the government, and attending yearly meetings where officials give updates on the status of search efforts. Searches in North Korea have been suspended since 2005 because of political disputes between the two countries. Iknoian is hopeful those searches will resume soon.
Greer said his agency hopes every family shares Iknoian's desire for answers.
In recent years, the government has begun to collect DNA from relatives of missing men, so that if remains are found they can be identified, even if no family members remain alive.
So far, DNA has been collected from family members of 60% of the missing from Korea, and 63% of those lost in Vietnam. Samples also are collected from families of those missing in World War II, but only on a case-by-case basis, such as when remains are found near an area where a family knows their relative was lost.
Greer said the high numbers of missing from World War II and the global nature of that war make it impractical to take DNA from every family.
"That universe, in terms of numbers of missing and the areas to be searched, is so huge that we don't handle it the same as other wars," Greer said. "We don't ask for DNA from those families until we have a reason to believe we need it. And, we don't send out teams to do excavations until we receive reports that burial sites have been found."
DNA legacy lives on
Right now, Vietnam is the most active region for search teams, but federal searchers are also looking for DNA samples from families looking for those lost in Korea. Even sole surviving members of families are encouraged to provide DNA samples.
"We tell them this is a legacy they leave behind," Greer said. "We collect dozens of samples each month, and we're building a DNA bank of samples."
For those samples to be used, searchers must first find remains of missing service members. That effort is part diplomacy, part archaeology and part detective work, Greer said.
"We search military archives and wartime records as well as interview veterans," Greer said. "We analyze all that information and use it to put teams on the ground where an aircraft might have crashed, or a soldier might be buried."
Iknoian isn't sure where her brother's remains might have ended up. She believes he was captured, either by North Korean soldiers or villagers, then taken to either China or Russia.
"I hope we find a sign of him one day," Iknoian said. "We've had a ceremony for him at Arlington National Cemetery, and it helped a little."
At that ceremony, Air Force officials presented a memorial box to Iknoian and her brother and sister. Along with a folded U.S. flag, the box contains pilot wings, rank insignia for a captain and ribbons that represent Ara Mooradian's military medals.
"It was a really empty feeling when they gave it to us," Iknoian said. "I thought this may be all we ever have of Ara, this flag. I won't ever take it out of there."