Officials say mission is worth cost

[unhappycamper]

Capt. Kristoffer Mills, head of the JPAC mission in Vietnam's Lang Son province, looks at an object he found in a mud sifting station. Mills said one of the difficult aspects of running a mission is building a team from a group of people who may have never worked together before.



Officials say mission is worth cost
By Ashley Rowland, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Monday, November 26, 2007

With every passing year, finding the missing gets harder.

Witnesses die, or forget where a pilot’s jet crashed, or where a servicemember was shot. The ground where they lay erodes with time. Eventually, their bones crumble and disappear.

Still, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command keeps looking for the 88,000 U.S. servicemembers who have gone missing in combat since World War II.

It’s an enormous, expensive undertaking that requires a staff of 400. The command’s annual budget for Southeast Asia alone is $21 million.

On average, anthropologists at JPAC’s lab in Hawaii — the largest in the world — identify the remains of six servicemembers each month. And leaders say finding them is worth the cost, in terms of both money and human effort.

“If we can afford to put these kids in uniform, strap jets to their back and send them off to war, then we can damn well afford to spend what it takes to get them back home,” said Ambassador Charles Ray, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs, during a phone interview.


Rest of article at: http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=50509