Posted on: Monday, November 22, 2004

MILITARY UPDATE

By Tom Philpott

James Coyle, intelligence research director for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command at Hickam Air Force Base, has spent most of his professional life investigating the whereabouts of thousands of Americans lost in service to their nation.

His commitment to that quest has not 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 personal 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, adding, "You don't bring democracy with bayonets."

But most of my interview with Coyle, and with Air Force 1st Lt. Ken Hall, a former Marine and spokesman for JPAC, dealt with the evolution and growth of this unique command. JPAC leads a $100-million-a-year effort to gain the fullest possible accounting of Americans missing from past wars.

In the past year, JPAC teams visited Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North and South Korea, Burma, Tibet, New Guinea, Palau, Albania, France and Washington state.

The 440-person JPAC was only formed in October 2003, by combining the world's most sophisticated forensics facility, the Army's Central Identification Laboratory, Hawai'i, and Joint Task Force Full Accounting. JTFFA got its start in 1992, a better-financed version of the Joint Casualty Resolution Center begun after the Vietnam War.

CILHI, since its founding 30 years ago, has had a global mandate to identify U.S. remains from all past wars. But most of the 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 to shape support for a full accounting of 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.

Though 1,849 remain missing from the Vietnam War, that number is small compared with 78,000 never recovered after World War II and the 8,100 lost in Korea. Another 120 U.S. service members disappeared during the Cold War and one pilot in the first Gulf War.

Coyle, an Army foreign-language officer in Vietnam (1969-70), says most of the missing from Vietnam probably won't be found. The soil there is highly acidic, which accelerates decomposition of bone. Porcupines eat teeth for calcium to replace quills.

"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."

Through extraordinary efforts, remains are being found, both from Vietnam and earlier wars. That makes the effort worthwhile, he said.

"As long as people want us to keep looking," Coyle said, "we'll keep looking."

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