For the past seven years, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Kelly McKeague has led the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the organization within the Pentagon tasked with providing the fullest possible accounting of missing American service members. The DPAA sends teams to dozens of countries in the hopes of finding, identifying and repatriating American remains to their families.

McKeague is responsible for policy, control and oversight of all aspects of the Department of Defense program to account for missing personnel from past conflicts.

DAV sat down with McKeague earlier this year. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

Can you briefly describe the DPAA’s mission?

We as a military, as a nation, sent men and women off into harm’s way. When they did not come home, it’s that fulfillment of that warrior ethos to never leave a fallen comrade behind. We are the embodiment of that moral promise of searching for, finding, hopefully identifying remains for the purpose of repatriating them to their families.

 

What does it mean to provide the fullest accounting possible for those who remain missing or unaccounted for?

There are currently 82,000 Americans still missing. The fullest possible accounting is doing the research, hopefully finding an area where we can then send a field investigation team to find remains, and then bringing them back to one of two laboratories for the purpose of accounting for them so that they’re no longer missing. And, more importantly, returning them to their families for a full military honors burial.

 

How does the DPAA go about finding and locating individuals? Do you have to partner with a host nation?

We work in 46 different countries all over the world. We are emboldened and beholden to the host nation simply because we need access. Oftentimes, they’re affording not only access but assistance. We have a team in Kuwait today that is there working hand in glove with the Kuwaiti Navy. They’ve been very generous in providing platforms, divers, equipment, fuel and making this Operation Desert Storm mission a success.

 

What can you tell me about the men and women doing this type of work—the teams that are going and recovering, bringing information and remains back?

The excavation team is made up of 725 individuals: 55% are civilians and the rest are military service members that come from all four branches. We have divers, we have mountaineers, EOD technicians, linguists, medics—basically, everything that you can imagine that you need for a 15-person team to be deployed in a remote, austere area and function over 45 to 60 days.

 

In 2018, there were dozens of U.S. remains that were given to us from North Korea. But I have to imagine that North Korea is not the strong partner we like to have. Can you walk me through how this happened?

I mentioned 46 countries, all of them willingly and responsibly working with the United States, even China. North Korea is one of the exceptions, and it’s unfortunate because, of the 7,500 missing from the Korean War, 5,300 are in North Korea.

[When they turned over remains in 2018], they said it was 55 service members. It turned out to be 501 bones, 250 different individuals.

 

What is done at the DPAA laboratories in Hawaii and Nebraska?

They are the preeminent forensic human skeletal labs in the world, even surpassing FBI’s, in my biased view. Utilizing seven lines of evidence, we partner with the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory at Dover.

Your collarbone, your clavicle is as unique as a fingerprint. If the scientists have the chest X-rays that the service member took when they entered the service and we find a clavicle in the field, they’ve developed this algorithm that sorts all 60,000 X-rays.

The other interesting thing is isotope analysis.

What you ate, what you drank as an infant, as a toddler stays with you for life. It becomes a marker. So, such that if we find a set of remains and we do an isotopic analysis, we can determine, did you grow up in the Midwest? It’s a cheaper and faster test than DNA. And oftentimes we can help segregate, if not contribute, to the identification.

 

What else should people know about the DPAA?

When I first became associated with the mission, I thought, surely 60, 70, 80 years have passed, families have moved on. Absolutely not.

There’s a void in mind and heart that follows the family generationally. They know everything about the loss. They know that their grandfather died in battle on this day. But the uncertainty of not having remains leaves an exacerbated grieving.

It’s also one where communities become engaged. Veterans come out en masse to pay their tribute to an American hero lost for decades that’s now coming home.

To learn more about the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, go to dpaa.mil.