The head of the defense agency tasked with identifying the remains of missing service members on Thursday credited President Trump for North Korea’s handover last week of what is believed to be the remains of fallen American service members.
On Wednesday, 55 boxes of remains were repatriated back to American soil, as part of an agreement made by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Trump at the Singapore Summit in June.
“Yesterday’s arrival of the remains of unreturned Korean War veterans in Hawaii was the manifestation of the commitment secured by President Trump and pledged by Chairman Kim at the Singapore Summit,” said Kelly McKeague, director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency at a Pentagon press conference on Thursday.
McKeague said the handover of 55 boxes was actually the largest unilateral handover of remains by North Korea in a given year.
“From 1990 through 1994 they turned over 208 boxes, the largest being 33 in a given year. The last time they unilaterally turned over remains was in 2007 where they turned over six boxes,” he said.
“So yesterday represented a high-water mark, if you want to do a comparative analysis,” he said.
He said the reactions from families of the approximately 7,700 still-missing from the Korean War are “palpable.” “This is an opportunity for more of them to get long-sought answers,” he said.
The 55 sets of remains were flown last Friday from Wonsan, North Korea to United Nations Command at Osan Air Base, South Korea last Friday. On Wednesday, they were sent on to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickham and repatriated on American soil.
DPAA chief scientist Dr. John E. Byrd said a preliminary examination showed that they were human remains consistent with other American remains received from the North Koreans in the past.
“What we saw were remains that were consistent with what we have found from Korean War recoveries we’ve done over the years, and we found remains that were consistent with being Americans,” Byrd said.
Every set of remains had a paragraph of information accompanying it, that included the village where the remains were found, McKeague said. A lot of the boxes came from the Sinhung-Ri village, near the Chosin Reservoir.
Both the Army and Marines were stationed near the Chosin Reservoir, but the Army was stationed in Sinhung-Ri, Byrd said.
He said there was one dog tag included with the remains. The family of the service member was notified “very quickly” afterwards, he said.
Families of missing Korean War and Cold War veterans will gather next week in Arlington, Virginia, for an update on their loved ones, McKeague said. The dog tag will be handed over to the family, although it is not certain whether the service member’s remains is among those returned.
A DPAA lab located at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam will now begin a lengthy process to identify the remains. The remains will be sampled for DNA, and the samples will be sent to the Armed Forces’ DNA Identification Lab (AFDIL) in Dover, Delaware.
AFDIL has stored the DNA from family members of more than 90 percent of the missing service members, which they can use to compare with the remains. When there are compelling matches, identifications can happen quickly. But it can also take months or even a few years to narrow down the identity, Byrd said.
Chest x-rays and dental records can also be used to identify missing service members.
Byrd said he was surprised by the great care the North Koreans took in packaging and preparing the remains.
“They had been very carefully packaged with padding and packaging that was done to I think a very high standard. And — and — and I think that surprised me a little bit that they put that kind of care into the effort,” he said.
McKeague said they were “cautiously optimistic” that the return of the 55 remains would be the beginning of more being returned. Approximately 5,300 Americans went missing in North Korea.
He also said North Korea also committed to allowing DPAA to begin joint recovery operations of remains in North Korea, but that has not happened yet.
However, he said he was encouraged that North Korea reaffirmed that commitment last month to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “I would go back in an instant if we were asked to,” Byrd said.
DPAA is currently working on more than a thousand cases, from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Byrd said all are being pursued “very aggressively” at the same time.
But he said there is a dedicated project to identify Korean War remains, consisting of five people. That will be doubled in the upcoming weeks, he said.
The project is being led by a South Korean-American scientist whose parents emigrated from North Korea to Seoul during the war, Dr. Jenny Jim.
“Here she is, a U.S. citizen charged with pulling together this nine person scientific team to again bring to fruition the identification of missing service members from the Korean War,” McKeague said.
McKeague said the identification effort “speaks volumes about our national psyche.”
“Here we are decades later, still searching for answers for individuals that paid the ultimate sacrifice. The fullest possible accounting of our MIAs is both a sacred obligation and a moral imperative,” he said.
“It remains a high priority for the Department of Defense, not just in resources devoted to it, but also in the resolute commitment attached to it because those we send in harm’s way will not be forgotten, and their families will receive resolution to their decades of uncertainty,” he said.
“I can assure you that the men and women, both, military and civilian that are attached to this mission, 720-plus. I’ve never been associated with a more dedicated, talented, and passionate group of individuals.”
Follow Kristina Wong, Breitbart News’ Pentagon correspondent, at @Kristina_Wong.
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