At each of the funerals Barbara Geisler has attended for American troops who had long been missing, she’s heard similar stories.
There was the family that wouldn’t move because they were afraid if their son returned, he wouldn’t know where to find them.
There were mothers who spent their lives waiting for the day their son walked back through the door.
Her own mother-in-law told her that every time the front gate banged, she would run to the window to see if her big brother had come home.
Never learning what had happened to their loved ones, and not getting confirmation that their remains had been found, can be almost unbearable, she said.
“I can tell you that with some people, the not knowing is something that they carry in their hearts for a lifetime,” she said.
Geisler of Spring Township is with the MIA Recovery Network, a private sector group of historians that works with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency of the Department of Defense in identifying unaccounted for veterans.
There are 82,202 American service members still unaccounted for, including 5,395 from Pennsylvania, with the majority from World War II since it was the broadest conflict, said Chuck Prichard, the agency’s director of public affairs.
And for each person missing there is a family who has never felt the closure of having their loved one’s remains found and brought home, he said.
For Geisler, it’s her husband’s uncle, Frederick Goempel, an Army private who went missing Feb. 9, 1945, while crossing the Sauer River from Luxembourg to Germany with Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army.
Goempel’s sister, Regina Geisler, once saw a photo from a POW camp and pointed to a man she was sure was him, but Barbara Geisler said there was little resemblance, an example of how desperately hopeful survivors can be.
“It may be difficult to understand if you haven’t lived with the loss,” Barbara said. “I remember wondering what in the world she saw that I did not. Then I realized that since there was no body, there was no closure.”
‘The flame is still strong’
Prichard too has attended funerals for service members whose remains were found after years of being unaccounted for. Many are held at Arlington National Cemetery, not far from the headquarters of the agency, which works to locate possible remains of service members, retrieve them and then try to confirm the identities, he said.
Arlington Cemetery has a chapel where the services are held prior to burials, and the distance to those gravesites is about a mile and a half. Still, most family members choose to walk there along the quiet lanes behind the caisson containing a flag-draped casket pulled by six horses.
Many bring large portraits of the service member, and it’s often a big turnout. Prichard remembers a recent service in the which four buses filled with relatives arrived, their ages ranging from infants to folks in their 90s.
“It’s heartbreaking, but it’s also inspiring to see that connection they still have,” he said. “The flame is still strong.”
And while those attending services for recently killed service members are often raw with emotions of grief and loss, the funerals of recently accounted for troops are often more like celebrations, he said.
“They say ‘now we fully know what happened to them. They’re found. Now they can rest in peace,’ ” he said.
Meticulous task
The agency bills its laboratories at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii as the largest and most diverse skeletal identification laboratory system in the world, staffed by more than 30 anthropologists, archaeologists and forensic odontologists.
Still, the retrieval process is usually difficult, often requiring the cooperation of foreign governments and archeological-type digs, and then the identification process takes years or even decades, Prichard said.
It is not only that the labs conduct DNA and dental record tests, but they also examine forensic and circumstantial evidence such as bits of clothing and equipment found with the remains, and the events that led to their deaths, he said.
Advancements in the process continue, he said.
For example, since the agency obtained the chest X-rays given to service members during World War II as a check for tuberculosis, it has been able to use those scans to identify many whose clavicles were found, since that bone is unique in each individual, he said.
As the time passes, though, so to do mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, spouses and children of the unaccounted for troops, he said. But to provide answers to the loved ones who remain and for the generations to come, the work continues, he said.
3 from Berks among missing
In the 2017-18 fiscal year that just closed, DPAA accounted for 131 service members, and the previous year identified 183, including a number who died during the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said.
Of the more than 82,000 still unaccounted for, DPAA estimates 34,000 are still recoverable, many of the rest being in water too deep for recovery, he said.
DPAA could not specify how many are still unaccounted for from Berks County.
As far as Vietnam War veterans, there are three MIA’s from Berks, all Air Force officers: Col. Thomas Dugan, Reading; Lt. Col. Ralph H. Angstadt, Oley Township; and Capt. David E. Pannabecker, Womelsdorf.
Diane Simmons, secretary/treasurer of the Berks-based POW/MIA Forget-Me-Nots, said even decades later families wonder about things like whether their loved ones could have parachuted out of a plane before it crashed, and stayed alive all these years as a prisoner.
“They still don’t know,” she said. “They still have questions.”
The country owes it to those service members and families to continue to work for those answers, she said.
“In the service they believe in ‘no man left behind,’ ” she said. “But we’ve left people behind.”
Contact Mike Urban: 610-371-5023 or murban@readingeagle.com.
