Update: The date of the "honorable carry" ceremony in Lincoln marking the close of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's USS Oklahoma Project has been postponed to a date that will be announced later. The ceremony will be carried live on the DPAA Facebook page.
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The Pentagon is playing taps this Memorial Day week for the USS Oklahoma Project, a six-year effort to identify 388 sailors and Marines missing since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Six years ago, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency exhumed 61 caskets containing USS Oklahoma remains from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. They were shipped to the agency’s laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base, the first major identification project at a facility that opened in June 2013.
Since then, the team of forensic anthropologists at the Offutt lab — working along with the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Delaware — have identified 338 of the missing men, beating a goal of 80% (about 315) set at the beginning of the project.
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“This is the first project we’re really closing,” said Carrie LeGarde, the anthropologist who is leading the project. “We’re still a pretty small staff. Everybody here contributed to the Oklahoma.”
Ceremonies originally planned for June 2 have been postponed because of the lack of an available aircraft, a spokesman for the accounting agency said Wednesday. An announcement will follow when the events are rescheduled.
The second will take place a few hours later after the plane lands at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, just a few hundred yards from where the men died.
“This is something that’s been years in the making,” said Lt. Col. Tamara Fischer-Carter, a spokeswoman for the accounting agency. The ceremonies are for invited guests only, but anyone may view them live on the accounting agency’s Facebook page.
The Oklahoma absorbed as many as eight torpedo hits in the first minutes of the Sunday morning surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and it quickly rolled over at its mooring on Battleship Row. Of about 1,100 sailors and Marines on board, 429 were killed. Only 35 were identified.
The graves were exhumed after the war, and the Army Graves Registration Service made a stab at identifying the remains.
The effort failed. Although 27 skulls were identified through dental records, authorities at the time decided to rebury all of the remains in plots at the new cemetery in Honolulu, in 46 graves marked “Unknown.”
In the 1990s, a resourceful Pearl Harbor survivor named Ray Emory, using documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, successfully linked the remains of five USS Oklahoma sailors to a single grave.
Emory joined with living veterans of the ship to lobby the Defense Department to open that grave in 2003. Those five identities were confirmed using DNA technology, as was one more from another grave in 2007.
Finally, after years of internal debate, the Pentagon in 2015 ordered the reopening of the remaining USS Oklahoma graves — a policy change that has since led to identification of hundreds of other World War II and Korean War dead who had been buried as “unknowns” in U.S. military cemeteries.
The remains arrived at Offutt’s new lab over several months. About 13,000 bones were spread out on tables, each one numbered and logged into spreadsheets. They took DNA samples from about 5,000 of the larger bones and set a goal of identifying 80% of the 388 sailors and Marines still unidentified.
The agency’s historians and anthropologists prepared reports and sent off the DNA to the Delaware lab for comparison with DNA samples obtained from relatives.
The first identification was announced in March 2016: Petty Officer 1st Class Vernon Luke, 43, of Green Bay, Wisconsin, a World War I veteran who had written to his family two weeks earlier, “Wish the war would break, we would get thru much quicker ... guess everything will come out okay,” according to his obituary.
The agency announced its 100th USS Oklahoma identification in December 2017, the 200th in March 2019, and the 300th in February.
It is the largest and most complex sorting of a single group of remains undertaken by the DPAA or its predecessor, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which was reorganized in 2015 after a series of controversies.
It dominated the duties of the Offutt lab for several years, and it is the first such project to be formally concluded.
LeGarde took over the leadership of the Oklahoma Project two years ago, but she has been immersed in the case since it started.
“I was in Hawaii at the beginning,” LeGarde said. “The very first casket that came out of the ground, I helped clean.”
The project passed its goal of identifying 80% of the missing men earlier this year, and the current total of 338 represents 86%.
Eighteen identifications were announced in April and 11 in May, including a set of brothers from Indiana, Petty Officer 2nd Class Harold Trapp, 24, and Petty Officer 3rd Class William Trapp, 23.
LeGarde said she believes the lab will reach 90%, or about 354.
“We still have some more in the pipeline,” she said.
The tested bones yielded more than 300 different DNA sequences, LeGarde said. About 50 of the DNA sequences were common to more than one sailor, and one sequence was linked to 25 of the men.
That required a second, more sensitive DNA test, and in some cases obtaining another DNA sample from a different living family member.
The DNA from family members is critical to making the identifications. Tracking down and obtaining most of the samples has been the job of Dee Dee King, a forensic genealogist from Texas who works on a contract for the Navy.
For more than a decade, King scoured old newspapers and combed the internet to track down relatives of the long-dead sailors. She has kept in touch with some of the families she met, and attended four funerals of men who were identified.
“It’s been a lot of work — nights, weekends, holidays — but worth every minute,” King said in an email. “I have met some amazing family members and heard many touching, heartbreaking stories.”
“In many ways,” she added, “the USS Oklahoma has dominated my life for the last 11 years.”
As recently as six months ago, the accounting agency still lacked family DNA samples for 25 of the sailors and Marines from the Oklahoma. Without one, identification is impossible.
Now, LeGarde said, the number is down to 10. A handful of them are men who were foster children or who were adopted as infants, and no record can be found of their birth parents.
She said relatives aren’t always receptive at first.
“There’s always a little uncertainty when the government is calling you to ask for your DNA,” she said. “For quite a few, the people were not even aware that they were related to this person.”
Wednesday’s ceremony will mark the return of about 7,700 bones for reburial. They will be buried together in the same Honolulu cemetery from which they were disinterred, perhaps on Dec. 7, 2021, the 80th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.
LeGarde described it as “bittersweet” to see the project she has worked on for so long winding down.
“There’s going to be a little bit of relief. But it’s kind of sad. 110% of my life has been dedicated to the Oklahoma,” she said. “I’m excited to be able to go to this (ceremony), and see this through to the end.”
While the lab work may be ending, the hometown burials will continue. They have been backlogged because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of last week, only 187 of the 338 identified sailors and Marines had been buried.
But 20 more funerals are scheduled for this summer — including Fireman 1st Class Louis Tushla, who will be buried July 17 in his hometown of Atkinson, Nebraska.
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we are going to see USS Oklahoma funerals all over the United States for the next year, and maybe into 2023,” said Sgt. 1st Class Sean Everette, a spokesman for the accounting agency.