GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE: Imagine No Unknown Soldiers Anywhere
It's easy if you try. Will the government try? Or billionaires? Or the crowd?
“And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
We often beat up on Silicon Valley and rightly so but increasingly private technology companies are responding to their duties.
Reuters notes that Clearview.AI is being deployed in Ukraine to help identify the dead, captured or missing. I support this use case for Clearview and would love to see it extended to our borders as well. Owen West of Clearview.AI has laid out a pretty compelling vision of crowdsourced investigations into oligarchs the likes of which were pioneered in the January 6th incident.
But what of identifying the dead already buried or who lack a face at all? That’s Othram, which uses forensic sequencing to solve crimes.
The cases Othram has solved is impressive indeed. Othram recently solved a case of a four year old girl aka “Little Miss Nobody.” They’ve even solved cases involving a minimal amount of DNA.
You can hear a great interview between Othram CEO David Mittelman and former congressman Doug Collins of Georgia discussing the uses of this amazing technology.
When the government can’t or won’t come in it’s been interesting to watch the public come to the rescue through crowdfunding and the widow’s mite. This is, I think, one of the most American things — to gather together and to solve problems ourselves. Billionaires and every day Americans alike have an interest in solving crime.
You can even donate your DNA in addition to your money.
My favorite Othram case is the Carla Walker case which was solved some 46 years after Carla was dragged from a high school dance, raped and murdered by Glen McCurley.
My favorite detail is that when McCurley switched his plea to guilty, his son, went up to him. Here’s how it was described in the local press.
After Glen McCurley entered a surprise guilty plea to the 1974 murder of Carla Walker and was sentenced to life Tuesday, a Tarrant County courtroom was filled with people hugging one another and wiping their eyes. McCurley’s son Roddy
McCurley walked across the room and approached Carla’s brother, Jim Walker. They embraced for several minutes — Roddy McCurley cried into Walker’s collared shirt, and Walker whispered into his ear and held him.
The Gospel lives on.
Our greatest patriots serve. There are many ways to serve. One of the best ways is to wear a uniform. Everyone in my family serves.
A friend and I walked through Arlington National Cemetery where I left flowers on the grave of my grandparents. (The anniversary of my grandfather earning the Navy Cross for his gallantry at the Battle of Honshu Island is March 19th.)
We visited the tomb of the unknown soldier and there are graves all around National Cemetery which are listed simply “unknown.” It’s impossible to walk around without stumbling upon some unmarked grave. I personally would love to pay to solve the cases near the grave of my grandparents. At $5,000 a pop, it’s pricy but I suspect I won’t have to do it alone. The public will join me.
Frankly walking by those unmarked graves is somewhat depressing. Why is it, in the greatest nation on the planet, we don’t honor our dead by knowing their names? How might families feel about their loved ones’ ultimate sacrifice if they don’t even know where the remains lie?
Of course America isn’t alone in honoring its unknown soldiers. There are tombs of unknown soldiers all over the world.
In light of the recent advances we might ask: why do we have unknown soldiers in our society?
Part of the issue is a lack of imagination on the part of the Pentagon which has refused to adopt modern sequencing techniques. Instead, the Pentagon blew $150 million on solving just 200 cases. For the same amount of money Othram could solve 30,000 cases.
The New York Times by Dave Philipps explains the issue at stake:
South of Rome, an American military cemetery has a grave that is thought to contain the remains of a young Army private named Melton Futch. But the white marble marker reads only, “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.”
It is one of some 6,000 graves of American troops killed in World War II whom the military was not able to identify with the technology of the time.
Today, of course, there is DNA analysis. Increasingly sophisticated techniques make it possible to obtain, even from bones that may have deteriorated for decades, a unique genomic profile that can reliably confirm their identity.
But in order to work, DNA identification requires a sample from a blood relative for comparison. And in the cases of many of the World War II dead the military can find no siblings, no parents, no children, not even distant cousins. In these cases, despite remarkable advances, the Army runs into the same dead ends today that it encountered in the 1940s.
So the Defense Department is considering trying a strikingly different approach: Instead of finding relatives and then matching their DNA, military researchers want to use the DNA to find the relatives.
It is a tactic that has helped solve scores of cold murder cases in recent years, including that of the Golden State Killer. Investigators take DNA found at crime scenes and upload it to public genetic databases in hopes of finding matches in family trees that can point back to one individual.
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Critics of the current approach — a plodding and costly process that has yielded fewer than 200 identifications a year with a budget exceeding $150 million — say the government should set aside the 50 percent rule, obtain DNA samples from every unknown’s remains, and start running them through every possible DNA database.
“Right now they are doing it backward, so you have policy getting in the way of science,” said Ed Huffine, who headed testing of remains from past wars for the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab in the 1990s, then spent years doing mass-casualty identification work in the civilian sphere.
Mr. Huffine said that the old dental records and other 1940s paperwork that the Army starts with now can create problems because they are often riddled with errors. But starting with DNA quickly produces reliable results, and has been used in places like Bosnia and Argentina to identify large numbers of unknown dead.
“Switching to DNA-first will be faster, cheaper and produce better results,” he said. “It just makes sense.”
It just makes sense. Will Congress help solve these issues once and for all?
Or do we need the Tomb of the Unknown soldier for some larger collective psyche?
And why haven’t congressmen on the Armed Services been asked?
Shouldn’t we care for the dead we already have before we enter into any new wars?