In the Race
Now, here, you see, it takes all the blogging I can do to keep in the same place.
If I want to get somewhere else, I must blog twice as fast as that!
You see, I'm in
the Red Queen's Race...
DNA Forensics...Awesome
By Janet Evans
Saturday, Aug 2 2008, 10:30 PM
Truly a wonderful thing. We really are fortunate to have DNA forensics. What would we have done after September 11th if not for DNA forensics? Tragically, many of the victims of the attack only had bone and tissue left. For the families, this was the only way to identify their loved ones.
Criminals don’t like DNA forensics. Although some criminals have been proven innocent due to this science.
The government has a mission. It is to find and identify soldiers from past wars.
MIAs…
Read the opening and then continue this interesting story from the Boston Globe
Army Major George Eyster didn't know - couldn't know - the two young men whose fighter planes disappeared into the jungle 64 years ago. But Eyster, a 32-year-old combat veteran of the Iraq war, feels like he does.
Gazing down over a sparkling harbor toward the caves where Japanese forces once hid from relentless American bombing, he thinks about the costs of war, then and now.
Eyster flew a helicopter gunship in Iraq, hovering only 50 feet above the charred battlegrounds of the Sunni Triangle and trying to take out enemy insurgents before they could kill American troops. Sometimes he succeeded. Sometimes he didn't.
Now, as a rumbling volcano spews ash in the distance, he stands on the killing fields of another war, where an earlier generation of young Americans sat in the terrifying loneliness of their cockpits, trying to take out enemy fighters defending the main Japanese base in the South Pacific.
Eyster, who traded in his military uniform for a polo shirt emblazoned with the signature black and white POW/MIA flag, came to Papua New Guinea to lead a group of soldiers - most of them Iraq and Afghanistan veterans - to try to find the remains of two World War II fliers who were just 19 and 25 when they were lost in 1944.
The expedition is part of the Pentagon's ambitious new initiative to locate tens of thousands of MIAs from World War II, many lost for decades in terrain that was considered unreachable, masked by unforgiving jungles or closed off by hostile regimes.
Armed with new technologies that can extract DNA from mere shards of tooth or bone, the searchers are trying to bring closure to a war that is starting to recede from living memory. For Eyster, the feeling of connection is palpable: The two men his team is endeavoring to find - Marion R. McCown and Allan S. Harrison III - might as well be the pilots he led into battle in Iraq.
"I think to myself, I have been in command of 18- and 19-year-old men - and women, in fact - flying helicopters across Iraq," Eyster says. "One of our aircraft was shot down over Baqubah, and we lost the two pilots in there.
"Both of the World War II pilots, McCown and Harrison, now belong to military history. Neither has any known descendants. No one is waiting at home for the recovery of their remains. Eyster and his fellow soldiers are undertaking this mission for the pilots - and for themselves.
"In our own minds we are doing what we would want to be done for ourselves," Eyster says. "I have seen guys break their backs for the idea that we are going to bring this little shred of evidence back home because he is a comrade-in-arms, he is a buddy."
Continued...
